Solomon Borisovich Iudovin
Solomon Borisovich Iudovin (1892-1954) was born in the village of Biešankovičy, Russian Empire (now in Belarus). His earliest art training was in Vitebsk (Belarusian: Viciebsk), with Jehuda Pen. In 1910 Iudovin moved to Saint Petersburg to study art. After the October Revolution he returned to Vitebsk. The town was at that time home to a progressive and avant-garde art scene, especially between 1918 and 1922 when the People’s Art School founded by Marc Chagall operated there. However, Iudovin did not embrace modernism but remained a figurative, realistic artist throughout his life. Between 1920 and 1940, most of his work was devoted to Jewish themes inspired by the An-sky expedition.
Meer Moiseevich Akselrod
Meer Moiseevich Akselrod (1902–1970) was born in a shtetl by the name of Maladzyechna, Russian Empire (now in Belarus). As a child, he survived a pogrom. In the 1920s he studied and later taught art at the State Art and Technical School in Moscow. He is best known for his watercolors depicting Jewish life in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, illustrations for Yiddish literature, and designs for Jewish theaters in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Issachar Ber Ryback
Issachar Ber Ryback (1897-1935) was born in Yelisavetgrad, Russian Empire, today called Kropyvnytskyi in Ukraine. He studied art in Kyiv between 1911 and 1916. Greatly influenced by An-sky’s ethnographic project, he went on two similar expeditions in 1915 and 1916 with another artist of Jewish descent, El Lissitzky. After the October Revolution, he was employed as a drawing teacher by the central committee of the Kultur-Lige, an association promoting a revival of Yiddish culture. In 1923 he published a lithograph album comprised of thirty-one works entitled “Shtetl, mayn khoreve heym, a gedenkenish” (Shtetl: My Destroyed Home, A Memorial). The illustrations depict the daily life in Ryback’s hometown before a devastating pogrom took place there in 1919. After brief stays in Moscow and Berlin, Ryback settled in Paris in 1926, where he lived until his sudden death at the age of 38. Throughout his career, Ryback was influenced by his Shtetl roots.
Regina Mundlak
Regina Mundlak (1887 – 1942) was born in the village of Kosaki near the city of Łomża, Russian Empire (now in Poland). In 1901 she moved to Berlin where her extraordinary talent impressed famous painters Max Liebermann and Efraim Moses Lilien, who both tried to help her to finance her education. However, even with their help, she had difficulty in making a living and had to give up her studies and return to her hometown. In the interwar years she maintained her own studio in Warsaw where she also frequently exhibited. In 1942 she was probably deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. Mundlak devoted her artistic career to creating realistic portraits of her childhood milieu – characteristic Shtetl types.
Grigoriy-Gersh Bencionovich Inger
Grigoriy-Gersh Bencionovich Inger (1910-1995) was born in Sarny, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). He studied art at the Kyiv Jewish Artistic-Industrial School between 1926 and 1930 under the guidance of Mark Epstein. Soon afterwards, he arrived in Moscow where he started to exhibit and later also studied at the Surikov Art Institute. During the war, he was evacuated to Chuvashia, a republic in in the central Volga region. After the war, Inger created series of illustrations for books by Yiddish authors I. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and David Bergelson. In the 1970s, the artist began a series of graphic works devoted to his childhood, recreating in them the world of the Shtetl that vanished in the Holocaust.