Image of the Week: Still Life with Yarzheit Candle
© D. Yael Bernhard
Pictured here is my maternal grandmother, Regina Loewe Werner, in the center of this photograph taken with her sisters in 1912. She was 18 years old, and about to set out across the world alone, bound for America. The daughter of a successful tailor, Regina grew up in Hungary, and left her homeland for a better life – free of the pogroms that terrorized and destroyed eastern European Jewish communities, and with more opportunities for education and advancement than a young woman could find in the old country.
Regina settled in New York and married, but soon became a single mother of three children. Using the skills her father taught her, she worked as a milliner and a seamstress, making hats for Lord & Taylor. Life wasn't easy for immigrants, and hers is a story that is both typical and unique.
Years later, my grandmother sewed beautiful dresses for my dolls, and for me. I spent a great deal of time with "Nana Jean" as a child, making apple pies, working on jigsaw puzzles, and watching Cinderella on New Year's Eve. We had a special closeness that I cherish to this day. But Nana had a wistful sadness about her that made a deep impression on me – for once she left her homeland, she never saw her parents or sisters again. They all perished at Auschwitz, along with over half a million Hungarian Jews who were murdered in the Shoah. Nana never spoke a word about her past, but I felt it in her silence. I didn't understand it at the time, but I felt I provided some kind of solace for her with my childish presence. And she in turn held a special affection for me that I soaked up like a sponge.
Yesterday marked Regina's 38th yarzheit. She passed at the age of 91, when I was 24 years old. I have greatly missed her ever since. Painting this still-life enabled me to sit with the yarzheit candle for many hours, contemplating my memories of Nana Jean and imagining her long lost sisters, struck down in the prime of their lives. Like ripe fruit stripped of their color, they're less alive than the objects in the painting. Such hope in those faces! . . . so full of faith in the future. I registered my great aunts and great grandparents in the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem. I do not know all their first names, only that they haunted my beloved grandmother – and through her, me.
Still life paintings equalize animate and inanimate objects, treating everything with the same level of realism, making all subjects equally striking or mundane. But the two-dimensional, monochromatic photograph stands in stark contrast to the lush fruit and flowers, the flickering candle flame. Somehow that contrast seemed appropriate. The more voluptuous I made the fruit, the more they foiled the penetrating stares of those faces.
Still Life With Yarzheit Candle is the image for July 2024 in my newly-published calendar, The Jewish Eye 5784/2024 Calendar of Art. July is when a three-week period of mourning begins, marked by the first breach of the Temple wall that began the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE, a subject touched upon in last week's post. Mourning and loss are ubiquitous throughout Jewish history, both personal and collective. Regina Loewe's story is the story of one woman's family – and that of millions of Jews.
The Jewish Eye 5784/2024 Calendar of Art is available in my webstore ($20 with shipping included) or on Amazon ($16.95). If you buy it from Amazon, please consider writing a review!
You can view the entire calendar here.
A good week to all!
D Yael Bernhard
children's books • fine art • illustration
