Yankl Adler

“When can a Jew, whether a sculptor or a painter, be considered a Jewish artist not only by virtue of their origin? This age-old question for Jewish artists and writers still remains unanswered”.
– Leo Koenig.

Yankl Adler (1895-1949) was one of the most prominent representatives of the Jewish artistic avant-garde. Reflecting on the unique challenges faced by the national Jewish artists (considering himself to be one of them), Adler wrote: “Among a huge number of artists who are Jewish (יידן-קינסטלער, yiidn-kinstler) around the world, there is only a small handful of Jewish artists (יידישע קינסטלער, yiddishe kinstler); they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They set themselves the difficult task of finding the synthesis, the appropriate form to render in their art the originality that the Jewish people carry as their undeniable heritage”. These words, written more than eighty years ago within the artistic and historical context of their time, are still relevant as a tool for analyzing and understanding modern Jewish art today. Adler's statement can certainly be used to describe the works of Tanchum (Anatoly) Kaplan, who can rightfully be included in that "small handful of Jewish artists."
Kaplan gained the reputation of a “national” Jewish artist in his lifetime, under the Soviet regime. The same “status” earned him his fame outside the USSR as well. Having been discovered behind the Iron Curtain by Eric Estorick, Kaplan would go on to be recognized as “one of the greatest graphic artists of the 20th century” and his exceptional professional mastery would often be considered a consequence of the national content of his work. However, the “Jewishness” of Kaplan’s art is deeply meaningful and its national motifs are not simply an external “ethnographic” attribute, rather they “amplify its universal resonance”.
Jewish themes, allusions to Jewish folk art and connection with classical Jewish literature – these three elements that have long been recognized as the pillars of Kaplan's artistic system that determine the nature of his work. It has to be said that combinations of these elements are to a varying degree characteristic of many other Jewish artists, both predecessors and contemporaries of Kaplan. However, the Jewish themes, the folk artistic tradition and the imagery and plots of national literature acquire a very special, unique interpretation and figurative embodiment in Kaplan’s art. This is why even with the passage of time his works reveal their depth and offer inexhaustible potential for analysis and insight.
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Kaplan's “Jewish theme” is in the depiction of a shtetl, a Jewish town, and its inhabitants. The shtetl as a theme for art was discovered by Eastern European Jewish artists in the first decade of the 20th century. By this point, the negative stereotypes of the Haskalah, whose ideologists saw the shtetl as a “conservation area” for Jewish “backwardness” and religious prejudices, had been discarded. In the new national paradigm and in the context of the modernist tendencies in the development of Jewish culture and literature associated with it, the “rehabilitation” of the shtetl took place. It was now perceived as the focal point of an original national civilization with its own peculiar visual appeal and artistic imagery.
Soviet ideology revived the negative attitudes towards the Jewish shtetl, which in the 1920s-1930s was going through a radical transformation as part of social, economic and cultural experiments of the new regime. Soviet fine arts of the period preserved the shtetl purely as an aesthetic picturesque and landscape motif. The depiction of the scenes from its everyday life and its inhabitants was either interpreted as criticism of the “remnants of the past” or attributed to the nostalgia for “yesteryear” that was fading away in the new reality. In general, the theme of the Jewish shtetl was driven out of various forms of art by a more relevant ideological demand to create the image of a “new Jew” who was free from the burden of old traditions, an active participant in the “creation of the socialist society”, a collective farmer or a factory worker.
At the very beginning of his creative biography, Kaplan chose to stay away from mainstream “official” Soviet art. This position, though marginal and unpromising from the point of view of his career, allowed him to maintain a certain degree of independence from the dominant ideological canon and freedom in the choice of his topics and their interpretation. Mainly, this concerned the theme of the shtetl and the nature of its depiction in all genres of Kaplan's work throughout his life.
Similar to the way in which Vitebsk served as the symbol of Chagall’s Jewish universe, Kaplan's world of the shtetl is personified foremost in Rogachov (now Rahachow, Belarus), where the artist was born and spent his childhood and youth. In 1940, after the annexation of Moldavia (Bessarabia) and Bukovina by the USSR, Kaplan found himself in Chernivtsi and then Chișinău. And yet when depicting these places he would still be primarily interested in Jewish characters and street scenes like the ones he could observe in his hometown. Rogachov was one of the centers of Hasidism in Belarus. Before the First World War Jews made up more than 50% of the population, becoming a third of the population and even exceeding that number by 1939.
According to Boris Suris, Kaplan's first biographer and researcher of his work, even after settling in Leningrad, the artist did not sever his connections with Rogachev and his relatives who remained there: “In late 1920s–early 1930s, Kaplan frequently visited his hometown, where he would often work on location.” Kaplan’s earliest surviving works, depicting his native shtetl, date back to this period. His artistic vision of the shtetl is already taking shape here; it will be developed further in Kaplan’s later works. In his early black-and-white pencil drawings, Kaplan captures his visual impressions almost “photographically”. Suris writes: “Without trying to reinvent the wheel, he (Kaplan – G. K.) draws everything that catches his eye during his trips: landscapes, buildings, utensils, portraits of relatives and friends". In this literal reproduction of his surroundings, in this "naive" realism combined with the conscious primitivization of form and explanatory inscriptions in Yiddish, in some of his drawings Kaplan was following the principles of “folk” (non-professional) art. Perhaps Kaplan's use of the black and white technique in pencil or ink was also not accidental, but rather fit into the logic of his "folk" artistic trend. Not only did this approach make it possible to quickly capture what the artist has seen around him, but also, according to the ideas widespread at the time, this was characteristic of traditional Jewish art.
This desire to record Rogachov, to capture its views and inhabitants with documentary accuracy was also the result of the new “optics” of Kaplan the artist, who would come to the shtetl from Leningrad for the holidays. Having gotten used to the “dimensions” of a big city, he inevitably perceived the scale of the shtetl, its streets and houses in a new way. It is no coincidence, therefore, that in some of his drawings (“Rogachev. Water Carrier”, “Rogachev. Bykhovskaya Street", both of 1928 ) a certain character appears: an “observer” or a “guest” of the shtetl. This character, bearing the features of a self-portrait, is emphasized by his size, being clearly bigger than other objects and characters in these works. This shows that he has already “grown up” and does not fit into the old dimensions of his shtetl anymore.
Moreover, Kaplan's early drawings on this topic appeared when Rogachov itself lost its former status and disappeared from the new administrative territorial map, turning into a “city”, although the word “shtetl” in its various forms was preserved in the official lexicon. Sovietization and modernization initiated new socio-cultural and economic processes in Rogachov, which deformed its former structure and irreversibly changed the nature of its life. For Kaplan, who grew up in the patriarchal atmosphere of a large Jewish family and was “brought up to honor the Jewish traditional values passed down from generation to generation,” these changes meant the destruction of one of the foundations of his own world, and this, perhaps, was the main motivation to capture, to record in the smallest detail the “fading” past that was so dear to him.
Thus, in “Kasrilovka” (1937-1940), his first series of lithographs, along with the views of Rogachov with its characteristic topography and buildings and portraits of its inhabitants, Kaplan uses seemingly the most insignificant of motifs: he depicts pieces of furniture, a wardrobe, Saturday candlesticks on a chest of drawers, a kerosene lamp, photographs on the wall, etc. In some of Kaplan’s gouache paintings and watercolors of the 1960s and 1970s, these mundane objects become his main symbols. As a result, not only the very image of the town is recorded, but also the environment of the Jewish home and traditional life are reconstructed: a cabinet decorated with carved figures is made by the craftspeople of the Jewish shtetl, while portraits of married couples or of a bride and a groom are stylized as popular prints or retro photographs by provincial photographers, many of whom were Jewish. Thus, Kaplan renounces, as it were, the “professional” artistic insight and acts as a “naive” artist who looks at the world through the eyes of his characters, the inhabitants of the shtetl.
The declarative identification with folk craftspeople was an important ideological gesture on the part of the representatives of the Jewish avant-garde of the 1910s, who thus tried to formalize their connection with the Jewish artistic tradition and the place of the new national art within it. Unlike them, Kaplan chooses his own unique artistic strategy – he ignores the conventional boundary that separates “professional” art from “folk” art and expresses the traditional “folk” vision with the help of “professional” artistic tools. He even personifies this position and introduces into his works a separate character, an artist with an easel. That way he places himself within the shtetl space, among its inhabitants, drawing a ferry on the river or a street scene against the background of the Rogachov church, painting portraits of elderly Jewish spouses in a typical interior of their home or of Sholem Aleichem surrounded by his children (“Stories for Children”, the title page of one of the versions, 1965-1970), talking to Sholem Aleichem against the backdrop of the town (“Stories for Children”, the title page of one of the versions, 1965-1970; “Tevye the Dairyman”, 1966 version) or copying a pattern from the carved tombstones in the Jewish cemetery. According to Mikhail German, Kaplan creates “the very reality of the shtetl as seen from the inside, by its native, an artist familiar with the possibilities of contemporary art."
Creating the impression of inhabiting the scene, Kaplan, however, avoids naturalistic lifelikeness. He achieves that through the unique artistic manner found in his formal, extremely bold experiments with lithography. This point is of great importance both in Kaplan’s personal and creative biography, and therefore deserves a separate mention.
Kaplan first started working with lithography in the late 1930s. According to Boris Suris, “The Museum of Ethnography commissioned Kaplan to create several lithographic compositions for the section dedicated to the life of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Birobidzhan. To get to know this printing method, Kaplan went to an experimental lithographic studio organized by the Leningrad branch of the Artists’ Union. He was fascinated by this new method and would come to the studio frequently, working on the stone with increased passion. The lithographic studio in question first opened in 1933 and became one of the few islands of refined artistic culture and relative ideological freedom at the time. At the studio, where a whole group of outstanding Leningrad artists would gather, “the spirit of innovation and experimentation reigned”, and professional skills and virtuosity in the expressive possibilities of lithography were considered the main values. This approach appealed to Kaplan, and it went on to determine the trajectory of his further artistic development.
Artist Valentin Kurdov (1905-1989), Kaplan’s friend and colleague at the studio, recalled: “An amazing person sits at the next table hunched over the stone all day long (...) – the artist Anatoly Lvovich Kaplan. Like a mouse, he scratches and gnaws at another huge lithographic stone (...) Kaplan remembers the life of the shtetl in Rogachov where he came from (...) The intricacy and complexity of Kaplan's lithographs are unprecedented, they do not abide by any rules. Kaplan worked directly on the stone, using tracing paper only for the overall composition. He runs the pencil flat on the stone, scratches at the cast with a razor, pokes with a needle and a scraper, applies the finish in splashes through mesh, washes away the excess with turpentine. The artist is fighting a battle there on the stone, and magnificent lithographic art wins. In the large candy box he uses for his tools and supplies you can find anything you want – there are needles, razors, bristle and soft brushes, toothbrushes, grids for splashing paint, scissors, a drawing pen, ink, pencils. And he himself, in oversleeves and a blue apron, looks like a provincial craftsman, like his ‘enchanted tailor’.”
The first result of this work was the "Kasrilovka" series, which became the basis for further fruitful development of Kaplan's creative system. The innovative expansion of the expressive potential of lithography and technological discoveries in this printing method allowed Kaplan to master a unique artistic language and develop his own distinct style of graphic writing.
One of attributes of Kaplan's individual manner and means of expression is the introduction of the fantastic into the depiction of everyday reality. In the works of the “Kasrilovka” series, objects and characters acquire a special texture, they seem to lose their physicality, their clear contours and outlines, turning into each other, as if dissolving into the fluid background of the lithographic paint. It feels like everything is immersed in some kind of fog, shrouded in a translucent haze, which gives the image a dreamy, surreal quality. From a young age Kaplan was familiar with the theory and practice of the radical avant-garde OBERIU group, and here he uses Daniil Kharms’, the OBERIU leader’s, idea of the “reality of the undefined” , combining it with attention to the smallest detail, the illusion of presence and the “naive” realism of a folk artist. Out of all that the image of the shtetl is created, far from being factually authentic, which Kaplan does not aspire to, but convincing in its idealized reality of a dream or a memory.
The commemorative idealization of the world of the shtetl came as a reaction to the deformation and gradual disappearance of that traditional habitat of the majority of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe. At the same time, the “idea” or “image” of the shtetl was increasingly moving away from the shtetl as a real historical phenomenon. This process especially intensified after the Second World War, when the “shtetl evolved into a conserved landscape” and the destroyed Jewish towns began to turn into symbolic “places of memory”. The tragedy of the Holocaust had a personal meaning for Kaplan. In the fall of 1941, his parents were killed in the Rogachev ghetto. Preserving the memory of his hometown would become the artist’s most important mission.
The memorial quality of Kaplan's works is manifested in the very material Kaplan is using. Mastering the lithographic method, Kaplan reproduces on paper the porous and rough texture of the stone surface, thereby imitating a tombstone, a matzevah. Once developed, he practices this technique even in his pencil and pastel drawings of the 1970s, as well as in later etchings, likening contour images to the signs carved on to stone.
Issachar Ber Ryback (1897-1935) was the first to use the image of a matzevah as a memorial symbol of the destroyed world of the shtetl. He decorated his album "שטעטל" (“Shtetl”), published in Berlin in 1923, with the motifs from the decor of Jewish carved cemetery steles. Kaplan in his interpretation of this image is not limited only by its decorative possibilities but realizes the full range of its formal, symbolic and expressive qualities. Thus, the sheets of lithographs for “Fishke the Lame” (1966-1969) are made in the shape of tombstones, with portraits of Mendele Moykher-Sforim and the characters of his story, the inhabitants of the shtetl, “carved” onto them.
In the works about his family history, Kaplan uses the image of matzevah in its literal, commemorative sense. For instance, “Tombstone” (1974), made in sepia on cardboard, depicting a gravestone with an epitaph: "אהרן בן לווי יצחק הכוהן קאפלאן (...)" (Aharon Ben Levi Yitzhak HaCohen Kaplan), as well as sculptural fireclay slabs “In memory of father” and “In memory of mother” (both 1970) imitating tombstones with relief inscriptions of his parents' names and the dates of their deaths: "לווי יצחק קפלון 1941" (Levi Yitzhak Kaplun) with the image of a lion above the name, and "שרה קפלון 1941" (Sarah Kaplun) with the image of a bird above the name. This list also includes the conical fireclay sculpture (1970s), similar in shape to a gravestone. Two portraits are engraved on its sides with the inscriptions "טאטע" and "מאמע" (tate and mame, father and mother).
The matzevah acquires additional symbolic meaning in “Wedding of the Beggars” (“Fishke the Lame” series, 1976). The etching depicts a Jewish cemetery, where a marriage ceremony is taking place under a chuppah. Weddings of beggars as well as orphans and disabled people (“black wedding”) were celebrated at cemeteries, since this was thought to be an effective way of avoiding mortal danger that threatened the Jewish community, especially during epidemics (hence the name חתונת מגפה). The Hebrew alphabet is written on one of the cemetery tombstones depicted by Kaplan and the names of his parents appear on the other two. Without laying claim on unambiguous interpretation of this detail we may assume that it is a commemorative symbol of countless Jews and shtetls with the names starting with all the letters of the alphabet, who, like his parents, were killed in the Shoah. It might seem that this has nothing to do with Mendele Moykher-Sforim’s text. However, Kaplan uses this scene (a wedding at the cemetery as a means of protection from danger), gives it universal meaning and turns it into a symbol of the connection between one’s own fate and the historical fate of the whole people, as well as a reminder of its recent tragedy. The latter point was of particular value in the USSR of that time, as the very fact of the Shoah was then being silenced by the authorities. For Soviet Jews in the post-war period, the cemeteries and burial places of victims of the massacres would symbolize their historical memory and national identity.
The use of the symbolic and metaphoric potential of Jewish literature to generalize and express in its images the facts of one's personal biography and national self-awareness are characteristic of Kaplan's entire oeuvre. It is no coincidence that he called his first graphic series “Kasrilovka” (1939), despite depicting his own hometown. Boris Suris, Kaplan’s first biographer, noticed this apparent contradiction, writing: “The lithographs (...) of the series evoke a number of literary associations. But they are not inspired by any particular literary source, just as they are not connected to any particular fact of their author’s biography. And yet they are based on both. No wonder the artist could not decide for a long time what name to give to the series: “Rogachov” or “Kasrilovka”. Rogachov was his hometown. Kasrilovka is a fictitious name from the writings of Sholem Aleichem that has become a household name, a collective image of a Jewish shtetl. In Kaplan's view, these two concepts overlap”. The fairness of this observation is confirmed by the words of Sholem Aleichem himself, who declaratively stated his identification with his own literary characters and the universal, “human” nature of the image he created: “(…) I (...) myself am a Kasrilevkite. Born and bred in Kasrilovke, I was educated in its Talmud Torahs and schools and was even married here. But then I set my little ship adrift in the great and tempestuous sea of life whose waves are high as houses. And despite the fact that one is perpetually in a tumult and on the go, I have never forgotten either my beloved hometown Kasrilevke, may it thrive and prosper to ripe old age, or my dear brethren, the Kasrilevke Jews, my they be fruitful and multiply (...) For your information, no matter how small, forlorn, and castaway Kasrilevke may be, it is connected to the rest of the world by a sort of wire which if tapped at one end delivers a message at the other.”
Dan Miron observed that Mendele Mokher-Sforim and Sholom Aleichem, the classics of Jewish literature, created such an artistic image of the shtetl in their works that, despite significant distortions of its prototype, claimed to have “scientific” credibility and was so convincing that it has actually replaced the historical reality of the shtetl in popular memory. However, it was precisely this quality of the literary image, the illusion of its similarity to “the truth of life” and to a specific biographical story, that allowed Kaplan to have a very personal approach to interpreting the text in its visual embodiment. Thus, the sheets of the “Enchanted Tailor” (1953-1963) or “The Song of Songs” (1962) are full of details that are absent from Sholem Aleichem’s original text, but are found in Kaplan’s earlier “Kasrilovka” or in his other works from the 1950s that are thematically close to it. It is as if he is introducing authentic attributes of a “genuine” place into the fictional literary space. Such, for example, are portraits of some characters from “The Enchanted Tailor” or portraits in the medallions in the “The Song of songs” stylized as photographs hanging on the wallpapered wall, a typical element of the interior of a Jewish house in a shtetl.
The introduction of the classical Jewish “triumvirate” – Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Leib Peretz – into the literary canon of Soviet national minorities led to mass publication of their works in Yiddish and their translation into other languages of the peoples of the USSR. Many Soviet artists, both Jews and non-Jews, illustrated the books by Jewish classical authors. Unlike most graphic artists who worked on these publications, in his literary series Kaplan not only freely interprets the text, but also does not completely submit to the "canonical" requirements of book illustration. They form a series which is, as it were, isomorphic to the text, and as such they represent a new graphic genre.
Both the formal discoveries and the entire figurative system of Kaplan's art were closely connected to the artistic and symbolic structure of Jewish folk art. Kaplan was not the only one attracted to it. Solomon Yudovin (1892-1954), one of the first to start collecting and studying Jewish artistic heritage, and his student and follower David Goberman (1912-2003), both living in Leningrad, shared this interest of Kaplan’s, and he was friends with both.. Since the late 1930s Goberman systematically studied, copied and photographed carved tombstones in Jewish cemeteries, many of which no longer exist. Together with Nathan Altman (1889-1970), who was friends with all three artists, they organized into an informal group, united, in particular, by their shared interest in Jewish folk art, which was one of the sources of inspiration for their own work.
As has already been mentioned, sometimes Kaplan would act as a "naive" artist, perceiving the world around him through the lens of the traditional Jewish visual culture in the form of Jewish folk art. For instance, his lithographs for Sholem Aleichem’s “Stories for Children” structurally reproduce the Jewish popular picture (lubok) which simultaneously depicts different scenes, placing them around the sheet in the shape of a frieze or in a number of separate “windows”.
The portrait of the Tavern Owner from “The Enchanted Tailor” with his name under it and framed by figures of allegorical animals with two candles in front resembles the traditional Jewish yahrzeit art, commemorative sheets with the parents' dates of death on them. In addition, Kaplan often and enthusiastically refers directly to the images and motifs of Jewish folk art, borrowing from folklore bestiary, the patterns of carved tombstones or the interior items of synagogues. For instance, they serve as a decorative frame for images in “The Enchanted Tailor”, “The Song of Songs” and are included in some of the lithographs for “Jewish Folk Songs” (1962). Kaplan uses these motifs and images not only for decorative purposes, but also as a meaningful, semantic element of the composition. In “The Enchanted Tailor” they “are called upon to serve as a kind of equivalent of the national folklore element that pervades all works by Sholem Aleichem,” especially his story about the misadventures of the tailor Shimen-Eli.
Kaplan turns the figurative language of folk Jewish art into his own artistic tool when illustrating the Passover song “Chad Gadya” (“One Little Goat”, 1957–1961), creating the images as handmade works of applied art and using stylistic and structural characteristics of carved Jewish tombstones. Boris Suris emphasized the decorative nature of this language and of the lithographs created on its basis, writing that “in these works, Kaplan acts as the legitimate heir and disciple of a rich and ancient tradition, as if the gift of those nameless masters of decorative and applied arts is resurrected within him…whose efforts, from time immemorial (…) moved directly from within the sphere of decorative and applied art. Unknown folk craftspeople created amazing pieces of weaving, embroidery, jewelry, enamels, stained glass, wood and stone carving; they illuminated ancient handwritten books and scrolls and minted household and religious objects. Time was merciless to these treasures, the war did not spare them, but what is preserved is therefore even more precious.”
As a true folk artist, in the “rich and ancient tradition” Kaplan sees not a dead petrified canon, but a living source of creative inspiration. Therefore, as in his other “folk” works, in “Chad Gadya” Kaplan uses not only the decorative function of this tradition’s figurative language, but also its symbolic and allegoric components, which create a wide variety of meanings and allow for their free interpretation through artistic fantasy. Dealing with “his” tradition freely, continuing and developing it, Kaplan offers his reading of “One Little Goat”. His song does not end with the appearance of the Almighty, who overthrew the Angel of Death, who killed the Butcher, who in his turn slaughtered the Ox… as in the original text. Instead, it culminates with the appearance of a man who puts a harness on the ox so as to plow and sow the land. The visual representation of this “idyll” in Kaplan’s work is the image of a lion lying peacefully with a lamb (in accordance with the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 11:6) that adorns the cover and the table of contents of this series. This motif is rare and is only found on matzevahs of the early 20th century in the cemeteries of Bukovina and Moldova ; it can therefore be considered not quite “canonical”, just like the text of “One Little Goat” itself. Thus, Kaplan creates his original version of traditional literary plots and pictorial motifs; seemingly quoting folk art, he manages to avoid imitative stylization without losing the “folk” authenticity of his “professionally” executed works.
In the ideology of Jewish modernism, there exists an idea of “cultural circulation”. It postulates that any living national culture should go through the process of a constant cultural exchange between the masses and creative individuals (writers, artists, and the like) who draw inspiration from the cultural environment and “give back” to society by creating works of literature and art which in turn stimulate public creativity. Thus, the homogeneity of national culture is achieved without a division into “folk” and “high” art, and the “naturalness” of national life is ensured for all strata and groups of society.
Kaplan can serve as an example of the implementation of this idea, especially in the last years of his life. Many of his ceramics of this period – Shabbat candlesticks, Hanukkah Menorahs, ceramic plates with symbolic designs – are artistic versions of traditional Jewish ritual and household items and can even be attributed to the genre of modern Judaica. Of particular importance in this sense is Kaplan's series of etchings called “Rogachov”, which he was working on until his very last days. Naming this series after his hometown, Kaplan removes the veil of literary metaphor and once again pays tribute to the memory of the vanished world of his homeland. Most of the sheets in this series depict various scenes from Jewish religious and ritual life, and all the characters in “Rogachov” – even in genre scenes of ordinary everyday life – belong to the bygone era of Kaplan's childhood. It is as if he himself returns to this time and these, immersing the viewer in this world of family, of the warmth of human relationships and of traditional Jewish values, which Kaplan, growing up, was taught to respect. He recreates this with that same naive immediacy, deliberately primitivizing the form, as he did in his first images of Rogachov at the very beginning of his creative path. Thus, he returns to both his biographical and his creative roots. Burdened with illness and everyday hardship, probably anticipating his departure, Kaplan returns to Rogachov's ideal world. This world, as already mentioned, although recreated by the artist in the form of a tombstone, is full of harmony. Here his parents live eternally, as do all the souls of the departed, in the “bond” of which the soul of this Jewish artist is woven, as it should be in accordance with the words of a Jewish epitaph taken from the first book of Samuel 25:29:

תהא נשמתו צרורה בצרור החיים

May his soul be bound in the bond of eternal life

Marc Chagall once wrote: “If I weren't a Jew (in my sense of this word), I would not have been an artist, or would have been a completely different artist.” These words, which combine a personal biography, a national self-identification and a creative life’s work, Anatoly Kaplan could have rightfully said about himself.