Zwy Milshtein, Girl With Hat, Etching

Price

$480

About this work

Milshtein was six at the outbreak of the Second World War and eleven as it drew to a close. Those formative years saw him swept along on a veritable Odyssey: hand in hand with his mother and older brother, they escaped their native Bessarabia ahead of the advancing Nazi armies. During two years, they fled back and forth across the vast area between the Aral and the Black Sea seeking refuge before finding it in Tbilisi, Georgia, during the winter of 1943. Their flight into the USSR followed the 1939 Soviet appropriation of the Romanian province of Moldavia and Milshtein?s father?s subsequent deportation to Siberia. By setting out, in search of the husband and father that they were never to see again, the little family was spared the tragic fate at the hands of Nazis that so many others would not be.This period of exodus, stamped by dark visions of bombings, of famine and the deaths of fourteen million Russians, is at the core of Milshtein?s inspiration. It binds him to a nocturnal universe cross-hatched by images of railroad tracks, stabled locomotives, of rare treats of fried eggs, and of vodka drunk amongst the muzhiks they encountered on their way. These images, at once starkly illuminated by the glare of tragedy but suffused by the glow of humanity, were nourished during his adolescence in Israel by the stories their mother recounted, in answer to their questions on their years of wandering and of the strange circumstances which she, a woman not yet turned thirty, experienced in order to keep them alive. The images of their endless, almost burlesque, journey are superimposed on a backdrop of an inky darkness in which hover the countless specters of all those never to be seen again.