Soviet Jewish Life featuring Bill Aron and Yevgeniy Fiks
Review by Aubre Hill
When your identity is persecuted, any act of cultural expression can be a statement of defiance. The Wende Museum’s exhibition “Soviet Jewish Life” examines this resilience with work by photographer Bill Aron and conceptual artist Yevgeniy Fiks.
Bill Aron, an American photographer, traveled to the Soviet Union in 1981 documenting the Refuseniks, a group of Jews refused emigration by the Soviet Union. His black and white photographs are an intimate look at religious ritual and community bringing attention to individual faces, wrinkled in age and laden with exhaustion. In a time of spiritual and cultural erasure, simply being holds such weight of purpose. Even joyous group dinners feel heavy perhaps because of the sparseness of food or understanding the gravity of such declarations of identity could result in police harassment and lost opportunities of work, education, and familial connection.
Refusenik Portraits is a series of 14 headshots with each subject looking directly at the camera. Each portrait is titled with the person’s name and the year they applied for an exit visa all of which were denied. They are young, old, a computer scientist, an electronics engineer, an economist and activist, an administrator in a meatpacking plant, and a retired colonel. “Michail Kosharovsky, Moscow” looks about 9 years old, arms crossed and shoulders shrugged with an expression beyond his years. “Nataly (Natasha) May, Moscow, First Applied for exit visa: 1974” shares an open smile with hands crossed under her chin. This portrait series is intimate and real sharing a complexity of emotions.
The theme of defiance is woven into the very existence of the 36 photographs. While customs confiscated a bag of film as Aron departed the Soviet Union, he carefully had planned ahead for this possibility planting decoy film while safe guarding the images we now are able to view.
Where Bill Aron examines daily reality, Yevgeniy Fiks reexamines Soviet history as a Russian Jew now living in New York. Birobidzhan, a Soviet created region established in 1934 for Jewish resettlement, is the focus of several pieces. “A Map of Birobidzhan” (2016) is a work on paper outlining the region in gold text meaning “home” and “belonging.” The text is imperfect in translation from Russian proverbs and sayings into Fiks’ limited Yiddish as a symbol of his assimilation. “Flora and Fauna of the Jewish Autonomous Region” (2016) are selections from an original 1984 propaganda book commemorating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Birobidzhan and Fiks’ added Yiddish titles “as a gesture of artistic appropriation.”
Fiks aligns the Soviet Jewish and African American experiences with “Withers and restricted, according to Mem Lamed Kof” (2021) a mixed media audio installation highlighting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech from December 1966. “When you are written out of history as a people…you suffer a corrosion of your self-understanding and your self-respect.” Fiks further explores overlapping stories with “Sovetish Kosmos/Yiddish Cosmos” (2018). These six collages layer pages of the Sovetish Heimland, a Yiddish magazine, with anti-Soviet slogans and Soviet space program monuments. They are a fantastical play of Soviet Jewish life and the space program provoking a connection between loss of Jewish identity and gain of scientific progress. “Let Them Live As Jews Or Let Them Leave,” and “Let My People Go” are just some of the slogans in bold font across these prints. It is a striking and powerful statement of declaration that resonates to this day.
This exhibit showcases work from 1981 to 2019, but they are not expressions of our past. As I type this, Russia has launched war reigniting Soviet aspirations. The West has announced united sanctions against Russia in response, and the empty dinner tables of Aron’s photographs resonate from decades ago. The Cold War is no longer just a part of our history, and defiance is not simply inspirational but survival.