The Jewish Quarter on Pilsudski Street in Lodz by David Dz’instrski by memory from his birthplace. Oil on wood.
The Jewish street is depicted against a backdrop of the synagogue at its end. In the street, the Jews of the city are engaged in their various occupations: the water carrier, the bookseller, the wine merchant, chassidic Jews conversing in the street, lively children running in the city streets, and more.
Size: 88×110 cm. Placed in a wooden frame and passe-partout 110×134 cm.
David Dz’instrski [1913-1980] was born to a chareidi family in Lodz; he grew up on Pilsudski Street, one of the central streets in the Jewish quarter of Lodz. [The street is a recurring motif in his paintings].
When the Nazis invaded Poland, he was drafted to the Polish army, fell into German captivity, and miraculously managed to escape to Russia. After the war, he discovered that his mother died of starvation in the ghetto, but his father, sisters and brother miraculously stayed alive. After the holocaust, he ascended to Israel in 1949.
Dz’instrski’s paintings emphasize the motif of Jewish life in Lodz before the war. He never formally studied painting, which is evident in the somewhat naive technique with which he paints. The people are distorted and not entirely proportional to the size of the houses. This also comes from the fact that he tried to paint the point of view of a child, with the world looming over him. David was particular not to paint from photographs, and said that he painted his paintings based on memory alone.
Dz’instrski related to his paintings as a series, according to him, “To sell a painting individually is like tearing a leaf from a book.” His series of paintings depict scenes and and subjects from Jewish life – Jewish occupations in Poland, the carpenter, the glazier, the laundress, etc. Or Jewish home life, such as the recital of shema over the newborn boy or “the Shabbos goy.”
In distinction to his paintings which are full of color and the life in the Jewish street before the Holocaust, the colors grow darker as they approach the paintings which deal with the ghetto, those which depict convoys of deported Jews, lines of Jews waiting for the miniscule allowance of oil that they received, there are no more children running in the streets, and the growing sense of horror.
His paintings were exposed to the general public in his later years at an exhibition which took place at Beit Ariella in Tel Aviv and various places in the United States. He passed away in Brooklyn at the age of 67.
Provenance: Estate of the artist’s family.