J e r u s a l e m: Opening Reception

At long last, Tova made it to the opening reception of her exhibit, "O milosci i smierci" (About Love and Death). She recieved endless bouquets of flower and was surrounded by photographers during most of the event. Every time I passed by, she would interrupt whatever Polish conversation she was having to call out, "Maria! I feel like a film star!" She was beaming.

There was a good turnout to the reception, and it seemed that there was a substantial interest in her paintings. The event was a little tedious for me, though, since there were several speakers, all in Polish, and I couldn't really follow very much. I recognized one of the men who spoke from my first meeting with Tova two years ago in Oswiecim. All at once, he stopped talking and started singing, more like chanting, a really long song. Tova wiped tears from her eyes, and everyone but me seemed deeply moved. After his talk, I asked the guy next to me what the singing was all about. His English was marginal, but he managed to communicate "Bible," "Song of David," and "Jerusalem." Turns out, he was chanting Psalm 137 ("If I forget you, O Jerusalem").

Here is an excerpt from the exhibition catalogue:

The works by Tova Berlinsky on show here are a tangibly desperate struggle with light, which makes its way into her painting with visible difficulty. The painter bars access, shading her backgrounds with a thicket of dark lines. She does it with a vengeance, with a dogged perseverance of a person who wants the entire world to be buried under the dust of memories and freeze in mourning and sorrow.

She dedicates the dark and often black flowers that are the subject matter of her painting to her parents who, like many Jews, departed in a tragic way and do not even have their own graves. Rather than bring out from darkness her stems, leaves, and petals, Berlinski, conversely, dips them in blackness and symbolically burns them to ashes.

The text continues in this way, and it seems to me that whoever wrote this up is a little over-intoxicated with the drama of the black-flower paintings. Knowing Tova, I find it hard to believe that she would describe herself as "a person who wants the entire world to be buried under the dust of memories and freeze in mourning and sorrow." I do know that she paints flowers because she has no grave on which to place flowers for her family, and the black-flower paintings certainly are sad, but Tova just isn't this dark.

At one point during the reception, Tova broke away from the crowd around her and made her way over to where I was standing. She leaned over and said furtively, "Jaga is a good girl, but I can't stand it! She is so imposing!" Jaga (Jadwiga), who is maybe around 70, is the woman she's staying with, the daughter of her friend Maryja. Referring to our earlier conversation, I said, "You mean she is very Polish, right?" Tova scowled, "No, she is more than Polish! She is awful." Apparently this woman has been making a career out of telling Tova what to do, watching her every move, and trying to control her activities. While I'm glad Tova has someone looking out for her, at the same time, I can sympathize with how annoying this must be. When I was visiting Tova at Jaga's house, she offered me cake and I declined. Then she brought cake anyway, and I declined again (I'm great at saying "no" and "enough" in Polish). She wouldn't let it go, trying to convince me to eat the cake. Since she was speaking to me in Polish, it was easy to just ignore her with a blank look, but it was sort of creepy how she was determined to get me to eat this cake. I really didn't want to eat it because it was a weird shade of yellow and instead of frosting it had some kind of neon-yellow gelatin on top and in between the layers. I would imagine that living with this kind of personality day in and day out is really grating on Tova's nerves. Tova is a very independent woman.

Anyway, in the midst of this opening reception, all eyes on her, this is what was on Tova's mind. She seemed to be feeling great, and stood at the microphone to give an animated talk (in Polish, of course). Thankfully, my friend Artur, who is the director of education at the Jewish Center in Oswiecim, was also there with his wife and young daughter, so I had someone to talk to in English from time to time. Artur's seven-year old daughter, Maja (pronounced "Maya"), latched onto me and we had fun saying "thank you" and "hello," and counting to ten in English. Then Maja would grab my hand, lead me away, and tell me long stories in Polish. I said, "Good!" in Polish at the end of every one, and this seemed to please her to no end.

There was one other English-speaker (sort of) there: an older man who does some Jewish tours in Poland who recognized me from a few days ago at the Jewish Center in Oswiecim. When he spotted me, he came over to sport his English skills. He tried to guess where I was from: Sweden? Germany? (I'm starting to wonder if I don't sound like a native English speaker or something. People never seem to guess an English-speaking country for me. One time in Israel, the first guess someone made was Greenland.) I told him where I was from, so of course he told me the requisite story about some family member or friend who has some kind of connection with the United States. As he was telling me this long story, he was also throwing peanuts into his mouth, which resulted in a shower of wet peanut particles on my face. I was grateful when Artur came over and I was able to escape the conversation.

I didn't get to talk to Tova very much during the reception, which was fine. I was glad for her to revel in all the attention she was getting, and so glad she was able to get here and be present at this event. Finally the crowd thinned out, and we said our goodbyes. "When will I see you again?" she asked me, and I gave her what I hope to be an honest answer: "Next year in Jerusalem."