The painter Isaac Dobrinsky was born in Makarov, Ukraine, into a traditional Jewish home and received a yeshiva education. When his father died suddenly, Dobrinsky moved to Kiev to study sculpture. In 1912, he left for Paris, where he remained until his death. Within a year of his arrival, he abandoned sculpture for painting. He and his family spent the first two years of World War II in Paris and then fled to the Dordogne. In the 1950s, he painted a memorable series of about forty portraits of Jewish boys and girls from an orphanage whose parents had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Day unto day bequeaths its fading sun,
and night after night laments for night.
Summer after summer is gathered in fall
and the world in its sorrow gives song.
Tomorrow we’ll die, the word in us…
An illustration by El Lissitzky from Chaim Nahman Bialik’s Shloyme ha-melekh (King Solomon), from an issue of the Hebrew journal Shtilim (Saplings) that was printed in 1917 in Moscow, two days before…
Lerski’s portrait of a young Polish Jewish immigrant to Palestine is in his distinctive, expressionist style. Using mirrors and reflectors to emphasize the transformative powers of light, Lerski liked…