Survival: Related Events

Opening Reception
Saturday, December 5, 2009 from 7 – 9 pm

Closing Reception
Saturday, January 9, 2010 from 7 - 9 pm

Poetry and writings inspired by the literary works of Abraham Sutzkever and the themes of survival explored in the exhibition. Introduced by Daniel Ettedgui and read by Alison Morse, Paulette Myers-Rich and Margie Newman.

“We dreamers now have to become soldiers and fight
And melt into bullets the soul of the lead.”
Abraham Sutzkever, The Lead Plates of the Romm Printers, 1943
A haunting poem written in the Vilna Ghetto of Lithuania by Abraham Sutzkever in September 1943 has inspired Minneapolis artist Robyn Stoller Awend to create the exhibition Survival: When Truth and Fiction Intersect.

This is an ambitious installation that includes new letterpress prints, photographs, and hand-crafted bullets. Stoller Awend began with the poet’s story of doomed Lithuanian Jews melting down lead printing type to make bullets as a last resort for survival against the Nazis. The exhibition includes an antique type drawer that once housed lead printing type, now weighted with “bullets” and suspended open from the gallery wall. Photographs taken by the artist while visiting the site of Vilna’s former Jewish ghetto capture the remnants of Jewish life striving to remain present. Her letterpress prints contain imagery formed through the use of text. Stoller Awend’s work references and reinvigorates the centuries-long history of the letterpress printing process.

Sutzkever’s poem of survival is layered with mystery and controversy, causing decades of debates regarding the accuracy of the events and questioning its truth or fiction. Before the war, Vilna was once a major center of Jewish learning and publishing. 95% of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust - the highest rate of genocide of any country in Europe. Of the many Romm Press buildings that were once in operation in Vilna beginning in 1805, only the outside of one structure remains today. The Romm Press – famous for printing some of the most important Judaic scholarly texts in Eastern Europe, including the Babylonian Talmud – has since been converted into businesses and residential living areas.

To watch Ms. Awend discuss this exhibition and its theme, visit 3 minute egg. Personal interview begins at 1:39.

This exhibition has been funded in part through a grant from the Howard B. Brin Jewish Arts Endowment, a designated endowment of the Jewish Community Foundation of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation.