By Rosalie Schwartz, PhD
MONTREAL — The Colours of my Father is an eye-popping animated film about Montreal painter Sam Borenstein. Produced by the artist’s daughter, Joyce, and aired on the Documentary Channel, the biography opened a world of art and artists to me.
Lithuanian by birth, the youngest of fifteen children, Sam Borenstein experienced pogroms and wartime deprivation before he and his father and sister left Poland in 1921 to join four older brothers in Montreal. Sam was only thirteen; his mother had died of influenza when he was nine
Intrigued by the paintings and the story, I searched the Internet for Sam Borenstein and found him. One link and then another. I searched for Montreal painters. There were more. Next, Amazon. A book on Borenstein; one on Alexander Bercovitch; the catalogue from a 1987 exhibition: Jewish Painters and Modernity: Montreal 1930-1945. I ordered them all. When I saw the work and read the artists’ stories, I was captivated.
Professor Loren Lerner had written the Borenstein book. I hit the Internet again. Art Department, Concordia University, Montreal. Email: How can I learn more? Reply: Passed your email to Joyce Borenstein. Email: Exhibit of Borenstein’s work at Yeshiva University Museum, New York. Joyce would be there to give a tour of the exhibit, along with a panel discussion, “Growing Up Jewish in Montreal.” If I could come from my home in San Diego, Joyce would be happy to meet me. I went to New York. I saw; I listened.
Then, I went to Montreal. Like the smitten swain in Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady,” I wanted to be on the streets where those painters had lived—the streets they had captured on canvas. Houses—cramped one against the other. Twisted staircases to second-story doorways. Trees with bare and twisted limbs or displaying leafy crowns. Midnight-black tar of a road, cut by a yellow block of sunlight. The shadow of a fence, an occasional car.
I gazed down Clark Street and absorbed the red-brick square buildings that Jack Beder had captured in oils on a snowy day in 1935, a gray sky pressing against the rooftops. The Polish-born poster-maker had painted St. Urbain Street the year before, 1934, in pastel pinks, blue and violet on an early spring day. I couldn’t wait to see that street made famous by Montreal writer Mordechai Richler, so I headed down Laurier, still as lively with shoppers and gossiping neighbors as when Alexander Bercovitch rendered it in 1933. Bercovitch had learned his craft in his native Ukraine and had spent time in Jerusalem and Ashkabad, Turkestan, before he and his wife and children joined her family in Montreal.
Piles of gray snow lined a wet street on Jack Beder ‘s 1939 Sherbrooke Street, but in Louis Muhlstock’s vision of the corner of Sherbrooke and Sainte-Famille, the street is shiny with spring rain and the trees are leafy-green. Seven-year-old Louis had traveled from Galicia to Canada with his family in 1911. They had settled in the heart of Montreal’s Jewish quarter, probably not far from the familiar corner store on de Bullion Street that Sam Borenstein painted in orangy-red and ochre in 1940.
Saint-Louis Square came alive for me when I rested on a bench and enjoyed chocolate biscotti ice cream in a cone—enchanted by the elegant corner house, with its decorative round tower, that had caught Jack Beder’s attention in 1939.
Jack Beder, Alexander Bercovitch, Louis Muhlstock, Sam Borenstein—just four of the dozen or so Jewish painters of Montreal who preserved the streets, activities, people of this vibrant city. Sylvia Ary, Rita Briansky, Ghitta Caiserman-Roth, Eric Goldberg, Regina Seiden Goldberg, Herman Heimlich, Harry Mayerovitch, Bernard Mayman, Ernst Neumann, Alfred Pinsky, Moe Reinblatt, Fanny Wiselberg—I hadn’t known their names, seen their work, been aware of their existence. Now, they haunted me.
I met with Joyce Borenstein in Montreal. She introduced me to West End Gallery owner Michael Millman. Millman’s mother and grandmother ran the gallery before him. They sold, and he continues to sell, the works of Montreal’s Jewish modernist painters. Canada’s museums display their paintings, prints, drawings and posters.
Montreal’s Saidye Bronfman Centre mounted the 1987 exhibition, “Jewish Painters and Modernity: Montreal, 1930-1945,” on its gallery walls. The National Museums of Canada and Quebec’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs funded the show. Saidye Rosner had married Samuel Bronfman, one of eight siblings of the philanthropic family that had accumulated its wealth through ownership of the Seagram liquor company. (Samuel’s sister Rose married Maxwell Rady the same year, 1922. When Rose gave birth to a son in 1937, she and Max named him Ernest — yes, the San Diego philanthropist for whom Rady Children’s Hospital and UCSD’s Rady Schjool of Business are named.)
The Saidye Bronfman Centre continues to anchor Montreal’s vibrant Jewish community and promote its culture.
Joyce Borenstein opened a treasure trove of art for me, along with a slice of Jewish life that I surely would have missed. The Jewish painters of Montreal—as art and experience—are worth the search.
*
Schwartz is a freelance writer based in San Diego