"You know that feeling when you crack open a book, begin reading and almost immediately realize you're holding a masterpiece in your hands? I had that rare, wonderful experience when I started reading Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust. I won't say anything about it other than: buy it now and pass it on to others. It's a beautiful thing. "—Dave Isay, Nprstorycorps- listen Closely
“Though ‘primitive’ by the classical standards of painting, Mayer Kirshenblatt has left us a visual memorial book of greater value for our heritage than the masterpieces in a museum."—Forverts
“Kirshenblatt’s canvasses, together with a stunningly vivid text . . . have now been issued in a handsome volume by the University of California Press, and the result is a marvel. . . . The book — the product at once of scholarly rigor and a boy’s sense of wonder, respect for the dead and an even greater respect for the living, ethnographic exactitude and artistic style, a yearning born of loss and a synthesis born of collaboration — is a book like no other.”—Forward
“A joyful book . . . filled with a vitality and sense of wonderment.”—History In Review
“In the Bible, Noah collects for his ark two of each species to preserve from annihilation in the Flood. In this glorious ark of a book, Mayer Kirshenblatt has accomplished a project of no less epic proportions: He has rescued from oblivion stories of his town of Apt as it lived and breathed before the war.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Sweet, coarse, and at times devastating.”—Nextbook
“This collection of pre-Holocaust memories will be a lasting contribution to our understanding of Eastern European Jewish life and culture before its destruction.”—Publishers Weekly
“Memories of his early years are very vivid, full of colorful characters, places and events. There is an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words and Mr. Kirshenblatt uses his skill in painting to tell the story of a way of life that has all but disappeared.”—The Jewish Press
“It is best through personal stories that we can grasp the world of our fathers which the Nazis had destroyed. Mayer Kirshenblatt has a unique gift for evocation of the past in his simple and beautiful paintings. Each one tells a story. Together they make up a world.”—Jan T. Gross, author of
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland“Mayer Kirshenblatt brings to life the small Polish town of Apt prior to 1934. We see before our eyes the world of Polish Jewry, from the well-dressed kleptomaniac who steals live fish to Kirshenblatt's mother in her kitchen. His paintings are simple, direct, often witty, and always moving. A book to buy, a book to share.”—Sander L. Gilman, author of
Multiculturalism and the Jews“As if memory itself had come and lifted up his brush, Mayer Kirshenblatt evokes every aspect of his childhood in a tender, beautiful series of paintings. The accompanying narrative mirrors the qualities of his art: a remarkable spontaneity and transparency permits the precious illusion that Apt, Poland, lives again in scenes of birth and death, recreations of kitchens and fire stations and farms, inhabited by a full and lively cast of butchers, milkmaids, prostitutes, musicians, all so lovingly and creatively brought to life. It is a magician's trick, a joyous and deeply satisfying immersion in the lost world of prewar Poland Jewry."—Ann Kirschner, author of
Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story
