When type became bullets

Robyn Stoller Awend’s exhibition of letterpress prints is inspired by renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever

By MORDECAI SPECKTOR

A Yiddish poem about Jews in the Vilna ghetto melting down lead printing type to make bullets inspired local printmaker Robyn Stoller Awend. Her upcoming exhibition at Form + Content Gallery, Survival: When Truth and Fiction Intersect, includes letterpress prints, photographs and handcrafted bullets. It will be displayed from Dec. 3 through Jan. 9, 2010.

Stoller Awend began creating artworks after reading a poem, “The Lead Plates of the Romm Printers,” which was written by Abraham Sutzkever in 1943. He wrote:

“We dreamers now have to become soldiers and fight / And melt into bullets the soul of the lead.”

Evoking the desperate attempt of the doomed Lithuanian Jews to survive the murderous Nazi onslaught, Stoller Awend’s exhibition includes an antique type drawer that once housed lead printing type. She has placed “bullets” in the type case, which is suspended from a gallery wall.

The exhibit also features Stoller Awend’s photographs from Vilna’s former Jewish ghetto, which show what remains of Jewish life in the city. Her colorful and playful letterpress prints contain imagery formed from text.

Regarding Sutzkever, the inspiration for Stoller Awend’s exhibit, Ruth Wisse, Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, writes in an essay on the Web site of the National Yiddish Book Center:

“Sutzkever’s poetry of and about the period of destruction made him famous throughout the Yiddish-speaking world. When a partisan courier brought his poems to Moscow in the winter of 1943, a special plane was dispatched to an airstrip near the Narocz forests to airlift Sutzkever with his wife, who had escaped with a group of ghetto fighters, to the Soviet Union as a symbol of the Jewish resistance to fascism. Some of his poems of the ghetto, such as ‘Teacher Mira’ and ‘On the Death of Yankev Gershteyn,’ commemorate its inspiring cultural personalities. The lyric ‘Under Your White Stars’ — a modern de profundis — was set to music and sung as a ghetto hymn.”

In the conclusion of her essay, Wisse declares, “Perhaps more than any other modern Jewish writer, Sutzkever has lived the life of the romantic poet-hero. He was at the center of the Jewish national tragedy in Europe, and in Israel on the eve of Jewish national rebirth. He took great risks in rescuing Jewish cultural treasures from Vilna and was the witness for Jewry at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. But he accords the highest value to poetry in the way that the psalmist serves God through song. Without direct use of religious language, his poetry translates the inherited faith of his ancestors into the personal perception of the extraordinary in the ordinary.”

Sutzkever, who was born in Smorgon, near Vilna (Vilnius), in 1913, now lives in Tel Aviv.

Stoller Awend has a BFA from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and an MFA from the University of Dallas, Texas. Her compositions, which reinvigorate the long letterpress tradition, use actual lead type letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and are printed at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

Stoller Awend’s artwork was featured on the cover of the AJW Community Guide last year. She also recently collaborated with Joe Vass, projecting images comprised of Hebrew letters, for the show Alef-Bet: Music of the Hebrew Letters at the St. Paul JCC. Her work has been included in more than 40 exhibitions nationally. She is a founding member of Form + Content Gallery.

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There will be an opening reception for Robyn Stoller Awend’s exhibition, Survival: When Truth and Fiction Intersect, 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 5 at Form + Content Gallery, Whitney Square Building, 210 N. Second St., Suite 104, Minneapolis. The gallery is open from 12 to 6 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and by appointment.

A closing reception will take place 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 9. There will be a reading of poetry and writings inspired by the literary works of Abraham Sutzkever, and the themes of survival explored in the exhibition. Daniel Ettedgui will introduce readings by Alison Morse, Paulette Myers-Rich and Margie Newman.

For information, call 612-436-1151 or go to: formandcontent.org.