sunset after the concert

Wednesday, July 17, 2013: Hanging out at the National Yiddish Book Center which is located on the campus of Hampshire College. Another annual trek which I have been through and watched the evolution of since it opened. This night was Klezmer concert night. The Klezmer Conservatory Band was great as usual.

My favorite exhibit at the Book Center is called, ” A Bintel Brief.”

From the website:

A Bintel Brief: Illustrations adapted from letters to the Forverts newspaper’s advice column

A Bintel Brief: Illustrations adapted from letters to the Forverts newspaper’s advice column

Opens at the Yiddish Book Center Sunday April 7, 2013.

AMHERST, MA: A Bintel Brief, an exhibit of illustrations based on letters to the Forverts newspaper’s advice column, opens at the Yiddish Book Center on Sunday, April 7th.  The exhibit’s illustrated panels are excerpts from a graphic novel by artist Liana Finck, to be published by Ecco Press in the winter of 2014. Each of the eleven stories in the book is based on a different letter written to the Bintel Brief, a beloved Yiddish advice column published in the Forverts newspaper beginning in 1906. The column was the brainchild of the newspaper’s founding editor Abraham Cahan. The letters, written by recent immigrants to America, expressed a heightened sense of reality full of tragedy, hope, sweetness and humor.

Finck spent a year in Belgium on a Fulbright Scholarship, where she worked on a comic book based on the life of Georges Remi, the Belgian who drew the famous Tintin series. After she returned to New York, she set about starting a career as a cartoonist. Finck says, “I was trying to rediscover the person I’d been ignoring since I started college. I thought it would be interesting to write about something Jewish.” A book her grandmother had given her, a collection of Bintel Brief letters translated into English, captured her imagination. “I feel very deeply connected with the stories,” she says, “and the mood of struggling and the very, very wry humor.”

In conjunction with the opening, Finck will offer a hands-on art workshop in which participants will incorporate one line from a Bintel Brief letter into a collage. At the end of the workshop the collages will be hung up side by side to make a giant comic strip.

A Bintel Brief will be on exhibit in the Brechner Gallery at the Yiddish Book Center through October 2013.

Some of the images have appeared in the Forward and been exhibited at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC, and the Museum at Eldridge Street in Manhattan.

Supported by a grant from the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, a partnership of Avoda Arts, JDub Records and the Foundation for Jewish Culture, and made possible with major funding from UJA-Federation of New York.
Lisa Newman March 27, 2013

_________________________________________________________________________________________

to be continued