Yvette Szczupak-Thomas, Painter, Sculptor, Writer and Poet, born 1929, France. 
Lived and worked in Jerusalem. 
Died in 2003.
Stage designs for artistic films and illustrations for Bialik publication.

Education
1943 Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris
advanced studies with Louis Fernand and Picasso

Awards and Prizes
1962 Jerusalem Prize
1963 St. Pierre Medal, Marseilles
Prize for Book Cover Design, Edinburgh
1965 Vichy Medal
1967 Monaco Medal.
 

Born in 1929 in Burgundy, France, Yvette was soon placed in foster care, where she worked on a farm and suffered from physical and mental abuse. After her health deteriorated she was replaced with a more caring family in Vezelay, where she began to study and draw. She soon impressed Christian Zervos, an art collector, patron writer and publisher, who, along with his wife Yvonne, adopted her in 1942, at the age of 13.

Hereafter Yvette's life took a radical turn as she became part of the milieu of leading French artists and intellectuals of the day, such as Georges Braque, Paul Eluard, Georges Batailles and Constantin Brancusi. During the Second World War, she was tutored by the Zervos' friends, including Pablo Picasso and Louis Fernand, and later attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. 
However, Yvette's life with the Zervos was tainted by the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Christian.

After WWII Yvette deeply sympathized with the fate of the Jews and soon began identifying herself as Jewish. 
In 1949 she met at the Zervos' an Israeli lawyer, Shmuel Alexander Szczupak, an adventurous "bon vivant" and 30 years her elder. The Zervos sent her to a vacation in Israel under his "guardianship" and romance ensued. Wishing to escape the Zervos, and being still a minor under French law, she was assisted by friends like Ida Chagall, Marc Chagall's daughter, and thus discovered that the Zervos never legally adopted her. This early chapter of her life is the focus of Yvette's memoirs: "Un Diamant brut, Vézelay – Paris, 1938-1950" Ed. Métailié, 2008.

Yvette thus immigrated to Israel in 1950, converted to Judaism, married Shmuel Szczupak and began her life as an artist. 
Yvette Szcupak-Thomas became a prolific, multidisciplinary artist and began exhibiting in solo and collective shows in Israel from 1955, including with "New Horizons". 
She also participated in many international exhibits, such as the Paris Biennale of Young Artists, and won various awards, such as the 1962 Jerusalem Prize and the 1965 Vichy Medal. 
During the 6-Day War Yvette was a volunteer paramedic in Magen David Adom and took an active part in its caring for the civilian wounded and dead during the fighting. This resulted in a celebrated series of drawings and woodcuts depicting the horrors of warfare. Amongst her various projects, Yvette designed film sets, illustrated books for the Bialik publication and penned French poetry books and children's stories in Hebrew. 
She died in 2003 in Jerusalem. 

Additional Information:

Les vies d'Yvette Thomas

Née en 1929, en Bourgogne, dans une famille décomposée, elle s'est éteinte à Jérusalem en 2003.

LE MONDE DES LIVRES | 14.08.2008

L'itinéraire d'Yvette Thomas est stupéfiant et singulier. Née en 1929, en Bourgogne, dans une famille décomposée, elle s'est éteinte à Jérusalem en 2003. Entre deux, une date cruciale, 1942 : son adoption par un couple de riches et célèbres marchands d'art, Christian et Yvonne Zervos, qui lui ont fait connaître le Tout-Paris de l'Occupation, mais aussi de l'immédiat après-guerre à Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

"Ma pour' petite... Ce s'rait pour ton bien. Les Zervos s'intéressent à toi ; y m'ont dit : "Votre petite reine, c'est un joyau brut..."", telles sont les mots que "Maman Phrasie" a juste le temps de glisser à l'oreille de la fillette blonde, dont le destin bascule subitement.

En 1948, grâce aux Zervos, elle rencontre Sacha Szczupak, un compagnon de Ben Gourion, qui devient l'homme de sa vie et avec qui elle fonde une famille. Elle détient le certificat de conversion n° 6 de l'Etat d'Israël. Dans les années 1980, Yvette Thomas entreprend de rédiger ses Mémoires, dans une langue naïve et fleurie. Ce document brut, exceptionnel, couvre les années 1938-1950 et comprend deux périodes distinctes.

La première est sombre. Le récit avant l'adoption décrit une réalité qui dérange. Orpheline, Yvette est placée dans une ferme puis dans une autre. Sa vie ne tient qu'à un fil. A 12 ans, elle ne pèse que 23 kilos. Chemin faisant, elle apprendra qu'elle a quatre frères et soeurs, que son père était un notable abandonné par sa femme, d'où cinq enfants de deux lits, dispersés par la volonté de l'Assistance publique.

La seconde partie, qui raconte la vie après l'adoption, est un pur régal littéraire et artistique. Yvette Thomas a eu Pablo Picasso comme professeur de dessin particulier. Elle-même a dessiné puis a été actrice de cinéma. Elle a vécu dans l'intimité de Paul Eluard et de sa femme Nusch, qu'elle appréciait, de René Char, qu'elle n'aimait pas, mais aussi de Braque, Brancusi, Calder, Giacometti, Miro, etc.

Le gotha des lettres et des arts défile dans des scènes qui sont loin d'êtres toutes à l'avantage des artistes : beuverie, chantage, escroquerie. Les anecdotes foisonnent. Les Eluard et les Zervos se crêpent le chignon... Quant à Picasso, il signe des faux, en toute connaissance de cause.

Si Christian Zervos est bien le fameux éditeur des Cahiers d'art, la plus importante revue d'art moderne d'avant-guerre (puis de l'après- guerre), cela ne l'empêche pas d'abuser de sa fille adoptive. L'inconscience voire les lâchetés de cette caste privilégiée sous l'Occupation, tout comme leur attirance soudaine pour le communisme dès la Libération sont rendues avec perspicacité. Peu à peu, Yvette Thomas s'éloigne. Elle veut de l'air et le trouve à Jérusalem, très loin de ses origines...

Avant de mourir, elle a eu le temps d'écrire ce témoignage brûlant.

Un diamant brut. Vézelay-Paris 1938-1950, d'Yvette Szczupak-Thomas
Ed. Métailié, 448 p.

Additional Information:

Der Nister (Yiddish: "the Hidden One"; 1 November 1884 – 4 June 1950 in a Soviet Gulag) was the pseudonym of Pinchus Kahanovich , a Yiddish author, philosopher, translator, and critic.

Early years

Kahanovich was born in Berdychiv, Ukraine, the third in a family of four children with ties to the Korshev sect of Hasidic Judaism. His father was Menakhem Mendl Kahanovich, a smoked-fish merchant at Astrakhan on the Volga River; his mother's name was Leah. He received a traditional religious education but was drawn through his reading to secular and Enlightenment ideas, as well as to Zionism. In 1904 he left Berdychiv hoping to evade the military draft, and this was probably the time when he started using the pseudonym. He moved to Zhytomyr, near Kiev, where he earned a modest living as a teacher of Hebrew at an orphanage for Jewish boys.

At that time, he also wrote his first book, in Yiddish, Gedankn un motivn - lider in proze ("Ideas and Motifs - Prose Poems"), published in Vilna in 1907. He also made the acquaintance of the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz, whom he greatly admired. Peretz recognised Der Nister's literary talents and helped and encouraged him to publish his prose Hekher fun der Erd ("Higher than the Earth"), published in Warsaw in 1910.

In 1912, Kahanovich married Rokhel Zilberberg, a teacher. Their daughter, Hodel, was born in July 1913, shortly after the publication of his third book, Gezang un gebet ("Song and Prayer") in Kiev. At the outbreak of World War I, he found work in the timber industry, which gave him exemption from military service. He continued to write and produced in 1918/19 the first of his books for children, Mayselech in ferzn ("Erzählungen in Versen"; "Stories in Verse"). Also, at this time he translated several of Andersen's fairy tales.

Life

In 1920, he lived for a few months in a Jewish orphanage at Malakhovka, Moscow Oblast, where he worked as a teacher for Jewish orphans, whose parents had been killed during the Tsarist pogroms from 1904 to 1906. Here he met other Jewish artists and intellectuals, among them David Hofstein, Leib Kvitko and Marc Chagall.

Probably in early 1921 Kahanovich left Malakowka and moved with his family to Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania. Here he had great difficulty earning a living, and decided to leave, as many other Russian intellectuals were doing, and moved to Berlin, Germany, where his son Joseph was born. From 1922 to 1924 he worked there as a freelancer for the Yiddish journal Milgroim ("Pomegranate") and also edited, along with David Bergelson, several Yiddish literary journals, though they didn't last long. In Berlin, he also published a two-volume collection of his short stories under the title Gedakht ("Imagined"). The book was his first modest literary success. When the Milgroim closed in 1924, he moved with his family to Hamburg, where he worked for two years for the Soviet Trade Mission.

In 1926, like many fellow exiles, he returned to the Soviet Union and settled in Kharkiv. In 1929, he published in Kiev Fun mayne giter ("From My Estates"). The work contained a complicated web of metaphors tied to Hasidic mysticism - especially on the Kabbalah and the symbolic stories of Nachman of Breslov - that can create a universe of images and parables, folk tales, children's poems and rhymes. His long sentences create a hypnotic rhythm. But they also reflect the increasing pressure that has been exerted at that time by the Soviet regime on Jewish intellectuals. However, the symbol-laden work, rich in Jewish themes, was declared reactionary by the Soviet regime and its literary critics. He was subjected to the increasingly stringent Soviet censorship. 
In 1929, he was criticized when the Russian Yiddish newspaper Di Royte Velt ("The Red World") reprinted his tale Unter a Ployt ("Bottom Fence"). The then president of the Russian Yiddish Writers Federation, Moyshe Litvakov, initiated a smear campaign at the end of which Der Nister had to renounce the literary symbolism.

He tried now to write his literary work within the constraints of prevailing socialist realism and began to write stories. These collected essays appeared in 1934 under the title Hoyptshtet ("Capital cities"). He stopped publishing his original works and earned a living as a journalist. In the early 1930s he worked almost exclusively as a journalist and translator, translating works by Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and Jack London. His own literary work was limited to four small collections of short stories for children.

Just before World War II, the Soviet government briefly adopted less censorious policies over writings considered to be promoting Zionism. Der Nister began working on his real masterpiece: Di Mishpokhe Mashber ("The Family Mashber"). The first volume of work appeared in 1939 in Moscow. The work was almost universally praised by critics, and he seemed to be rehabilitated. But the success did not last long. The limited edition of the first volume sold out quickly, but the Second World War and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, made publication of a second edition impossible. The second volume, devoted to his daughter Hodel, who starved to death at the siege of Leningrad in early 1942, was not published until 1948 in New York. The manuscript of the third volume, the completion of Der Nister, mentioned in a letter, has been lost.

During World War II, Der Nister was evacuated to Tashkent, where he wrote stories about the horrors of the persecution of Jews in German-occupied Poland, which had been described to him by friends firsthand. These collected stories were published in 1943 under the title Korbones ("Victims") in Moscow, where he had retired with his second wife Lena Singalowska, a former actress of the Yiddish theater in Kiev. In April 1942, Stalin ordered the formation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee designed to influence international public opinion and organize political and material support for the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany, particularly from the West. Solomon Mikhoels, the popular actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre, was appointed the JAC chairman. Other members were Der Nister, Itzik Feffer, Peretz Markish and Samuel Halkin. They wrote texts and petitions as cries for help against the Nazi pogroms. Among others, the texts were printed in U.S. newspapers. The JAC also raised funds.

In 1947, Der Nister made a trip to Birobidzhan, the USSR Jewish Autonomous Region near the Chinese border. He traveled there on a special migrant train, together with a thousand Holocaust survivors, to evaluate the development of the self-governing Jewish settlement in this area. However, very soon Stalin changed policy to the extermination of Jewish writers and the destruction of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. In February 1949, Der Nister was one of the last of the Jewish writers arrested. The Soviet authorities officially reported Der Nister died on 4 June 1950 in an unknown Soviet prison hospital. Many of Der Nister's contemporaries would be killed in August 1952 in the Night of the Murdered Poets, including Itzik Feffer, Peretz Markish, David Hofstein, Leib Kvitko and David Bergelson.

Der Nister's last writings, describing the persecution and destruction of the Jewish communities in Europe under the Nazi regime, and hinting at Soviet persecution as well, were collected in a work, Vidervuks, published posthumously in 1969.

Israel Joshua Singer, another famous Yiddish novelist, once said of Der Nister that "had writers of the whole world been given a chance to read [his] work, they would have broken their pens.”

Burial Site

For more than a half-century after his death in captivity, Der Nister's place of death was not known to the public. In August 2017, researchers from Israel and Russia located his remains at a prisoner cemetery in the village of Abez, near Vorkuta, where he was recorded to have died on June 4, 1950. The researchers set up an improvised memorial atop his unmarked grave consisting of a Star of David fashioned from barbed wire.

Works

Even in his earliest works, he was drawn to the arcane teachings of the Kabbalah and to the intense use of symbols in his writings.

His best-known work, Di mishpokhe Mashber ("The Family Mashber"), is a naturalistic family saga. The work is a realistically written family saga of Jewish life in his native city Berdychiv at the end of the 19th century, with the three brothers as main actors: Moshe is a proud business man; Luzi is a skeptic mystic and benefactor who believes with brave defiance in the eternity of the Jewish people, probably a self-representation of Kahanovich; and Alter is a philanthropic altruist. David Roskies calls the depiction of the protagonist, Moshe, "the most finely wrought portrait of a hasidic merchant in all of Yiddish literature." As in the novel, whose protagonist's brother joins the Breslover Hasidim, Pinchas's brother Aaron did the same. Der Nister himself was influenced by Rebbe Nachman's Hasidic parables, though this manifests in his fiction, Roskies argues, through a filter of Russian modernism, and authors like Andrei Bely also influenced his work.

Di mishpokhe Mashber ("The Family Mashber") was translated into Hebrew in 1962, into French in 1984, into English by Leonard Wolf in 1987, and into German in 1990.

Der Nister appears as one of the main characters in the novel The World to Come (2006) by Dara Horn. The book describes Kahanovich's uneasy friendship with artist Marc Chagall, inside whose frames he hid some of his writings. Adaptations, descriptions, and excerpts from his stories, and those of other Yiddish writers, are included. (Horn makes one fictional change: Der Nister dies almost as soon as arrested, whereas in reality he died the following year, or maybe as late as 1952 according to some sources).

Selected works

·         Gedankn un motivn — lider in proze ("Ideas and Motifs — Prose Poems"), Vilna, 1907

·         Hekher fun der erd ("Higher than the Earth"), Warsaw, 1910

·         Gezang un gebet ("Song and Prayer"), Kiev, 1912 (collection of songs)

·         Translation of selected tales from Hans Christian Andersen, 1918

·         Mayselekh in ferzn ("Stories in Verse"), 1918/19 (many editions: Kiev, Warsaw, Berlin)

·         Gedakht ("Imagined"), Berlin, 1922/23 (collection of fantastic stories, 2 vols.)

·         Fun mayne giter ("From My Estates"), Kiev, 1929

·         Hoyptshtet ("Capital Cities"), Moscow, 1934

·         Zeks mayselekh ("Six Little Tales"), 1939

·         Di mishpokhe Mashber ("The Family Mashber"), Kiev, 1939 (Vol. 1), New York, 1948 (Vol. 2)

·         Korbones ("Victims"), Moscow, 1943

·         Dertseylungen un eseyen ("Stories and Essays"), New York, 1957 (posthumous)

·         Vidervuks ("Regeneration"), Moscow, 1969 (posthumous)

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