Saul Tchernichowsky

Saul Tchernichowsky was born in Mikhailovka, Russia into an assimilated family where he was introduced to the Haskalah and Zionism. As a young man studying medicine in Odessa, he continued to explore his interest in languages and became drawn into Hebrew and Zionist circles.

Tchernichowsky brought to his work an acute sense of folklore, and strove to expand the content and form of the Hebrew language in his descriptions of rural scenes from his homeland and of Jewish customs. From 1922 until 1931, Tchernichowsky lived in Berlin, where he devoted himself to translation and wrote some of his most fervent Zionist poems. In 1936, he signed a contract with the Schocken publishing house and moved to Jerusalem, where he would remain the rest of his life.

The portrait of Tchernichowsky, seen here, is from Leonid Pasternak, His Life and Work, which was produced by Hayim Nahman Bialik and Max Osborn in 1924. Leonid Pasternak was born in Odessa in 1862. After receiving a law degree in Moscow, he began to study painting and became a professor at Moscow School of Art from 1894-1921. In 1921 he moved to Berlin and established himself as a portrait painter. Three years later his work was published in Album shel temunot [Portrait Album] (1924), which contained an introduction by Hermann Struck. An example from that work is the portrait of Hayim Nahman Bialik featured in this exhibit. It was Bialik himself who lured Pasternak to Berlin in order to fill a part of the Jewish intelligentsia that he believed was missing. In 1938, Pasternak moved to England, where he died in Oxford in 1945.