Michael Rogatchi Shtetl Stories Collection Review ( Excerpts)
By Michaël de Saint Cheron
Published first in the Shtetl Stories and Memories Art Catalogue (C) 2024.
Michael Rogatchi Shtetl Stories collection can be seen here.
Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk once uttered the words, that our dear Elie Wiesel repeated so often (which he attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav): “Ein Shalom yénitar milèv shavour “ (there is no peace greater than a broken heart ). Elie added to this for his part: “There is no greater faith than a broken faith”. Isn’t this ardent force that nourishes Inna and Michaël, lies in this indescribable faith, this insurmountable faith that springs from a broken faith?
The artist’s love of Yiddish memory, like that of music, shines through each piece of the collection.
For my part, this is the first time that I have been able to see Michaël’s studies and sketches, some of them monochrome, as in his Homage to Elie Wiesel, or Homage to Leonard Cohen.
If the connection with music is organic for the artist and his oeuvre, it is interesting and telling that his Study for Yiddishe Son, for Elie Wiesel, also brings us to the domain of music, with this character (Elie as a child) playing the violin.
It is the same for Shtetl Song, a very interesting work due to the form that Michaël Rogatchi chose, a flower which serves as a receptacle for a dance at the festival of Simchat Torah, where we can imagine in the foreground a group of young girls dancing in the middle of a assembly of men. Here, in the shape of the drawing, the artist has drawn a flower which has the shape of an eye – and we can see here a reminiscence of the parsha Re’eh from the Torah, chapter “See”. In this chapter, the central role is played by the pericope of eternal meaning at the pivotal moment, in which God gives to the Children of Israel, and through them, to the human race as a whole, an imperative of the choice between a blessing and a curse.
Blessing for those who follow the divine commandments of sanctification of life, curse for those who refuse them. What could be speaking more acutely to humans in our 21st century than this meaning, this choice in between life and death, the choice between blessing and curse?
Let’s return to our Shtetl Song work. Contemplation of this Michael Rogatchi’s drawing on cotton paper immediately evokes for me the names of Paul Celan and Anselm Kiefer. In his first book Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), Paul Celan composed an untitled poem: “Ich bin allein, ich stell die Aschenblume/ins Glas voll reifer Schwärtze. Schwestermund… (I am alone, I put the ash flower/in the glass full of ripened black, sister mouth.. […]”.
This verse has always fascinated Anselm Kiefer, and I associate it as if hearing it again today, when I see this drawing by Michaël Rogatchi, Shtetl Song. What is this Aschenblume, this Ash Flower, to which Kiefer, the German artist, but resident in France for thirty years, has devoted numerous works, being fascinated by the Celan’s paradox? Normally, we perceive a flower as a direct opposition to ash, isn’t it? Or can it be seen differently ? In his poem, Celan brings together two contradictory, almost opposite words, and what they represent, the ashes and a flower. Irresolvable artistic aporia.
Michaël Rogatchi, like many artists who lived through the horror or who were born afterwards, with a deep knowledge of it, chose figuration rather than abstraction, abandoning the famous Biblical principle of the prohibition of representation.
Recently, Gehrard Richter chose to paint his Birkenau series, based on four absolutely unique photos of the members of the Sonderkommando unit of Auschwitz-Birkenau, taken in the greatest secrecy in the summer of 1944. The series contains several works, and it has been defined by a French art historian and director general of the National Institute of History of Art Eric de Chassey as Make ( It) Visible.
Can we suppose that Michaël Rogatchi did not have to see these terrifying photos of an open-air pyre in which the SS butchers were burning the corpses of those tortured in the gas chambers? It would be too easy to think so. One does not need these indescribable images of the Shoah (I prefer the Hebrew word SHOAH to that of the Holocaust) to paint, compose or write works on the Shoah, as very great artists have done and are still doing for 80 years. To do so is certainly a decisive mental and artistic act, and such homage can be not only monumental art, as it is in the case of four monumental paintings Birkenau by Gerhard Richter. The Shoah is so often present in the work of Michaël and Inna Rogatchi, as it is in the entire oeuvre of Anselm Kiefer, without any photo being necessary for neither of the artists, as was the case for Claude Lanzmann in his cinematic masterpiece SHOAH.
Michaël and Inna , in the part of her series, Shtetl Memories, which is combined in this joint collection with the works of her husband, choose to bring us, work after work, into their memory, into their imagination, into their timelessness, inhabited with the memory of the extermination. Thus, their works, studies, sketches, drawings, depicting and expressing much more than just a boy playing the violin, or just an accordionist sitting on a bench (Homage to Leonard Cohen) with winged figures above him, like angels, nor just a community dancing on a flower for Simcha Torah.
Thinking about metaphors in Michael’s works, it brings us powerful paradoxes again. A flower as such, let alone an eye, cannot be a place for dancing. Only the Aschenblumen, the flowers of ashes, or the Auschenaugen, the eyes of ashes, can be places of ashes where bone can dance against the ashes.
Michael Rogatchi’s Yiddish Song, the Psalm 9 – Ghetto Waltz, or his Shtetl Song, are all works that bring to mind these powerful words from Anselm Kiefer, when he spoke of his numerous interpretations of the Celan’s Ashesflower, with Daniel Arasse ( 1944 – 2003), the one of the most important French art historians , who died too young. In their conversation which occurred on the France Culture TV programme in 2001, there is a telling episode:
“Daniel Arasse: Let’s also talk about a word, an alliance of terms. I believe that you also borrowed it from Celan, his Aschenblume.
Anselm Kiefer: Aschenblume, Yes, it’s very beautiful.
D.A.: “Flowers of ashes”.
A. K.: A flower is dazzling, it is an explosion of life, of joy, and if we associate it with ashes, ashes which are already the fruit of metamorphosis, we suspend time by bringing the two elements together, at the same level. »
This collection of works by Inna and Michaël Rogatchi suspends our time and our imagination, their drawings make us hear the songs in the secret of the soul of Elie Wiesel, in particular his “Ani Maamin”: “I believe in the coming of the Messiah, and although he delays, I will wait for him every day”. Elie’s version of the essential for Jewish soul Ani Maamim, came to him, as he has told, from the heart of the Shoah, from a nephew of his rabbi of Wiznitz, who had sung it in front of him one Shabbat in 1943. Wiesel always remembered that special song, all his life.
The Rogatchis’ works from their Shtetl Songs collection are also infused with magnificent songs of Leonard Cohen, and many other songs and much of the other essential music, like that of Gustav Mahler, one of the most gifted ancestors of Inna Rogatchi.
“There is no greater peace than a broken heart » . There is no artworks greater than those which make us hear the Song of our Souls and this Cry of Heaven.
Dr Michaël de Saint-Cheron ©
President , The André Malraux International Research Center (CIRAM)
Philosopher of religions, art critic, author of “Soulages, d’une rive à l’autre” (2019) and “The Seven Heavenly Palaces of Anselm Kiefer” (2025, Actes-Sud)
Paris
June 2024