My roots.-Leonid Afremov

No man is an island, least of all an artist. Alberts Einstein said that if he looked great it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. I myself feel that, whatever success has come my way, it is impossible to overestimate the debt I own to those artists who came bofore me.
I was born in Vitebsk, a City of about 300 000, located in what is now known as the country of Belarus, a former Soviet Republic of Bellorussia. Vitebsk is an ancient Eastern Eropian city and one of the oldest churches in Uerope, a twelth century building, was standing there before it was finally demolished by the Soiviets in the Nikita Khruschev era. This atrocity makes me think of Taliban demolishing Budda statutes in Afganistan in 2001. Vitebsk has been at the crossroads of Russia, Litvuania and Poland and this gave that little provintial place a somewhat cosmopolitan outlook, as much as it can exist in Eastern Europe.
Historically Vitebsk has also been a very Jewish city. It was located within the so called Pale of Settlement, the western part of the Russian Emprire where Jews were allowed to settle. As of today, most Jews fled after the collapse of the USSR, including my family. It is within the Jewish community of Vitebsk that the artistic traditon, that put the city on the map with the name of Mark Shagall, took place.
Here I have to mention the patriarch, the founding father of the Vitebsk school, the teacher of Mark Shagal and many others, the great Yehuda Pen. It was he who openned the first private arts school on Russia and, while prsonal artistic fame evaded him, he realized himself through he school where I myself claim a place. Yehuda met a tragic end in 1937, being murdered in his own house under mysterious circumstances. It was claimed that his own relatives did him in, to get whatever money Shagall was sending him. Later on many claimed that the murder was in fact arranged by the Soviet State Security servises, as a part of the great purge of the late 1930ties.
I have studied the work of Yehuda Pen and his students at the Vitebsk Musium of Art. I was so impressed by Yehuda’s influence that I chose it a topic of my graduating thesis at the Vitebsk State Pedagogical Institute in mid seventies. Two weeks before graduation the Dean of the Instutute received a note from Minck, the capital of the former Soviet Republic of Belorussia, now the independent county of Belorus, stating that the artistic heritage of Yehuda Pen is not a proper subject for the public and students of art to be conserned with. I was simultaneuosly flabergasted and terrified. I had no idea that the Party has time to consern itself with a graduating thesis of an art student dedicated to an obscure and long dead painter. In addition, I had absolutely no time to complete an alternative thesis and had no idea what its topic could have been.
I was saved by the providence. The Dean, a family friend, had very bad feet and a relative of main was a well known shoe maker. The Dean got a pair of extra soft custom made shoes and got an opportunity to write a thesis on a not too challenging subject of classroom decorating in public schools, which I thankfully completed.
Much water has gone under the bridge since then. After leaving Vitebsk in I have spent my life in Israel and the US, but like with Mark Shagall, it has always remained in my heart and I remain a proud disciple of its school of art. My life school might have been a school of hard knocks but it made me an artist and the man I am, and without my roots there would have been no Afremov.