The Rogatchis’ Shtetl Variations

By Michaël de Saint-Cheron (C) Paris.

Excerpts.

The essay is published first in the Michael and Inna Rogatchi. SHTETL SONGS & MEMORIES Art Catalogue, 2024. (C).

You readers are holding in your hands a collection of works by Inna and Michaël Rogatchi, in honour and memory of Grigory Kanovich, who left us in 2023, in Israel, at the age of eighty-nine. These pieces have been produced by these two artists in common, in the truest sense of the word: in communion, like musical compositions for two keyboards or two pianos. Inna and Michael act in such communion through love of life (Love), through memory, and through art. Their works stand on these three pillars, together with a fourth: Judaism. Their communion resulted in these twenty-five creations:  drawings, studies, sketches and original works on paper. This collection represents a highpoint in their journey of memory; it conveys the force of their art; it springs from their roots in Litvak culture and tradition.

Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk once uttered words that our dear Elie Wiesel repeated so often (attributing them to Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav): Ein shalem milev shavur  (There is nothing more whole than a broken heart). Elie added for his part: “There is no greater faith than a broken faith.” May we not say that the ardent force motivating Inna and Michaël resides in the indescribable faith that springs from broken faith?

The Rogatchis’ love of Yiddish memory, like that of music, shines through each piece in the collection. For visitors to the inaugural exhibition of the Shtetl Songs at the Grigory Kanovich Jonava Library in Lithuania, as well as for those who will view the collection at subsequent venues, it matters little which piece was done by the hand of Inna and which by Michael, so great is the symbiosis between the two. 

However, it is important for the critic to distinguish, within this communion of two oeuvres, which pieces were done by each in the couple. We may think of the artists Robert and Sonia Delaunay and recall how Sonia’s work has taken second place to Robert’s, quite unjustly.

In this set of twenty-five works, I would like to emphasise the importance of the works on paper in mixed technique, and in particular those by Inna titled Songs of Our Souls. 

If the connection with music is organic for the artist and his oeuvre, it is telling that his Study for Yiddish Son, dedicated to Elie Wiesel, also brings us into a musical domain, in which the character (Elie as a child) plays the violin. 

In those works from this exceptional series, we can see here a reminiscence of the Torah portion Re’eh, meaning “See.” In this reading from Scripture, of everlasting importance, G-d gives the children of Israel, and through them humankind in its entirety, the choice between a blessing and a curse. Blessed will be those who follow the divine commandments and thus sanctify life; and cursed will be those who refuse this imperative. To us twenty-first-century human beings, what could speak more forcefully than this choice between life and death, between a blessing and a curse? 

And today, what do Inna and Michael, this rare couple of exceptional artists, transmit to us through their art of memory and history, through the heritage they have received from the Jews of Lithuania but also from their friends Grigory Kanovich, Elie Wiesel and Leonard Cohen? They call upon us to convey, beyond what seems humanly possible, love and communion among the living. They demand that we have an ardent heart that perceives the tears of the deceased ones and transform them into song.  

Like many artists who lived through the great horror afflicting the Jews of Europe or who were born afterwards with a deep knowledge of it, Michael and Inna Rogatchi opted for figuration rather than abstraction, abandoning the famous Biblical prohibition on representation.

Recently, Gehrard Richter chose to paint his Birkenau series based on four absolutely unique photos taken in great secrecy by members of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1944. Several studies have been written on this series, the latest of which is Making It Visible by Eric de Chassey, a French art historian who serves as director general of the National Institute of Art History.

Can we suppose that Inna and Michael 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? These indescribable images of the Shoah (a term I prefer to “Holocaust”) are not necessary in order to paint, compose or write works on the Shoah, as very great artists have done and are still doing after eighty years. To meet such a challenge, one must have decisive mental and artistic force. Such works need not be monumental art, in the case of Gerhard Richter’s four grand paintings titled Birkenau. The Shoah is often present in the work of Michael and Inna Rogatchi, as it is in the entire oeuvre of Anselm Kiefer. To create their works, no photo of horror was needed by these artists, or by Claude Lanzmann in producing his cinematographic masterpiece Shoah.

Michael and Inna choose to bring us, work after work, into their memories, into their imagination, into their timelessness, haunted as it is by the Shoah. Thus, their works—studies, sketches, drawings—depict much more than a boy playing the violin, or an accordionist sitting on a bench in the works of Michael.

Then come the more obviously evocative works by Inna Rogatchi, such as Litvak Story, Shavuot Window, or Cry of Heaven (In Memory of the Six Million). There are many representational figures in these paintings by Inna. Those in the Litvak Story are particularly distressing. From their eternity of ashes, from the flames, they peer at us, like the martyrs burned alive by the SS or the Wehrmacht in Oradour-sur-Glane (France, 1944), or in Lidice (in 1942, Czech Republic) and in so many other places of torment during the Shoah and the Second World War. For eighty years thereafter, in so many places around the world, madness continues to extend the boundaries of atrocity, abomination, desolation.

In this artwork by Inna, Litvak Story, in its eternal flames, one of the faces has the shape of an open book. If man— der Mensch in German, Adam in Hebrew—can be “like the tree of the field” (Deuteronomy 20: 19), we can imagine that the book depicted refers not only to the eternal Book, but also the Book as the extension of the human being. Didn’t Heinrich Heine, a major poet of the 19th century, who left Germany for France, write these words which resonate within us today: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people”?

These disappearing faces; these faces amid flames for all eternity in the works of Michael and Inna Rogatchi; these faces presented in Lithuania as an homage to Grigory Kanovich; these Cries from the Sky (Cry of Heaven ) are certainly the faces of the Six Million martyrs of the Jewish people. But I also see, beyond Jewish suffering, the images of human suffering in general, limitless and universal.

This collection of works by Inna and Michael Rogatchi places our time and our imagination into suspension. Their drawings make us hear the songs sung in the secrecy of the soul of Elie Wiesel, in particular his Ani Maamin: “I believe in full faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he tarry, I shall wait for him every day.”  Elie recounts that this rendition of this essential credo for the Jewish soul was handed down to him in the heart of the Shoah. A nephew of his rabbi of Wiznitz sang it in front of him one Shabbat in 1943. Wiesel always remembered that special version, all his life. 

The Rogatchis’ works from their Shtetl Songs collection are also infused with magnificent songs by Leonard Cohen, and many other chants and other indispensable music, like that of Gustav Mahler, one of the most gifted ancestors of Inna Rogatchi.

“There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” There is no artwork greater than what we hear in the Songs 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  (Actes Sud, 2025)

Paris, June 2024