Through Fire and Water- Yosl Bergner

Through Fire and Water:

Yosl Bergner's latest paintings

Dr. Doron Lurie

"Aliens have landed from Mars and have recently been spotted around Gordon Street in Tel Aviv!"

This is how Orson Welles, with his deep, dramatic voice, would have opened a contemporary version of "War of the Worlds,"  the famous radio play broadcast on CBS radio in the USA on October 30, 1938, the night before Halloween. The skit, based on H.G. Wells' play of the same name, is now remembered as "The Invasion from Mars." It was designed as news flashes interrupting a live event in the middle of a musical program, with Orson Welles in the part of the newscaster, doing it so convincingly that numerous citizens in New York and New Jersey panicked. People called for a national emergency to fight off the Martians, while others gathered in mass prayer groups, and some even tried to commit suicide.

No need to worry. Yosl Bergner's "aliens" are none other than fire hydrants, the kind standing on our city sidewalks, ready for a crisis. Yosl relates: "There I was, innocently walking along, and these hydrants were always looking at me. They have heads and even arms. It's interesting, after all, everyone sees these same hydrants, but I assume that I'm the only one for whom they transform into creatures that are truly human, even if a bit strange. After all, they are striped in red and white." Armed with this insight, I take another look around his small, crowded studio, located in an old building on Tel Aviv's Bilu Street. I realize that there's no one like Yosl to breathe life even into inanimate metal plumbing fixtures. Suddenly, I feel the pictures staring at me, even though some of the images are cyclops, with a single eye in the forehead. Others look more like a submarine periscope, observing and surveying the area. Now, I also began to discover entire "families" of these creatures – a hydrant, a hydrantess, with a hydrant-junior between them. Some look as if they are laughing, some are crying and others (for some reason) look a bit drunk. I realized I was in trouble. In another painting, I saw three hydrants which I immediately associated to the Christian art tradition of the three crosses on which Jesus and the two thieves were crucified at the same time. In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh described his painting of a pair of shoes not as a "still life" but as a "portrait of shoes." And in the present case, I had no doubt that these are "portraits" of fire hydrants.

Yosl continues: "I began to be interested in these hydrants way before the big forest fire in the Carmel, the fire made it more obvious that we needed this type of emergency equipment everywhere. I began to paint them, and then I had a little accident. One day, while alone in the studio, I fell on the floor. I hurt my thigh, but it was nothing compared to being crushed underneath all of the canvases of the hydrant paintings, which surrounded me and had collapsed onto me. I was deflated and flattened like one of my plungers from my previous paintings, and I'm sure it looked just as surrealistic. I wondered whom I could call for help. The phone was right near me, but I knew that my wife Audrey wasn't home. I realized I didn't remember even one phone number, which is when I began to internalize the fact that the circumstances in which I found myself right now – helpless, on the floor, buried under my paintings unable to call for help – is actually a pretty idiotic situation…"

As we know, fire and water are polar opposites, and find it difficult to coexist. They are also two of the four basic elements of Nature according to the philosophers of ancient Greece (along with earth and air). This theory, developed by Empedocles in the 5^th Century BCE and later adopted by Aristotle, states that all materials in the world are created from these four elements. Kabbalah has also adopted this and even found parallels between the four elements, the four directions, and the four archangels (Raphael, Uriel, Michael and Gabriel).

The concept of  "fire and water" also bears many connotations in Judaism as well as  in general. Many couples make wedding vows to stick together "in sickness and health, through fire and water," through any situation, good or bad. According to legend, medieval Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, Germany, who lived in the late 10^th century or early 11^th century, murmured the Unetanneh Tokef prayer during his dying moments. He composed the prayer, whose prime association is with the High Holiday liturgy, after being cruelly tortured and having his limbs cut off by the local bishop. 

Let us now relate the power of the sacredness of this day,

for it is awesome and terrible,

The day Your Kingship will be exalted,

Your throne, founded firmly with loving-kindness,

where You shall sit upon in truth

On New Year people's fates are written down

And on Yom Kippur they are sealed

How many shall pass away and how many shall be born

Who shall live and who shall die,

who with a full life span, and who before his time,

Who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by a wild animal,
Who by hunger and who by thirst, who in an earthquake and

who by plague, who by suffocation and who by stoning… 

Contemporary singer/poet Leonard Cohen, one of the "five great Jews" of rock, pop and blues of the late 20^th century (along with with Robert Zimmerman a.k.a. Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond and Lou Reed) turned Unetanneh Tokef into his song "Who by Fire". Written after the Yom Kippur war, it argues about fatality of life vs. death, and the different forms of death awaiting us, and in general – the fate of humanity.

                And who by fire, who by water,

Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
Who in your merry, merry month of May,
Who by very slow decay,
And who shall I say is calling?

There is actually something apocalyptic about the motif of fire hydrants dispersed on our streets, since their very existence and destiny is an expectation of catastrophe, perhaps the fire of Judgment Day. Some of Yosl Bergner's "fire hydrant paintings" feature ideal pastoral azure skies, while in others the skies are dramatic blood-red. Is this about a concrete fire? Or perhaps it reminds us of the Yiddish song S'brent (Our Shtetl is Burning) written in 1938 by Jewish Polish poet Mordechai Gebirtig following the Przytyk pogrom. "It burns, my brethren, it's burning. Woe to our little village, poor thing, it's burning…"

In general, we may say that in his current series, Yosl is corresponding with his own past symbols and projects: the winged angel holding an apple in his bosom is taken from Abba Kovner's book, "The Little Angel Michael," which Bergner illustrated in the 1950s. Other motifs are reminiscent of his illustrations to S.Y. Agnon's book "Pisces." The famous tearful maidens looking out of windows reappear from his earlier works, and other paintings feature black ravens flying around, or birds à la Hitchcock terrorizing the hydrants. (After all, the fire hydrants in the paintings are designated for crisis and for meeting any possible disaster, and Yosl himself stated, "Birds in general, and ravens in particular, as far back as I can remember, have always seemed to me to be enemies").

Yosl Bergner is the last representative of our "Old Masters" generation  Most of his friends who drank at Cassit with him are no longer with us. Who among us does not long for the gradually-vanished cultural scene that comprised the best of his friends – personalities such as Nissim Aloni, Yossi Banai, and many other greats…

My talks with Yosl are a unique experience, even perhaps a bit surrealistic. When Yosl attempts to produce a complex yet coherent sentence (you must know that a usual sentence by Yosl begins in Hebrew, switches to Yiddish and ends in English) to try and explain what he wanted to express in these paintings, his thoughts wander into other realms completely without warning. After about the fourth word he stops and asks me, "Did I ever tell you about my uncle, who was a painter, and shot himself?" I say yes, then he resumes, telling me about the fire hydrants for about 10 seconds, then asks me, "Did I ever tell you about the uncle whose pornographic photos I stole when I was a teenager"? I answer yes, and five seconds later he asks me if I saw Carmela (Rubin) or Danny (Kerman) recently. I answer yes, and then Yosl remembers, without any connection to the previous topic, how excited he was at his first look at the Velasquez paintings in a museum in Vienna more than 70 years ago, from which he jumps to speaking about German painter Max Doerner (author of a book he wrote in the 1920s in Germany, which both of us still value to this day, on the techniques of all of the great painters). From there he went to a nostalgic story (off the record!) about the prostitutes of Warsaw, well remembered from his childhood, and when he finally saw the desperate look in my eyes, he concluded with, "Oh well, just write already whatever you want about my hydrants."