Return to Vilna ― In the Art of Samuel Bak

The journey home has been a serious motif in literature since ancient times, and Samuel Bak's most recent series of paintings on this theme, Return to Vilna, provides us with two paradoxical truths. Samuel Bak has escaped the nightmare of history that consumed his family and the rest of Vilna Jewry during World War II - and he has not. His work invites us to share his twin legacy, and to acknowledge its parallels - different in origin and extent, but equally brutal - in the place names we have grown so familiar with from the register of subsequent atrocities: Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur and many others. Bak has restored to our nostalgia for the past a more urgent if less gratifying incentive: we return to it in pain, whether we name it Vilna or any of the other sites of slaughter that solicit our visit, in memory and imagination. A major source of impact in Bak's artistic universe emerges from his uncanny talent for investing shattered objects and violated sites with a vitality to offset the overwhelming sense of human loss caused by the destruction of European Jewry. His images assume an existence of their own, enacting rituals of remembrance even as they declare their evanescent state. They are fugitive gestures of commemoration captured on canvas and hence endowed with a permanence through art that is not inherent in their natural substance. The issue of finding a systematic stance to commemorate this unspeakable crime remains a vexing one for anyone involved in the field of Holocaust literature or art. Samuel Bak has found an original response to this dilemma.

Lawrence L. Langer is Professor of English Emeritus at Simmons College.