The Heart of the City That Once Was

This cityscape by Aniela Cukier (Cukierówna) has enchanted me with its melancholy and colour palette. However, the deciding factor for choosing this work was its incredible affinity with the poem The Evening Walk by Deborah (Dvoyre) Vogel. My initial idea was to write a composition around the Yiddish poet’s piece which would correspond with the item from the JHI collection I have chosen to discuss. Already during its first reading, I saw Vogel’s poem as almost an ekphrasis of Cukierówna’s linocut.

I am fascinated by both the similarities – an attempt to reflect the metaphysics of the urban landscape, the melancholy of late autumn or early spring, the selection of colours: greys, pinks, reds – and the differences between the two works. The artist’s print depicts Warsaw in 1933, while the poet most likely describes Lviv, where she spent most of her adult life and tragically died in the ghetto. Cukierówna’s Warsaw is marred by a piercing void, while Vogel’s Lviv is filled with the light of sunset and a “swarm of footsteps” – but “the skies’ pink hue” and the “people immersed in love” are overpowered by the marching “army squares”. In this context, Cukierówna’s print is a landscape after the battle between the rosy sunset and the greys and muted greens of an advancing metallic apocalypse, with its “sad echoes waning on the brick walls and the pale pink chimneys of the convent”. 

Vogel’s work gains shocking relevance in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the bombing of Lviv. 

In my musical interpretation of the poem, I wanted to give tribute to Vogel’s modernist fascinations, her experiments with form, her Cubist metaphors. This is why my composition is minimalist, formalist, repetitive, and trans-like. The unrelenting rhythm of marching soldiers, anxiety and fear. On the other hand, I wanted to capture both the grey melancholy and the pink softness of the imagery in both pieces of art; I wanted to lead the listener through the emotional winding roads of Lviv–Warsaw on the brink of war… 

Debora Vogel 

The Evening Walk 

The skies’ pink hue 
has subsided 
under their steps 
grown into the pavements, 
mixed with the dust from the asphalt: 
they have entered greyness. 

A lonely street, 
separated from the sapphire sky: 
between them a purple cloud 
and a red brick wall. 
The street – a ribbon in grey stone, 
in it a swarm of footsteps. 

People immersed in love 
like in tall grass or bitter hay. 

Firm army squares are marching 
through the street from a pink postcard, 
the skies’ pink hue is subsiding 
before the steady metallic steps. 

A tough fortune awaits them: 
long marches among marshes, 
bare terrain where wild roses grow 
roses with a papery, pale pink complexion.   

They will have 
gashing bellies and lips, 
and legs stuck in muted green boots, 
like those from a van Gogh painting.   

An evening like Bach’s tune 
lost in greyness, 
lonely and grey like a pearl, 
futile like a teardrop and a sigh.   

Soldiers deep in thought, 
soldiers in watery green shoes; 
toy soldiers from pink postcards – 
we need you.   

The pink hues are subsiding before you 
in a lonely street 
with a red wall on one side 
and a swarm of steps. 

 D. Vogel, Wieczorny spacer, w: Moja dzika koza. Antologia poetek jidysz, ed. K. Szymaniak, J. Lisek, B. Szwarcman-Czarnota, transl. Z. Szeps, Kraków–Budapest–Syracuse 2019.

In our digital repository, the object can be viewed in the highest quality.

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Supported by Norway and EEA Grants from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway and the national budget #EEAGrants #Funduszenorweskie #EOG #EEANorwayGrants