Obj. ID: 34911
Modern Jewish Art Illustration for Ch. N. Bialik's story Ne'achorey haGader (Behind the Fence), Barlinek (Berlinek), 1923
The following description was written by the researcher Alec Mishory.
Bialik's story tells of the forbidden love between a young Talmud School student and a gentile young girl. It ends with a description of Marianka, the young maiden, holding a baby, while peeping through a hole in a fence, watching her lover and father of her child, talking to his new Jewish bride. Budko's print is the epitome of freedom he enjoyed as an early interpreter of Bialik's works. He switched our role as readers with that of the story's heroine: we seem to be the ones who peep through a crack in the fence, watching Marianka – and not the other way round. We see her in her yard, through a rectangular peeping hole (a).
The illustration for Bialik's story that appears in the Jubilee Edition is a cropped segment of Budko's original print. The cropped illustration (b) focuses our attention on Marianka, her baby and her dog Shkuripin. Nothing is left of her hand holding the baby as depicted in the original woodcut but a white patch that hardly connotes a hand. The small illustration does not convey any aspect of the relation that physically binds the young mother and her son, an aspect that is quite clear in the original (a). The baby acts here as a mediating figure; his gaze is directed towards the left but he also meets ours.
It is obvious that Budko used the visual convention of depicting the baby Jesus in the arms of his mother Mary as a model for Marianka's image. It would then be probable to assume that the resemblance to a Christian motif upset Bialik or the producer, or any other person who decided to crop the original print. However, even in the cropped version, the artist succeeded in reversing the story's end by making us, spectators, peep at the heroine's tragic and unfair situation.