By Ari Neumann

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Discover the curious case of “Lazar Weissmann,” a supposed Jewish artist who captured scenes of 1930s Galicia in 100s of watercolors, at a new exhibition of the History Museum of Kolomyia opening on May 16 at 14:00, for one month.

Found as far as Canada, to as close as Poland and across Ukraine, Weissmann images both thrill, and repel. His identity has confused collectors, artists, and art fans for nearly two decades: now this exhibition, and the story below, unravel the mystery behind the elusive artist.

For more images and contact with organizers – visit the exhibition Instagram account. 

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I asked no questions when I purchased five Lazar Weissmann watercolors late last year at auction. The yellowed paper from the 1930s, the faded paints, the flowery signature, the lively portraits of Jews – I was sold before I even bid.

I’d never purchased art. It felt too slippery. What if I loved it one day and hated it the next? But I liked what I saw. Especially the word in the bottom-left corner: Kolomyia – the town in today’s south-western Ukraine where my great-great-grandparents were from. For these images, I thought, I can make an exception.

Perhaps sensing an easy mark, the sellers offered me another fifty-five after I won the lot. I was tempted. But the content of the larger collection I was shown raised questions about what, exactly, I was buying. 

Because you can react to a Weissmann in many ways. Joy is one place to start. Joy at seeing 1930s Galicia brought to life: its Jews, Ukrainians, Poles rendered with equal parts affection and mischief. To look at his drawings is to eat a nostalgia sandwich, and to sweat through it. 

But disgust is an equally fair place to start. Between the affectionate school teachers and their pupils; the old Jewish men reading newspapers (in Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew!); the Jewish-owned restaurants and cafes – there are other images. 

There are, for example, images of Jews guzzling beer, Jews drunk in the streets, Jews fallen, inebriated, on the ground. You might first defend the artist: it was 1930s Poland, after all. A rough time. But the ‘Jewish problem’ with alcohol was not one of consumption. And if you look past the booze, you’ll see there are notable schnozes on those Jews. Greedy Jews. Lecherous Jews, caressing the backs of non-Jewish women. Scheming Jews, peeking furtively around street corners. Ugly Jews. And of course, there are one too many Jews with money. Tropes too old, too raw, to ignore. 

That wasn’t going to stop me. I needed these watercolors. If anything, what was going to stop me was that I had no idea who Weissmann was. I’d searched and searched, and found…nothing. No real proof he had ever existed. No mention in the Yad Vashem archives. No Wikipedia page. No mention in Polish vital records. If he had existed, he had left barely a footprint. 

The bits and scraps out there about him had it that Weissmann was a Jewish artist from Kolomyya, active from the 1920s through the early 1940s, killed in the camps: sometimes in Janowska, near Lviv, and sometimes in Auschwitz – at both times in 1942, the latest date with which he signed his work. 

This report, published during a spat in 2019 over the rightful ownership of the images between Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi and a Jewish community center in Moscow, added some color, claiming his work survived to our day because it was “…held in the Federal Republic of Germany [West Germany] until 1974 … saved by the Polish soldier Leopold ‘Poldek’ Pfefferberg, and was later given or sold to Oskar Schindler … the last known owner of these images.” 

And this one [caution, link leads to a .ru domain] furthered that story, implying tongue-in-cheek that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy was ready to back Kolomoyskyi’s efforts to “repatriate” the collection in return for political support.

Good stories. Maybe too good. The involvement of Schindler made me uneasy. And just as I was ready to give myself license to ignore the alarm bells in my head, Facebook page Jews of old Kolomyia and environs confirmed my fears, hours before I’d agreed to meet the sellers and hand over a not insubstantial wad of cash for the remaining watercolors. The page administrator told me: 

” . . . these are the works of a Kolomyian artist from the 1990s and 2000s . . . [Volodymyr Mykhalchuk], a collector of sorts. He’d visit elderly residents of Kolomyia [to collect antiques]. Once in an attic he found a stack of old paper, dating back to the 1930s, on which he drew scenes from pre-Soviet Kolomyya, especially on Jewish themes. He signed them in Latin (sic) script as Kołomyja [ed. in the Polish spelling], added a year, and left his signature. A curious sort of compilation. And one that has duped many. He passed some years ago.”

Duped many indeed – including, evidently, myself. Mykhalchuk’s “Weissmanns” have gone for hundreds online, with auction houses, estate sales, even respected artists mistaking [caution, link leads to a .ru domain] them for 1930s work. I’ve heard museum curators refer to his watercolors as “the Weissmann collection.”

Not entirely sold that Weissmann was a fiction – indeed hopeful that he wasn’t – I pushed for more details from Jews of old Kolomyia:

“Mr. Neumann! I’m no expert, and I don’t have the time to be one. If you want to get to the bottom of this detective story, go to Kolomyia — you’ll learn everything there.”

 Only I’d just been to Kolomyia, a few months earlier, retracing my roots. But old ruined cemeteries, the remains of old synagogues, and even shiny-bright restored ones, can only tell you so much. I wasn’t so sure I was up for another search for the departed. And though Kolomyia is not large (population 60,000), the Facebook searches and phone calls I made as I considered a return trip had not left me optimistic.

Shows what I know about small-town life.

“Mykhalchuk? Worried about finding him? Every dog knew him,” told me Volodymyr Havrilenko, owner of a souvenir and collector’s shop in downtown Kolomyia. Havrilenko and his shop were one of the first stops on a whirlwind mini-tour of Kolomyia’s art and cultural life, graciously provided by local artist Myroslav Yasinskyi (an incredible artist in his own right, you can find his work on his Facebook page).

“Volodya used to come in here, trading his pictures. I took what I liked, left what I didn’t. Some I kept, some I sold. He sold them really for pennies. I think he did it more for the fun, for the inventiveness, rather than for the money,” Havrilenko said, estimating Mykhalchuk drew more than 1,000 “Weissmann” images, of varying quality and thematic content, now scattered across the world from Canada to Poland. At one point, Mykhalchuk’s “Weissmanns” nearly flooded Lviv’s antique and collectors shops.

I spent that week in Kolomyia talking to everyone and anyone who’d known Mykhalchuk. I learned much about him as a man. Something of a jack-of-all (artistic) trades: an artist in the graphic sense, but also a man of the theatre, an amateur historian, an in-demand tour guide across Galicia. But about his art, or the existence of a real Weissmann, I could unearth little. Most of his friends and family hadn’t asked him many questions. Where the images had come from, what they were inspired by, nobody knew, and few cared: people liked what he drew, and that was enough. Some suggested he had copied from or traced originals – “how else could he have known so much about the town at the time?”

So when I left Kolomyia a week later, I did so with mixed feelings. I’d uncovered a secret, but only half of one. The existence of a real Weissmann was looking dubious. And the idea that a non-Jewish artist, however talented, was drawing and selling these images, albeit for a dime, well, that left me uneasy – again.

I sat on the story before meeting his widow, Oksana, a month later in a town outside of Łódź to try and find out more. A spirited woman, and excited to talk about her husband on her birthday – “Volodya sent you to me today, what a gift that I can talk about him with somebody who cares!” – she filled in some gaps in Volodymyr’s biography. 

He was, she told me, a creative from the start, teaching himself to read at five, drawing movie posters for the local cinema, sketching for army friends, even trying his hand at religious iconography. He read voraciously, and worked at the local history museum, soaking up images of prewar Kolomyia. His passion for drawing city scenes, especially Jewish ones, began in the early 2000s in Łódź, where he came across images of Jews in prewar journals while working in a small optician’s shop – the “original Weissmanns.”

Inspired by their style, he began drawing his own “Weissmanns.” His employer asked him to draw more as gifts for friends. One evening, Oksana recalled, Mykhalchuk returned home with his boss in tow, the boss telling her: “He draws so well. Maybe he shouldn’t be sitting in that little shop? Let him stay at home – let him draw.”

The couple returned to Kolomyia in the early 2000s. Mykhalchuk set up a small corner studio on the first floor of their apartment and got to work. “He could crank one out in about an hour, sometimes two. A steady stream of people came in and out of the house, placing orders for various scenes of prewar Kolomyia. And he took so little for his work. Something I never understood. But I never asked him more than what he told me – it wasn’t my business,” Oksana said. 

But why, I asked, the enduring interest in Jews? I shared the conjecture I’d heard from other townsfolk: that Mykhalchuk, who was adopted, was himself probably ethnically Jewish: that his fixation on Jewish life was probably personal. There were several variations on the same theme. One went: “interethnic marriage wasn’t so common then … so to avoid people talking, she [his mother] may have left him at an orphanage.” Other times the reasoning was less generous: “. . . only some wayward Jew could have gotten her [his mother] pregnant” – a reference, by the way, which is not entirely absent in Mykhalchuk’s art. Beyond his having been an orphan, further “proof” of his Jewishness was his gait – “he even walked like a Jew,” some said. 

Oksana laughed off all the gossip. “My mother also used to say that about him – ‘he’s definitely a Jew,’ she’d say, observing him from afar,” she recalled. “What can I tell you. People like to talk. But no, he was not Jewish. Though he did suffer terribly, not knowing who his mother was. He watched that show ‘Wait for Me’ [ed. reality/talk-show about connecting lost relatives and loved-ones] religiously, hoping someone would reach out and find him. I used to say, ‘Mykhalchuk! Turn that nonsense off!’ But I don’t think he drew Jews because he imagined his parents were Jewish. It was an interest, one that he lived and breathed. He understood how integral Jews had been to Kolomyia, to Galicia . . . but also, you see, it sold.”

I’d heard that line, “it sold,” a few times. Often as a dismissal of Mykhalchuk’s art: “there’s been Jewish kitsch like this in Eastern Europe for decades. Good money in it.” I was even recently shoo’ed out of a collector’s shop in Lviv just for asking if the proprietor had ever seen Mykhalchuk’s drawings: “Don’t try to peddle that shit here,” I was told. “I’ve seen enough of that stuff. Fakes, that’s what they are.” 

I think dismissal of Mykhalchuk’s work as kitsch, as fakes, misses the mark. Kitsch is young things serenading tourists with klezmer ditties as they enjoy fine-, outdoor-, Jewish-style- but non-kosher-dining. Kitsch is Semitic-themed amusement-parks.

Mykhalchuk’s work certainly has elements of kitsch. But it’s also solid content – a studied recreation of interwar Galician Jewry by a deeply compassionate if mischievous artist. People and places that existed; the boycotts; the unique distribution of Jews in the economy, including in alcohol production and sale; the lively Jewish press, and network of schools; the perception of Jews by 1930s Polish society. To me, Mykhalchuk’s images have far more to reveal about Yiddish civilization in Poland and Ukraine than Kazimierz. So, let it sell.

Mykhalchuk passed away, still young, in 2016. Unfortunately he can’t speak for his own work, nor to his intentions. He left no record to wrap up the loose ends of this story. I’ve searched for the originals in Łódź, for the Polish shopkeeper, for records of Weissmann, and I have come up empty-handed. We may never know if Weissmann ever existed. 

What we do know is that Mykhalchuk left behind an incredible body of work, reimagining interwar Galicia and Kolomyia. We also know, from the words of his widow Oksana, that he would have been overjoyed that his work is getting attention. At the tail-end of his illness, she said, he “went on and on” about a book, soon to be published, dedicated to the 775th anniversary of Kolomyia’s first written mention – where his images would feature prominently, publicly for the first time. “He just wouldn’t shut up about it,” Oksana told me. “I said to him, ‘Mykhalchuk, don’t you have other things to worry about?’ That book obsessed him. Because, he said, people would finally value his work – and for more than a few kopecks.”

He didn’t make it to the publication of the book, passing away just less than a week before. But I hope that many will make it to the exhibition of his work. Not just because the images are interesting and the graphics fun – but because these images talk, and they have a lot to say: about history, Ukraine, Jews, our shared heritage, anti-Semitism, and the reality that today’s Ukraine is a tolerant, multiethnic, multicultural state, important at a time when Russia tries relentlessly to convince the world that the country is deeply fascist.

That’s not to say there aren’t complicated, nuanced moments in today’s Jewish-Ukrainian relations, in the same way that not all Mykhalchuk’s works are gushing eulogies to those inhabitants of a world now gone. Some of Mykhalchuk’s images of Jews are ugly, yes, but maybe he wasn’t drawing Jews in the 1930s – maybe he was drawing the 1930s as it would have drawn Jews? Maybe edgy, maybe unpleasant, but not, I think, anti-Semitic.

I remember discussing my plans for the exhibition with a local Kolomyian some months back. I was told, “We might say that we love Jews. And we do. But here you are, a Jew, an American Jew, in Kolomyia, doing Jewish things in Kolomyia. Showing images of Jews that used to live in Kolomyia. I’d encourage you to think about the message that sends, and what images you want to show. People want to see themselves, too – not just the Jews.” I agreed this was important, and walked away from that conversation feeling I’d had a very reasonable discussion with a very reasonable person. I also walked away feeling that I had unwittingly played the part of the Good Jew – the Jew ever aware of his surroundings, aware of the implications, the things people might say, the situation. Was this exchange an example of anti-Semitism? No. Was it an uncomfortable reminder of how sticky history can be? Yes.

Biography is not a straight-forward process, nor is art. The number of conflicting accounts I heard of Mykhalchuk outweighs the number of hard facts I now know about him. But one fact stands: he was a singular human being, whose uniqueness has only muddied the waters of trying to understand his intentions and inspiration. This is not to say that Mykhalchuk is a figure shrouded in mystery. He, like all people, was just complicated.

So too is the history of this episode in Ukrainian history that he tried to capture. It is textured, it is nuanced. It is colorful, and it is dark. But the fact that 125 years after my ancestors first left Kolomyia, I can go back and pull together an exhibition portraying Jewish life in the town, and be welcomed and supported in doing so, says volumes about the Ukraine of today – a country willing to listen when the past speaks, and brave enough to let those voices be heard.

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Special thanks to project partners:

Anna Burban, director of Kolomyia Nashe Misto
The Museum of the History of the City of Kolomyia
Department of Culture of Kolomyia