Oldal 506 [506]
OCR
When Ytzig Met Shtrul: On Schmoozing and Jewish Conspiracy in Romanian Árt image, forcing it to express an alternate content. Ihe unheard dialogue demands an exposure; it is here where the composition, by means of real or only seeming facial expressions, gestures, ambient elements, lights, and colors, directs to a fair level of perception. The full clarity of the message remains elusive, the visual pantomime being able only to suggest the general interest of the speakers. Ihe message becomes explicit only with the use of captions, especially in the case of the press cartoons, and with the text assuming a function of relay to the image. Grouping, with its inherent dialogue, verbalized or simply inferential, was paradoxically the effect of a social exclusion or differentiation. The Jews were not the only ethnic groups represented on a regular basis in the official art; the Gypsies and the Turks (especially in the interwar period) were subject to collective representations, too. However, the last ones were organized in group portraits and only rarely in interactive compositions. Their dialogue was either absent or settled between the group and the viewer. Did not they talk to their own kind? Of course they did, but their dialogue was insufficiently intriguing and socially irrelevant, as they lived in distant communities. But the Jews never seem to simply pose in groups; even when they are actually doing it, they regularly simulate a chance encounter or an organized meeting, setting upon a discussion. Their behavioral characteristics completed a general and natural profile, a desirable step in the artist’s documentation, but might have also solidified a social prejudice, no matter the artist’s intentions. The artistic motif of the Jewish group was a formal encasement for stereotypical projections. The inner connection, a perfectly normal conduct for any community, was an identifying and discriminatory marker for the Jews. The behind-closed-doors “Zionist meetings,” literary clubs, and synagogue gatherings were complemented by the more visible postliturgical chatting, the Jew-to-Jew brokerage, the ad hoc street gatherings between merchants. All these, and many other formal and informal gatherings, consolidated, in the Romanian conscience, an ill-intentioned solidarity and allowed for the perception of the Jewish get-together as dangerous. For the anti-Semite artist and viewer, the Jewish socializing was a crime. Admittedly, the European conscience outlined a stereotype of the Jewish conspirator, filling out the criminal portrait of the cunning, money-thirsty Jew. In arts, the Jewish evilness could be outlined individually, by means of physiognomic bearings and personal gestures. However, taking a more strict interest in his conspirative nature meant more than unveiling an individual, but rather a human interaction. This was the way for the secret plot to be uncovered. The Jewish group could also be understood as a multiplication of a singular personality, offering different instances of a singular Other. Thus, the artist was given the permission to discover the most reclusive intimacy and to translate an abstract soliloquy into a lucid dialogue. The Jewish compositional group answered to a faultfinding mythology. All their grand criminal deeds, either magical-ritual, such as the deicide or the infan503
