In 1935 ICOR embarked on what was perhaps its most ambitious project: acquiring a collection of contemporary art that would be used to start a museum in Birobidzhan. One hundred and twenty American artists–including William Gropper, Max Weber, Jose Clemente Orozco, and many of the Chicagoans who two years later contributed to “A Gift to Biro-Bidjan”–donated more than 200 oil paintings, watercolors, sculptures, prints, and drawings to this gesture of cultural solidarity. The ICOR art committee proudly announced that the works would form “one of the best and most complete collections of American art to be found anywhere outside the United States.” The collection was displayed in New York City and Boston, and in late 1936 it was shipped to Russia, where it was exhibited in Leningrad and Moscow. Then it vanished.
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For the past few years Efrem Ostrowsky has been trying to track down one piece of the collection. Now retired and living in Highland Park with his wife, Thelma, he grew up on the southwest side, where his father, Sam, had a small studio behind the family’s house on Central Park Avenue. Sam, who was born in Ukraine in 1885 and trained at the Kiev Conservatory of Art, came to the United States in 1903 to be an artist. He got a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute, married Anna Israelson, a Lithuanian-born schoolteacher, and studied for a time at the Academie Julian in Paris, before World War I forced them to return to the States. In 1916 he began to design stage sets for the Yiddish theater, first in Chicago and Milwaukee, then as the principal designer for Maurice Schwartz’s Jewish Art Theater in New York, a leader during the golden age of Yiddish theater. (Forty of his oil and watercolor stage designs were exhibited at the Spertus Museum in 1987.)
In 1935 Sam was teaching art at the Jewish People’s Institute on Douglas Boulevard when he and his wife met a woman involved with the Chicago chapter of ICOR, who helped persuade him to donate one of his works to the Birobidzhan collection. “It was,” says Efrem, “something to be done for the cause.”
After the exhibit ended he began making inquiries about the painting, almost all of which led to dead ends. Last March, for instance, he got in touch with Stephen Feinstein, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, who forwarded a color copy of the photo to a colleague in Moscow. They still haven’t had a reply.
