Artist Biography
Simon (Szmaja) Karczmar, my father, was born in Warsaw, Poland, on November 1, 1903. At the age of five, his parents took him to spend a vacation with his grandfather in Juvenishki, a shtetl near Vilnius. There, he discovered the hatas (small wooden houses), the water carrier, Tevie the milkman, and horses, which he loved to ride without a saddle and especially to draw.
Later, he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He painted nature and portraits. To pay for his studies, he regularly went to Russia to buy furs for a cousin who was a furrier and developed a great deal of experience as a furrier.
In 1929, he left for Paris to continue his painting practice. There he met a young Polish woman, Nadia (Nechuma) at French evening classes, and married her in 1931. To support the family, Simon worked as a fur matcher. Soon, Nadia opened a perfume shop in Les Lilas, in the Paris suburbs.
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When the Second World War broke out and the situation became unbearable for the Jews in Paris, the family took refuge in 1942 in Nice, which was still for some time a zone not occupied by the Germans. When the situation worsened, her child was hidden with cousins in the countryside, while they took refuge with other members of the family in a mountain village. They were denounced, and her father-in-law was murdered by a French militiaman collaborating with the Germans. Nadia was deported to Auschwitz. Simon joined the resistance in the maquis.
In 1945, at the end of the war, Nadia returned from deportation and found her shop in Les Lilas. In 1951, the family decided to emigrate to Israel where Simon joined forces with his brother-in-law in a small metalworking factory. Business soon went very badly and he had to liquidate everything. At the invitation of a friend, the family went to Montreal, Canada in 1955, where Simon was able to practice fur assortment.
In 1959, he was struck by an allergy that affected his eyes and had to stop working. Seeing that he was depressed, Nadia bought him three canvases, brushes and tubes of paint and reminded him that when she knew him, he was a painter. At that time, Simon was reading the works of Sholem Aleikhem and quite spontaneously, he began to paint his memories of the Shtetl in a naive way, regaining his childish gaze.
Encouraged by the reception of his new works, he painted until he had collected enough paintings to organize an exhibition at the WMHA in Montreal. Then, with Nadia, he accompanied his son in 1960 to Mexico City where he was organizing the Mexican Museum of Film on Art. He had a second exhibition at the Centro Deportivo and was then invited to exhibit in two other Mexican galleries.
Simon painted and Nadia organized exhibitions for ten years throughout the United States and Canada. In 1962, they returned to Israel where Simon took a studio in Safed and became a member of the artists' colony. For a long time, they alternated between Safed in the summer and New York in the winter. Having thus fulfilled his dream of being a painter for the last 22 years of his life, Simon died in 1982, at the age of 79. He is buried in the cemetery of Safed, where Nadia will also be buried in 2009.
Simon Karczmar tirelessly recounted the daily life of the Shtetl: lovers, weddings, births, festivals, musicians, dancers, markets, prayers to the moon and various characters, all this universe that he drew and painted with love. Then he found a new source of inspiration in Safed, his second shtetl.
Simon Karczmar's works reflect a deep nostalgia for life in the Shtetl, a vanished world that he immortalized through his paintings, and later revisited through the artistic community of Safed.
