Abyssinian House, later the Ethiopian Consulate Building, built between 1925 and 1928, one of a number of structures in the northwest of Jerusalem that are associated with the Ethiopian community.
Front of Abyssinian House on Ha-Neviim Street, Jerusalem. The Renaissance-style Italian Hospital building can be seen just beyond it, on the right. G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress
The devoutly religious Empress Zauditu of Ethiopia (1876–1930), first woman to head an internationally recognized nation in Africa, had Abyssinian House built not far from the Kidane Mehret Church. Brilliantly colored mosaics on the façade depict the symbol of the royal family, a crowned lion carrying a cross-topped flagstaff. The panel includes the motto , “The Lion of Judah is victorious,” written in Ge’ez. The building had been intended to serve as her residence when visiting Jerusalem, but she did not live to use it. Instead, the ground floor became the Ethiopian consulate and the two upper floors were rented out as apartments with the proceeds to benefit the Ethiopian monastery that had long been present in the city. An Ethiopian monarch did finally occupy the premises in 1936, after Italy seized Ethiopia and the Haile Selassie spent six months Jerusalem on his way to exile in London. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Ethiopia severed ties with Israel and the building’s a diplomatic function ceased.
At some point between his arrival in Jerusalem and moving into 8 KKL Street in Rehavia, Ismar David lived in Abyssinian House. His landlord or host was a Mr. Domowitz.1Summary of a meeting between Nahum Tishbi, Director of the Department of Trade and Industry with the Wolpert family, March 17, 1938. Central Zionist Archives S8\2292\1.
Susanne Suba, 1913–2012, watercolorist and illustrator.
A holiday card from Susanne Suba.
At the age of three, Susanne Suba begged for painting lessons from the head draughtsman in her father’s architectural studio. Rebuffed, she “turned to the medium of pencil on penny post-cards, recording our life in Budapest…”1Suba, Susanne, PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 4, No. 10: December-January 1938-1939. In her youthful autobiography,2A collection of Suba’s childhood work is preserved in the Winterthur Library, Winterthur Museum, Delaware. she recorded her life from birth until her arrival in New York at the age of six with her American-born mother, pianist May Edwards Suba. Her father, Miklos (1880–1944), who joined them in Brooklyn a few years later, gave up architecture and became a well-known Precisionist painter.
After studying at Pratt (and decorating the walls of a corset shop, which she didn’t include in her professional portfolio),3 Suba, Susanne, PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 4, No. 10: December-January 1938-1939. Susanne Suba began her career in earnest, with four illustrations for The Colophon. Her first assignment as a book illustrator, Life Without Principle by Henry David Thoreau, landed in AIGA’s Fifty Best Books of the Year in 1937. Many, many books followed, some by her then husband Russell McCracken. She designed book jackets, as well, and did numerous spot drawings, one cartoon and five covers for the New Yorker between 1939 and 1963.4 Maslin, Michael, The New Yorker Cartoonists N-Z The Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum have shown her work.
The Composing Room’s PM-AD Gallery exhibited her drawings in 1940, four years after Hortense Mendel started there. Suba, with her husband, playwright (most famously of Dark Victory) Bertram Bloch, exchanged seasonal greetings cards with Ismar and Dorothy David. Somewhere along the line, Suba tried her hand at ceramics.
In late 1957, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society announced their international assembly in New York City the following year. Jehovah’s Witnesses had held conventions at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in 1950 and 1953, each time packing the stadium. In 1953, overflow crowds had to occupy tents in surrounding parking lots. So, with evident excitement, the organizers revealed that the 1958 event would take place simultaneously at the “excellent facilities of both Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, situated just four city blocks apart. … From any part of the world, all are welcome to attend; and we already know that thousands are coming from the ends of the earth.” Duplicate programs were arranged so that speakers in the morning session in one arena would appear in the afternoon session of the other and vice versa. When repetition was not possible, a direct wire carried audio from Yankee Stadium to the Polo Grounds.”1 The Watchtower, December 17, 1957. Over 250,000 people attended the twin locations.
Today, 1001 Jerome Avenue, an art deco building designed by Sugarman & Berger in 1937, faces gate 2 of the new Yankee Stadium (opened in 2009). When Ismar David and Hortense Mendel lived there, the House that Ruth Built was a short walk down the street. The monumental influx of people for the Divine Will International Assembly from July 27–August 3, 1958 would have been impossible to overlook, even for a neighborhood used to hoards of baseball fans. The festivities proved irresistible for (probably) Hortense and her camera.
Josefine Pola Weinbach Stout, 1902–1984, interior and textile designer.
Rex Todhunter Stout, 1886–1975, “banker, barker, bookworm, bookkeeper, yeoman on the Presidential yacht Mayflower, boss of 3,000 writers of propaganda in World War II, gentleman farmer and dirt farmer, big businessman, cigar salesman, pueblo guide, hotel manager, architect, cabinet maker, pulp and slick magazine writer, propagandist for world government, crow trainer, jumping‐pig trainer, mammoth-pumpkin grower, conversationalist, politician, orator, potted‐plant wizard, gastronome, musical amateur, president of the Author’s Guild, usher, ostler and pamphleteer,”1Johnston, Alva, Alias Nero Wolfe – II, The New Yorker, July 23, 1949, p.30. novelist and creator of detective Nero Wolfe.
Rex and Pola Stout preparing barbequed chicken at their home. Photos by Hortense Mendel
Rex Stout’s career was as prodigious as the girth of his most famous creation. A precocious child, he read the bible (twice!) before the age of four. At age 13, he won the Kansas spelling bee championship and entered Topeka High School, where he captained the debate team and was senior class poet.2 Rex Stout, Map of Kansas Literature, He skipped college and served in the navy for two years. Then he tried various cities around the country and assorted occupations, including writing stories for pulp magazines, until 1916, when he both married and devised the Education Thrift Service, a savings program for school children. Within a decade, royalties made him financially independent, allowing him to write in earnest and travel to Europe. His first novel (that had not been initially released in serial form) was How Like A God, published by Vanguard Press, which he had co-founded in 1926 to re-issue left wing classics and publish new works that could not get released elsewhere. The Great Depression quashed his fortune and he turned to mystery writing to earn a living. Nero Wolfe made his first appearance in 1934 and his last in 1975, however literature took a back seat during the Second World War, when Stout threw himself into support for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the war effort. As president of the Author’s League, he took a strong stance against McCarthyism.
In late 1931, while Stout was building his self-designed modernist home, High Meadow, on the Brewster, New York-Danbury, Connecticut boarder, he met Pola Weinbach Hoffmann, who ran an interior design business with her husband Wolfgang. A year later, Stout and Weinbach Hoffmann married in a civil ceremony at High Meadow.
Born in Stryj, then Austria-Hungary, Pola Weinbach began constructing fashions for her dolls as a child. Despite the objections of her parents, she left university in Lemberg to study at the Vienna’s Kunstgewerbe Schule. During her four years there, the Wiener Werkstätte accepted many of her designs. She lived in Paris and then Berlin before marrying the son of her former teacher in Vienna and immigrating to New York.
After her divorce from Wolfgang Hoffmann, Stout returned to textile design, helping to pioneer the revival of weaving in the 1930s. She collaborated with leading fashion houses and created collections for textile companies in Great Britain. In 1940, she headed an eponymous division of Botany Worsted Mills. Stout enjoyed the opportunity to design for a wider segment of society: “I like to make American fabrics for American women.”3 Pope, Virginia, Blends Color Harmonies Into Fine Garment Fabrics, New York Times, March 17, 1940. She used color theory to design fabrics that could be used in combination with each other and manufactured her fabrics for beauty and durability. In 1946, she formed an independent company, Pola Stout Designs/Pola Stout Colors, with its own textile mill in Philadelphia.
Pola Stout often worked from her second floor studio in the expansive home she shared with her husband and two daughters. “While she is spinning yarns in one wing of their hill-top farmhouse, he is spinning his yarns about Nero Wolfe in another.”4Ibid. Ismar David and Hortense Mendel visited Rex and Pola Stout at High Meadow, sometime during the 1950s.
Born in Mikhailovka, Russia, to religious parents, Shaul Tchernichovsky received nevertheless a wide-ranging education. He learned Hebrew and Russian as a child and at age fourteen was sent to Odessa to further his education. There, he studied German, French, English, Greek and Latin. By the age of 16, he had published his first poem. He failed to get into a Russian University and went to Heidelberg to study medicine. He completed his medical studies in Lausanne in 1905. After a few itinerant years, he practiced medicine in St. Petersburg. He served as an army doctor during World War I, practiced as a doctor in Odessa for several years, moved to Berlin, where he worked as chief editor for the Stybel Publishing House,1Tenenbaum, Samuel, Saul Tchernichovsky: A great Poet of the Hebrew Tradition,The Australian Jewish Chronicle, reprinted from The Jewish Tribune, February 6, 1930, p. 5. and was able to visit the United States and Palestine. During all this, he never stopped writing and publishing his poems and other literary works.
When Tchernichovsky arrived in Palestine in 1931 to edit Mazia’s unfinished The Hebrew Dictionary of Medicine and Natural Sciences, he was already a celebrated poet and translator (into Hebrew) of Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe and other European classic and modern literature. An admirer of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tchernichovsky had translated the American poet’s Hiawatha as well. He lived in Jerusalem for the rest of his life, writing and practicing medicine, standing both inside and outside Jewish literary traditions.
In late 1931, Tchernikovsky, along with Herman Struck and S.A. Van Vriesland, judged the competition for the cover of the Keren Kayemet’s Golden Book V. They found Ismar David’s design “the most original and impressive.”2J.N.F. Golden Book Competition: Prize for the 5th Volume Cover Deisgn, The Palestine Bulletin, November 17, 1931, p.4.
Siegfried Adolf Van Vriesland, 1886–1939, Zionist leader.
By all accounts a committed, passionate and practical Zionist, S.A. Van Vriesland had a successful law practice in Rotterdam before he accepted the position of Treasurer to the World Zionist Executive in 1919. Not long afterward,“V.V.,” as his colleagues often called him, immigrated to Palestine, where he sought to establish an orderly, rational Zionist financial system during especially contentious times.1In Memoriam: Siegfried Van Vriesland, Palestine Post, December 13, 1939, p. 6. In 1927, he was appointed Dutch Consul General. In late 1929, he joined Palestine Potash, Ltd. as general manager, where he again worked to institute sound financial practices. In 1938, he was named General Manager of the Marine Trust, Ltd., and was largely in charge of the Tel Aviv Port. He oversaw significant expansion of infrastructure at the port, but faced crushing problems, at least in part due to the war. Early in the morning on December 4, 1939, a house maid found him in his bed, shot in the head, with his revolver at his side. No message was found.2Dr. S.A. Van Vriesland DeadPalestine Post, December 5, 1939, p. 1.
S.A. Van Vriesland actively supported the arts in Palestine. A tribute in the Palestine Post, shortly after his death, read: “There are few artists in the country, of the brush or the stage, who will not gladly own how much of their start as individuals or groups they owe to Van Vriesland.” As a judge, alongside Hermann Struck and Saul Tchernikhovsky, of the competition for the Keren Kayemet’s 1932 Golden Book cover, he chose Ismar David’s design as the winning entry.
A.L. Monsohn Lithographic Press, later Monson or Monzon Press, founded in 1892. Originally based in Jerusalem, later also with facilities in Tel Aviv and Haifa, the Press closed its doors in 1992.
In 1890, Jerusalem-born Avraham Leib Monsohn, 1871-1930, traveled to Frankfurt to study lithography and painting. He returned two years later with a hand press and, alongside his brothers, founded A.L. Monsohn Lithographic Press in 1892, then the only firm in Jerusalem capable of color printing. At first, the business consisted mainly of decorative souvenir postcards and New Year’s cards, which Avraham himself designed and painted in the prevailing art nouveau style. The purchase of a larger—and automated—press two years later allowed Monsohn to print many more sheets per day and branch out into commemorative placards and announcements for synagogues. The Press received special permission from rabbinical authorities to print for Christian and Moslem clients and was the official map printer for the Ottoman authorities. Greatly helped by their own innovations in gold embossing and offset printing, the firm branched out into advertising and other commercial work for local fruit, wine, candy and cigarette industries. Their client list grew to include the Jewish National Fund, Shemen, El Al and the Israeli government. Monsohn printed the Koren Bible beginning in 1959 from plates prepared by Emil Pikovsky. The Press closed its doors in 1992.
During the Siege of Jerusalem in 1948, Shimon Baramatz, 1922-1992, grandson of the founder, was temporarily released from military service in order to print posters by Ismar David and Jossi Stern on the newly-purchased Monsohn offset press.
After Rosa David arrived in Haifa in late 1947, she lived temporarily in a home for the aged in the Mount Carmel area. As part of a group project, she wrote this poem about her mother, Cäcilie Nothmann Freund, 1845–1915.1Haifa Elternheim Residents Collection of Memoirs 1948, as archived in the Center for Jewish History.
Wie oft hat man die Mutter schon besungen!
Wie viel ist schon zu ihrem Preis erklungen!
Doch denk an meine Mutter ich zurück,
Die immer nur in andern fand ihr Glück
Mit Ihrem stets empfänglichen Gemüte,
Der stillen Größe, ihrer schlichten Güte,
Mit der sie einem jeden was gegeben,
Der einmal ihr begegnet ist im Leben,
Mit ihren Augen welche immer lachten
Bei Müh und Arbeit, die zwölf Kinder brachten,
Mit ihrem kindlich gläubig frommen Sinn,
Der alles nahm als Fügung Gottes hin,
Mit ihren Liedern, die wir heut noch hören,
Mit ihrer Güte, immer zu versöhnen,
Dann kann ich keine großen Worte finden,
Um das, was sie uns allen war, zu künden
Ich konnte es ihr auch niemals völlig zeigen,
Wie ich ihr war mit ganzem Sinn zu eigen,
Doch ihre Güte lebt, ihr Tun, ihr Wort
In mir als ein erreichtes Vorbild fort.
How often have we sung the praise of mothers!
How often, before, echoed their worth!
Indeed, I think back on my mother,
Who always only found her happiness in that of others.
With her unfailingly open and welcoming nature,
From her quiet grandeur, her simple goodness,
She gave something to everyone,
Who met her even once in life.
With her eyes, always laughing
Through the strain and work that twelve children entailed,
With childlike belief and pious sensibility,
She accepted everything as the will of God,
With her songs, that we still hear today,
With her goodness, always reconciling,
Truly, I cannot find the words,
To express what she was to all of us.
I also could never fully show her
How I embrace her with my whole spirit.
Her goodness, her actions and words
Live on in me as an aspiration.
Michael Pikovsky,1866–1943, and Emil Pikovsky, 1899–1989, father and son printers and publishers in Jerusalem.
After operating in Odessa for more than 30 years, Michael Pikovsky immigrated to Palestine with his two children and re-established his zincography firm in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem. Initially, M. Pikovsky, Ltd. was a surprising addition to the very modest local printing industry and few, beside the Franciscan Order in the Old City, recognized the value of having high quality plates made at home rather than abroad. In order to promote their business, the Pikovskys produced their own illustrated newspaper, HaMizrach. It was the first periodical of its kind in Palestine and, although short-lived, stimulated an appetite for finely illustrated publications in the general public, while clearly demonstrating the skills of the firm for potential clients. As the population and the economy grew, the need for handsome and expert printing both at home and for the Diaspora increased. Services included engraving, letterpress, lithography and offset printing. The Pikovskys developed counterfeit-resistant techniques and the firm became an integral part of the Mandatory government and, with statehood, the government of Israel.
Pikovsky relocated several times, settling in a large building in Rehavia, not far from Ismar David’s studio, in 1935. In a letter from July 1, 1953 to her sister, Helen Rossi mentions “our pal” Pikovsky having met Hortense Mendel in New York the previous year and found her “positively overpowering.”1Letter from Helen Rossi Koussevitsky to Zelda Popkin, July 1, 1953, American Jewish Archives. Emil Pikovsky, along with Helen Rossi and ten others, was designated a Distinguished Citizen of Jerusalem on December 31, 1981.
