Blowing the Shofar, 1983
Stanislaw Brunstein was born in Warsaw, Poland on 27 October 1914, and trained at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and l'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris; his naive style particularly suited the subject matter of the shtetl. In 1939 he escaped Warsaw and the transportation to Treblinka by crossing the border into Russia, only to be imprisoned there, before eventually being released to join the Polish army. The only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, he arrived in Britain in 1946 to work as a stage designer. As a refugee in England, he initially settled in London’s East End, and made scenic designs for the Yiddish theatre, also working as a political cartoonist. From 1962 onwards, he specialised in images of the lost world of Jewish Poland. Stanislaw Brunstein died on 19 October 1994.
