Photographers
Lipshutz Studio
Sitter
Leon Blank, 1867 - September 8, 1934
Date
unknown
Type
Portrait
Medium
Photograph
Credit Line
The Jewish Forward
Testimony
" ... Here we have a second kind of actor, who when we look
at them, dances in our hearts for joy, and somehow we remember
old things, images that are long gone; our fathers and
grandfathers stand before our eyes, the words, the mimic is
close to us, familiar, we've seen it before; we laugh and cry, a
stroke of our soul has been touched.
Let a Gentile come to my place, he will not understand at all;
he will squint his eyes and will perhaps feel disgust. But I
understand it, I love it just as much as the pious prayer and
pious mimicry of our fathers that is dear to me. Such actors are
Yiddish actors. They paint for us the deep Jewish life, with its
joys and sorrows, with its faults and virtues, and to this kind
belongs Leon Blank.
When he plays the shoemaker
in the "Greenhorn Millionaire," or the Jewish poet in
"Israel's Hope," characters that are far different from each
other as east is from west, he understands in both that he
must bring out the typical Jew that they are, with their
virtues and their vices. One must admire how deeply he
immerses himself in the character where he presents himself
as the Jewish shoemaker, who places our lives on the lowest
level with which one is ashamed in the family. However, he
is a Jew, with all the Jewish sides, and he does not fall
for himself; he speaks, as is in the grave times of misery
and oppression, yet he is a cheerful beggar, with the
specific Jewish optimism and irony to evil and malice. He
always dreams about his family, even though he allows
himself to throw a glance at a passing girl, and he will
even have an abundance too of nonsense, but not evil.
Behold, he is nevertheless a living person, and as Peretz
sings there: "For one choice, a Jew also commits an
offense." But on the other hand, one has God in his heart,
and his wife and children are always in mind; and if Mr.
Blank still catches up with the masses and rarely does he
goes here and there with a two-word proverb, this is not
because his talent demands it, but alas, it is out of simple
habit."
Source of Testimony
Uriel Mazik, Der Tog, November 20, 1916
