Two photography exhibits capture Cleveland's many faces

Reviewed by FRAN HELLER, Contributing Writer

Herbert Ascherman Jr. is the people's photographer. For more than three decades, he has captured the many faces of Cleveland, from movers and shakers to surgeons and steelworkers.

Two exhibits currently on view reflect the broad range of Ascherman's work.

In 󈬢 Faces,” Ascherman focuses his camera on Northeast Ohio Holocaust survivors, POWs, and concentration-camp liberators. The exhibit is at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage through Feb. 18.

“Cleveland, America” is a visual roadmap of the city's rich multicultural and ethnic diversity. It's at The Western Reserve Historical Society through May 31.

Ascherman's photographs are more than mere portraits. Coupled with anecdotal material, each unit conveys a moving personal story as well.

50 Faces

In 󈬢 Faces,” the story is one of unspeakable suffering, followed by almost miraculous survival.

Joseph Klein was 15 when he came to Auschwitz, where Dr. Mengele decided who shall live and who shall die, writes Klein. His mother and two sisters, one with a baby, went left to the gas chambers; his surviving sister went right. Klein describes how Dr. Mengele asked him in German if he could work. “Yes,” stammered Klein. “If I said ‘no,' I would have been sent to the gas chambers.”

Black humor prevails in Sophie L. Billys's story. She recalls walking with her child in a buggy when she came across a pregnant woman being interrogated by a German officer. The officer then stuck a knife in the woman's stomach, which horrified Billys. When the woman didn't fall down, it was because she was carrying a sack of beans, not a baby.

Tibor Messinger was freed after three years in a concentration camp. His self-questioning is as poetic as it is painful. “Free physically? Perhaps. Free emotionally? Maybe. Free mentally? Never.”

As I was viewing the exhibit, docent Erika Gold approached. Pointing to the picture of POW camp liberator Melvin M. Jackfert, Gold described how the medical corpsman helped save her cousin's life by feeding her with an eyedropper. The cousin, now 81, resides in California.

The Holocaust took its toll on the survivors and on their children. Barbara Hertz Beder, daughter of a survivor, describes her mother's screaming at night and wonders if she would have had the strength to endure all her mother went through in the Holocaust. Brother and sister Ralph Solonitz and Sophia (Solonitz) Stern acknowledge feeling different from other children while growing up. They had no relatives other than a grandfather and their parents. With maturity comes understanding and with it, sadness, they note.

The late Dr. Herman Hellerstein was a combat medical officer, whose outfit was part of the British forces that liberated Bergen-Belsen. Hellerstein described the group of starving, bedraggled victims straggling toward their company. One of the stronger ones carried a flag with a crude Magen David on it.

Some Jews survived by disguising their identity. Milanka Bialystok, “Millie” Billys Korman, writes: “During the war, my family lived as Greek Catholics. One day, I yelled ‘dirty Jews' at Jewish inmates wearing the striped uniform marching down the street � When my father told me I was Jewish at age 8-1/2, I thought it was the worst thing anyone could be.”

Others survived by sheer luck, like Karola Dorfberger, who was stripped naked and delivered to the gas chamber and certain death. But something went wrong with the gas, and they were sent back to their barracks.

“Why” is the pervasive question all these photographs scream in silence, the unsmiling faces and vacant eyes staring impassively at the viewer or turned inward on themselves. Images and words vie for attention; each enhances the emotional impact of the other.

Three photographs have the greatest resonance for Ascherman.

One is of Leon Faigenbam, who wears the striped prison cap from Majdanek, which he brought with him to America. To Ascherman, it means Faigenbam didn't want to forget.

Albert Ryb holds two photographs of himself in his concentration-camp uniform taken immediately after his liberation from Dachau. In one, he has scratched his face out because, symbolically, it wasn't he; it was someone else who lived through that hell, explains Ascherman.

Leon Shear props up his chin with his tattooed arm in prominent view. Somebody told Ascherman that Shear's granddaughter asked her grandfather, “Why do you have numbers on your arm?”

“So you don't have to,” was his reply.

Ascherman's original body of work includes 50 pictures with 51 faces. First shown at the Jewish Community Center in Cleveland in 1985, the exhibit has traveled throughout the Midwest and East.

There are three sets of these photographs. The original set is at The Western Reserve Historical Society, another set is at The Temple-Tifereth Israel Museum, and the third is at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of only a handful of post-Holocaust artifacts at the Washington, D.C., museum.

What prompted Ascherman to photograph survivors?

“Artists have responsibilities,” he says. “An artist has the obligation to take his art, his talent and ability to give back to the community that supports him.”

Most rewarding to the hardworking artist is that 󈬄 years later, it is still recognized for its validity and importance.” At least a dozen people in the photographs have died already.

A good photograph can provide a window into the subject's soul. How would Ascherman describe the “collective” soul of these photographs?

“Haunted,” he says. “They have seen hell, and they walked out of it.”

Cleveland, America

As a fourth-generation Clevelander, Ascherman wanted to leave a legacy for his son Herbert III, 34, of what still remains of “old” Cleveland. His original architectural photography project ended as a “people” project, which Ascherman soon found more interesting than buildings.

For two years, Ascherman and his Deardorff 8x10 camera and tripod prowled the city streets. “These were people I knew, people I met, and mostly, people I found,” he explains. A map of Cleveland indicates the places where he took the photographs.

Unlike candid shots, each subject played a collaborative part in the process. Each of the 110 pictures on display took two hours to set up and shoot. The images are printed in pure platinum, which Ascherman says is the most archival material available.

Jewish subjects figure prominently in this exhibit, too. A favorite of Ascherman's and this reviewer's is a quintet of Chasidic men in black hats and suits engaging in lively discourse in front of Chabad House on Green Road.

Cleveland Opera co-founder and former artistic director David Bamberger is pictured standing on a table covered with stage props, like a figure out of his own opera.

Other Jewish subjects include back surgeon Dr. Sam Rosenthal and his family at a kosher rib burnoff in Beachwood; urban planner and visionary Daniel Rothenfeld, clutching a blueprint in his hand; and renowned Case Western Reserve University physicist and Trekkie Lawrence Krauss.

The first picture in the display, and another of Ascherman's favorites, is of laundry worker Marie Jackson taken at Swift's Cleaners at East 86th Street and Carnegie. Despite the menial labor she performs, there is great dignity in her bearing.

Striking about the exhibit is its democratic perspective. Poets and punk rockers, physicians and performance artists are nestled side by side.

There are stories of inspiration, like that of composer Dennis Eberhard, photographed standing on crutches in front of Lake Erie. Eberhard had polio since childhood, which motivated him to discover things inside himself. He died in 2005.

Other stories will make you chuckle, like the two entrepreneurial geezers sitting on a park bench in Ohio City, who asked the photographer for $10 (cigarettes for one, a sandwich for the other) in exchange for granting permission to have their photos taken.

It's nice to think of Cleveland as a tourist destination, as Ascherman turns his camera on Austrian teacher and photography enthusiast Viktor Groszhedl standing in front of the Rock Hall of Fame. Dressed like the archetypal tourist in a garish floral shirt, trekking shorts and sandals, with his camera and camera bag in tow, Groszhedl has visited Cleveland six times in the past 20 years.

There are 65 registered ethnic groups in Cleveland, notes Ascherman. That rich diversity is reflected in his portraits of Hispanics Aaron Rios and Iris Madonado, king and queen of the Latino Festival; Robert Madison, the first black architect in Cleveland, wearing a hard hat; and David Dwoskin, the Jewish owner of Stadium Mustard, a Cleveland institution.

Another prized picture of Ascherman's is of Thomas R. Krizman, a steel mill worker standing in front of a 300-ton bucket handled by a 400-ton crane pouring 85,000 pounds of molten steel into a 2,000-degree furnace.

This visual documentary is an affectionate homage to Cleveland and a gift to the city from one of its best photographers.

The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage: 216-593-0575 or http://www.MaltzJewishMuseum.org. The Western Reserve Historical Society: 216-721-5722 or http://www.wrhs.org.