Editor Andrew Kear on Mashel Teitelbaum, Winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Jewish Culture

written by Andrew Kear | adapted by Goose Lane Editions

As a researcher, Teitelbaum proved a challenging but irresistible subject: someone whose career overflows with creativity and energy, whose life was perpetually fraught, unyielding, magnificent, tragic.

He was a man for whom there was no room for small talk, or small thought.

Teitelbaum’s Ashkenazi roots traced back to Tzarist Russia, from where his father Max fled, escaping pogroms and political instability.

Max was settled in Saskatoon by 1913, established West Side Dry Goods and married Sarah Kilstein. Mashel Alexander was born in 1921.

Teitelbaum’s Jewish identity was deeply formative. Max and Sarah had fostered their son’s cultural and religious identity; as a kid Teitelbaum took classes in Hebrew and Yiddish and attended a Jewish youth group.

The Jewish population of Saskatoon was small at the time, and was subjected to the discriminations of the day, from quotas on professional and social memberships to the presence of a very brazen Ku Klux Klan.

Early on, Teitelbaum faced the racial taunts of the schoolyard but also made connections outside his family’s close-knit Jewish community. He had a self-admitted “inherent wildness” from the start, earning his stripes with a multiethnic clique, later boasting he “travelled like a ‘sheigetz’ with the toughest gang in town.”

From the beginning his attitude toward authority, especially institutional authority, was hard-bitten. Isaiah Berlin would have called him one of those “properly tragic” artists: “The only thing which can be regarded as properly tragic,” Berlin wrote, “is resistance, resistance on the part of a man to whatever it is that oppresses him.” Teitelbaum was allergic to oppression, at times tragically so.

Teitelbaum grew impatient with formal training, although this didn’t prevent him from studying with a number of artistic giants, including Clyfford Still and Max Beckmann, and later starting his own art school.

After the war he eventually settled initially in Montreal, where, in 1952, he met and married his wife Ethel Lintz—someone who deserves her own biography! They moved to Toronto a year later, and it was in this city that Teitelbaum made his career and lived until his death at 64.

There were many Mashel Teitelbaums. Many faces and phases of the artist. A single perspective on his life an art would have been insufficient. And so, very early on, it became clear to that the book needed to be kaleidoscopic in perspective.

In the end, Mashel Teitelbaum was that rare soul who can unveil the thrum of life itself, his work always wavering between natural beauty and existential terror, becoming and suffering, will and world, substance and void.

Andrew Kear is Head of Programs at Museum London. He was formerly Chief Curator and Curator of Canadian Art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Kear has written and curated exhibitions on a wide range of contemporary and historical Canadian artists, including Karel Funk, L.L. FitzGerald, and William Kurelek.

Mashel Teitelbaum: Terror & Beauty is published by Goose Lane Editions with WORK BOOK.

For more information, head to gooselane.com/MashelTeitelbaum