The Cultural Legacy of Usher Chiter and Elyukim Maltz in the Context of the Development of Jewish Ethnography and Museum Practice in the Interwar Period

Abstract

The article examines the interwar period in the life and work of two architects, Usher Chiter (1899–1967) and Elyukim Maltz (1898–1973), both graduates of the Odessa School of Architecture. During that time the architects were doing work for the Mendele Moicher Sforim All-Ukrainian Museum of Jewish Proletarian Culture in Odessa. Based on documents and visual materials from a number of museums and archives located in Ukraine, Russia and Israel, as well as on private collections (including those of families of architects from Moscow, where Chiter and Maltz moved in the late 1920s),the author attempts to trace and reconstruct the two architects’ research expeditions across the former Pale of Jewish Settlement.A total of seven field trips were conducted in Podolia and the Soviet part of Volhynia – with the aim of collecting materials and exhibition items for the museum and of making nature drawings and watercolors showing Jewish sites, such as synagogues, cemeteries and residential buildings.This empirical approach exemplifies the method of preserving and representing disintegrating Jewish shtetls, commonly practised during the interwar period. The work of both architects is viewed through the prism of musealization of Jewish heritage in the early Soviet period which was closely connected to the formation of state ideology and its transition from «building of the national identity» to class paradigm and atheistic upbringing.