Ray Faust, Bronx Artist: Part 2, An Artistic Life

When you first walk into a space full of Ray Faust’s work, what strikes you, amid the bright colors and patterns of her paintings, is the diversity and geographic breadth of her subjects. In what she chose to paint and draw, traces of Faust’s own life and preoccupations become known and familiar, from the Eastern European shtetl of her childhood, steeped in Jewish tradition, to the streets and countrysides of the United States. Also running throughout: her interest in the klasikers—Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Y. L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem, the three classic writers of Yiddish literature—and what that reveals of her own relation to Yiddish culture, literature, and art. The gallery piece published simultaneously with this one, also part of this blog, illustrates some of these recurring subjects, while this piece seeks to contextualize that work within Faust’s own history, provide a limited biography, and invite others to continue thinking about and researching Faust’s life and works in the years to come.

The artistic, political, and prolific painter, writer, and folklorist Ray Faust (1900–1993) was born Rokhl Lehrer in the town of Tomaszów Lubelski, Poland, whose streets and citizens grace a considerable portion of her paintings. Though often referred to as a city by Faust and other inhabitants, in the early 1900s the town had a population of only a little over 9,000, over half of whom were Jewish. Faust’s father moved to the United States in 1913, and her mother died in 1917, leaving her the caretaker of her two younger brothers. She followed her father to the United States in 1920, and it was after arriving that Faust began to paint. Her father, a bristle manufacturer in a factory in Poland, found work as a house painter; Faust worked in a neckwear factory; and her husband, Mendel Shiye (Morris) Faust, was a garment worker. She wrote for Communist and other left-wing Yiddish papers and was for many years a member of the Bergelson branch—named for Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson—of the Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle).

Although she didn’t start painting until after her arrival in the United States, Faust began to draw at a young age, and aside from some study at the Art Students League, a long-running arts school in New York, she was self-taught. As far as we can tell—Faust often neither named nor dated her paintings—her earliest paintings representing her memories of Poland come from the late thirties. Her work was exhibited for the first time in 1946 in a show at the A.C.A Gallery (today ACA Galleries) in New York; her first solo show took place at the Jewish Museum in 1949. From that time she was exhibited more widely, including at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.

But why include Ray Faust here, in the Bronx Bohemians blog? Although she was not, as far as we know, part of the circle that emerged around Bertha and Yechiel Kling, Faust was also a well-known figure in Yiddishist circles in the Bronx. For decades, she and her husband lived in a small apartment on Prospect Avenue; her connection to the Bronx, however, is perhaps most visible in her love for—and paintings of—her beloved Bronx Botanical Gardens.

As shown in the accompanying gallery piece, Faust’s art is diverse in its content but distinctive and recognizably hers, and certain themes and subjects rise often to the surface. Making up a large portion of her work are, of course, her paintings and sketches of her hometown in Poland—of life there, of the streets and landscapes, of Jewish practice. She also painted New York extensively, loved still lifes, made many portraits, and even painted pictures on decidedly American themes, featuring landmarks like the Statue of Liberty. Yiddish language and culture also play a significant role in her work, from paintings of writers to various Yiddish cultural spaces or buildings with Yiddish writing on them—one labeled “kunst galerye” (art gallery), for instance, and paintings of Yiddish summer camp Camp Boiberik.

For the most part, her paintings, rarely fantastical, each address only one or perhaps two of these topics, but her writing at times serves not just to show another facet of her interests but to blend themes or contexts not always easily juxtaposed in a painting. One striking example—a poem she published in the leading Yiddish monthly Di tsukunft (The Future) in October 1971—merges events in contemporary America with the traditions of the old country and hints at the ways in which her paintings of Europe emerged from her own memory. “Undzer fon af der levone (oder kidesh levone)” (“Our Flag on the Moon [or Kidesh Levone]”) begins with astronauts, with the awe of the moon landing, but from the opening lines we see a blending of worlds: “Astronauts in fiery rockets / like Eliyahu Hanavi / flew in the heavens.” Yet the image of Elijah doesn’t persist, and the next stanzas focus on the astronauts, their accomplishments, and their audiences. It is in the fourth stanza, translated below, that Faust’s preoccupations with the world of her childhood surface.

She goes on to draw with her words an image she also painted: kidesh levone—the monthly ritual of sanctifying the moon—in the shtetl, the “roofs white with snow” and a “circle of Jews / with siddurs in their hands. / Their eyes, / turned to the moon.”

A poem beginning with the recent moon landing then shifts into a memory of the same sort that haunts her work, and she blends religious past and technological present, conjuring up vibrant images of both. The poem ends with an image both familiar in its content and startling in its implications.

From traces in biographical essays, we know that Faust appears to have published relatively widely in the Yiddish press. Her entry in the Lexicon of Yiddish Writers states that she published in the Frayhayt and the Morgn frayhayt between 1926 and 1956, and that she had a daily column in the latter at some point during those years; a 1976 article about Faust in the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) references publications in “various journals,” including Di tsukunft; and she also published at least once in both YIVO Bleter (volume 44) and Zamlungen (no. 2). The same Forverts article references two longer manuscripts: a historical novel and a biographical work, excerpts of which were published in various journals but which we haven’t yet located. She published under multiple versions of her name (using Ray, Rokhl, and different combinations of her married and maiden names) and various pen names, including F. Rey, Fey Rey, Feyrey, F. Reysh, and Rokhl Bas Yankev.

Most notable (and accessible), however, are her writings in the Tomaszów Lubelski Yizkor book (published in 1965), for which she wrote seven pieces, both poetry and prose, and served on the publishing committee. Early in the memorial book—preceded only by a foreword and “some words to a reader”—is a poem titled “A matseyve far undzer shtot” (“A Tombstone for Our City”). Part description of the now-missing world and its inhabitants who have no other memorial and part call to action, the three-stanza poem begins anaphorically, with lines beginning with the word nisht (“not”) before listing all those who could not raise a tombstone for Tomaszów Lubelski. The poem ends, in its third stanza, with a simple, familiar, and emotional call to preserve their city in a Yizkor book.

Faust’s other writing in the Yizkor book includes pieces about her father’s factory, about life, work, and politics in the town, and about the kind widow who took in Faust and her younger brothers after a fire devastated the community. Here, a painter who memorialized her hometown in paintings and drawings of her memory makes also a tombstone out of words.

Memory and Yiddish held places of great importance throughout Faust’s work, whether painted or written. Her son, Harold, didn’t speak a word of English until he left home for kindergarten. A folklorist with a strong personality, Faust was an invaluable informant for the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, a collection of Yiddish-language field interviews recorded between 1950 and 1972. According to celebrated anthropologist and museum professional Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who knew and interviewed Faust, “what she knew outclassed anything I knew that I could learn at university; what she knew was simply unparalleled.”

In the mid-1960s, Ray Faust moved to Chelsea, to an apartment in the Penn South Cooperative created by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Every surface of that apartment was covered in paintings. They hung on the walls, sat on the floors—on entering her apartment, one had the impression of walking into a museum. Faust had even painted the furniture. This apartment was a testament to Ray Faust’s devotion to her work, to the importance of art and of Yiddish to her life, to her incredible productivity as an artist—just as the work itself was a testament not just to her life and her surroundings but also to her memory and her community.

—by Claire (Simkhe) Breger-Belsky, 2023–24 Yiddish Book Center bibliography and translation fellow

View a gallery of Ray Faust’s paintings.

The Yiddish text in this piece has been transcribed exactly as it appears in the journals or books in which it was originally published. Ray Faust's writings in the Tomaszów Lubelski Yizkor book can be found beginning on pages 28, 106, 113, 168, 172, 201, and 519.

The Bronx Bohemians blog is made possible with the support of the Lynn and Greendale families in memory of their aunt and mother, Zeva Greendale, and her special passion for yidishkayt.