Labkovski Meets Aleichem: Art as Testament

Imagine walking into The Soraya’s gallery this fall, and the air feels thick with conversation, not the kind you can hear, but the kind that hangs between walls. One side holds the painted world of David Labkovski, faces and streets captured in vast shades of watercolors and oils, each brushstroke promising a refusal to forget.

Sholem Aleichem’s words, blown up on the walls and murmured in staged readings, wander in with humor, irony, and the stubborn heartbeat of the shtetl.

The exhibition, “Through the Eyes of David Labkovski: Sholem Aleichem and his Heroes,” running Sept. 13 through Dec. 31, 2025, doesn’t just pair two artists. It stages a dialogue between the life Aleichem captured before the devastation of the war, and the loss Labkovski recorded after. One wrote the music of everyday life; the other painted its silence.

Labkovski, born in Vilnius in 1906, survived the Holocaust and years in Soviet labor camps before emigrating to Israel. His paintings are not nostalgia pieces; they are evidence. Market squares, ghetto streets, narrow doorways, the haunted stillness of places where neighbors once stood, each canvas is anchored in something he saw or knew would vanish without record. Decades earlier, Aleichem had been writing the life of those same towns before they disappeared. His Tevye the Dairyman jokes and sighs through a world in flux, using humor as a kind of armor. Often mistaken for sentimental folklore, Aleichem’s stories are layered portraits of a community negotiating hardship and change with resilience and grace.

The DLP has designed the exhibition as an immersive exchange rather than a static display. Labkovski’s works will hang beside excerpts from Aleichem’s stories, and a multimedia video installation. Visitors will be invited to participate in interactive “I Am” poetry exercises, writing themselves into the narrative. The idea is to inhabit history, not simply read about it; to stand in a space where text and image press up against each other until the lines blur.

This is not just an art show; it is a community space for remembering. The Soraya, a cultural hub in one of Los Angeles’s most diverse regions, serves audiences as varied as the city itself: students, educators, members of the Jewish diaspora, and curious visitors. Here, they may find themselves picturing the uneven clatter of a water carrier’s cart, the flicker of candlelight before electricity, or the layered conversations of a small-town street. The particulars may belong to another century, but the emotions; love, envy, friendship, and ambition are timeless.

The debut in Northridge is only the beginning. Built to travel, the exhibition is intended for museums, universities, and community centers across the country, bringing with it the David Labkovski Project’s acclaimed educational programs. These workshops use art and literature to prompt personal reflection, bridging the gap between historical fact and lived empathy. For younger generations in particular, the combination offers a way into history that is as emotional as it is informational.

For all its historical gravity, “Through the Eyes of David Labkovski: Sholem Aleichem and his Heroes” is not a memorial in the conventional sense. It is a meeting between a pen and a brush, between what was lived and what was lost, between memory and imagination. It invites visitors to stand in the space between, to listen, and to carry the conversation forward.