Yossi Zisman's book, "An Art Dealer Named Niemand," is a fascinating historical thriller that jumps between past, present, and future and revolves around a painting by Chaim Soutine called "The Gypsy." The novel is wrapped in a frame story at the beginning and end, introducing the painter in question and his painting.
Frame story: prologue and epilogue
The prologue focuses on three moments in Soutine's life, occurring before his death, during his childhood, and in mid-life. A few hours before his death, Soutine lies huddled and covered in blood and sweat, hidden in the trunk of a car that evades the Gestapo checkpoints and brings him to a hospital in Paris where he will die. This is a fact that the author draws from the life of Soutine, who died of a stomach ulcer that deteriorated into cancer in a clinic in the 16th arrondissement after a long and tiring journey from the Touraine region to Paris in August 1943.
And here the illusion comes into play when Yossi Zisman writes that at that moment Soutine saw in his hallucinations the gypsy from his childhood, with whom he must have identified now, having reached a relatively old age and about to die in agony. I would add that there is a certain similarity between Soutine's early self-portraits and the gypsy's face, a painting that probably depicts Soutine himself in a kind of prophecy before his death. Soutine foresaw the future, and with great accuracy.
The gypsy, according to Zisman's fiction, gave little Chaim the blessing of the way to his artistic life, a kind of operating instructions:
The gypsy raised his two large, soft palms and placed them on his little head. “Look around here, at the world, at the colors, they are thick and deep, and always,” the gypsy wanderer whispered to him, “they are always in motion.” And his hand fluttered for a short moment over the boy’s eyes, briefly touched his face, and he disappeared from the scene. (p. 7).
The episode that follows is the tragic story of a German painter, the partner of a French painter, residents of the same city of artists inMontparnasse, “La Roche”, where Soutine also lived. Police shot a German after mistaking him for a burglar. Soutine, who was busy painting, went down to the street at the sound of the gunshot and noticed the victim’s body, whose jacket and shirt were stained with blood. Frightened, he returned to his room and added a thick red tie to the neck of the gypsy, whose face was tormented, contorted, and distorted.
“It’s not him, it’s not him,” says a young man next to the body of the German painter who was shot in vain. At the end of the novel, we realize that many of its characters lie and pretend, one of them even lives under a false identity. The motif of unclear identity is accompanied by the motif of injustice that afflicts the book’s characters, as some of them are shot in vain or have their lives taken in some other way, sometimes because of a crime they committed for which the punishment should not have been death.
The epilogue returns to Soutine's life, to the middle of his life, to a conversation between him and the French painter from Rennes whose beloved from Berlin was accidentally shot. Soutine tells her a second version of his encounter with the gypsy when he was a child:
“When I was a child in Belarus, a gypsy wanderer appeared in my village. He approached me, covered my eyes, asked me to look carefully at the colors around me, and then disappeared.” (p. 333).
The blindfold adds a layer to the artistic narrative of the gypsy, a future Soutine double, who teaches the child to project the mask of his emotions onto the world in order to paint it with his inner colors. Merely looking is not enough.
Soutine gives the French painter Marens his “Gypsy” painting as a parting gift. In fact, he painted two identical paintings, and here the motif of duality appears, woven throughout the book. Almost every event and every hero has a double, and the attentive reader must weave the threads.
A plot full of twists and turns
Between the prologue and the epilogue lies a dizzying and dense plot that takes place eighty years later. In most of its chapters, Isaac Niemand, an art dealer, speaks in the first person, like Yossi Zisman himself, who owned a gallery in Tel Aviv. Isaac is in deep mourning over the death of his beloved wife from liver cancer. A phone call snaps him out of his stupor and scares him to Haifa.
In an old house, reeking of old age, he meets Horace, a rich and tired ninety-year-old art collector, who tasks him with finding the “gypsy” who was stolen from him and provides him with a fat advance and a credit card for all his expenses. Here begins the adventures of Isaac, fifty years old, who loves women and they return the favor, getting horny quite easily, especially with wild girls but also with Christine, a mysterious and beautiful Frenchwoman from Rennes, the granddaughter of the painter from “La Roche”, who tricks him and sets a trap for him. And she is probably not the only one. Did Horace tell Isaac the truth?
Slowly, the reader sees how complicated the plot is and how difficult it is to understand. The mystery thickens, the tension is at its peak: Where did the “Gypsy” painting go? Its history is full of twists and turns. It saved the lives of Horace and his sister from death after their father gave it as a gift to the Nazi criminal Hermann Goering and his wife in exchange for immigration documents for his children. He himself and his wife perished in the Holocaust.
And the painting’s incarnations did not end there. Goering gave it as a gift to Himmler’s daughter, and then the painting ended up on the wall of the home of an SS commander who was responsible for sending at least four thousand Jews to Auschwitz until it came, in an unexpected way, to Horace’s hands. The painting that saved Horace and his sister’s lives was revealed to him again under no less dramatic circumstances. I won’t go into details, of course, but let me just say that Horace’s past is connected to the “avengers” group from the Jewish Brigade that executed dozens of Nazis and collaborators. An activity that causes him pangs of conscience before his approaching death.
Isaac, who refuses Horace's entreaties to abandon his mission, is led into a trap by the Frenchwoman who seduced him with her beauty and evasions. The description of the beatings he suffers leads back to the gypsy's red choke tie and the body of the German painter, whose jacket is stained with blood:
And he slaps me across the face with tremendous force. I feel the bones of my skull shaking with terrible pain and close my eyes. Flames of fire caress my burning red right cheek, and jets of blood flow from my nose, flowing down my neck and staining the lapels of my jacket. (p. 300).
Hero Mishna, Enoch
In the fifth chapter of the novel, a secondary character suddenly appears, a kind of double of Isaac, less colorful and more tormented. Who is this second man and how is he connected to the plot? It is about the city of Zurich, a bank, a safe, the city of Dielsdorf, the examination of a painting and the determination of a price.
The mysterious man wants to escape his past and erase his identity. He refuses to give his name to the bar girl who catches his attention. He is pursued by equally unknown creditors.
More chapters, at an increasing pace, all telling the story of this man, whose name is Hanoch, in the third person, appear until the end of the book. I won’t tell you who Hanoch is, but I will say that the man erases his previous life in Israel and starts a new one in the city of Lugano with Anita from the band “Abba.” Like Isaac, he is also attracted to wild girls, but to a much less obsessive degree and chooses a stable and deep relationship.
However, hidden threads connect the two protagonists. At the beginning of the book, after his meeting with Horace, Isaac recalls his childhood in the city of Haifa:
I lean for a moment on the stone railing and look down at the platforms. The memory of my mother, waving lovingly at me from the window of the crowded bus, appears before my eyes. The bus leaves the station and my cousin and I walk back through the crowd pushing towards the platforms. We enter a large record store and discover to our surprise that the record we have been waiting for for a long time has arrived. The new record by the band “Abba”. Excitedly, we run to the pay phone, call my cousin, and she arrives hurriedly on the bus from Carmel, purse in hand. We buy the record excitedly.
I don't remember how many times we listened to the record in those days. But even today, about forty years since that morning, when I randomly hear a song from that record, the memory of those days comes crashing down on me and the familiar sounds momentarily awaken the fresh and sharp feelings of my childhood and their sweet memory pierces through all the experiences and insights that have been collected and piled up in my soul, and they break through all those layers that were sealed and left in the cellars of oblivion, and raise beneath them the freshness of those days with burning longing. (p. 23).
Hanoch is the man who will link his future with that of Anita from the band “Abba”. His new and fresh life with her refers to Isaac’s past, who as a child listened enthusiastically to the band’s songs. Hanoch and Isaac are also connected, therefore, by their connection to the famous Swedish band. Isaac only dreamed in his childhood of the distant and unattainable band, while Hanoch fulfilled the dream of the double and became the partner of one of its members.
Additional connections are woven between the two characters, for example the death of Enoch's mother when he was fifteen, which he recounts in a poignant passage, which parallels to a certain extent the death of Isaac's wife, both from cancer and at the same age.
Isaac, too, in the end, like Enoch, knows great loves. His many rants are probably intended to comfort him over the death of his wife and even to try to find something of her in women who remind him of her. Not without pangs of conscience that are probably revealed in a dream. The first encounter with a bar girl in Berlin gives rise to a scene in which his deceased wife appears before him in tears and struggles with the girl who has just left the hotel room.
Isaac's love adventures occupy a prominent place in the book and are somewhat childish in my eyes, the man boasting of his conquests, but pleasant to read. There is evident empathy for the women, both young and older, sometimes cared for by children, who are forced to surrender to prostitution.
Even outside the darkness of the bars, Isaac finds himself in the flattering pose of an object of desire. Thus he broke the heart of Florence, his French lover, whom he suddenly abandoned in favor of his great love for the Israeli woman who died prematurely of cancer and, most painfully, along with the unborn fetus.
From a search on the Internet, I realized that Yossi Zisman deliberately created confusion between the two band members in his book. One is Anita, the blonde, and the other is Annie-Fried, the brunette, known as Frida. The author specifically mentions the name “Anita,” but Frida is the one who moved to Switzerland, like Anita in the novel. The real Anita never left Sweden.
Moreover, Frida's life story fits perfectly into the book's plot. Frida was born from a forbidden affair between a Norwegian mother and a married Nazi soldier. To spare her the abuse that was the lot of children born from such relationships, her mother and grandmother emigrated with her to Sweden.
Frida's adult life, which in the novel is called, as mentioned, Anietta, was full of tragedies. The greatest of which is the death of her daughter in a car accident at the age of 31. Zissman does not tell all of this in his book, but Frida's biography alludes to the mixed couple, the French painter and the German painter who were accidentally killed, and perhaps also to Isaac, the Jewish-Israeli, and Christine, the Frenchwoman, between whom cultural differences are rife. Go explain to the Frenchwoman what a wine of wine is.
Frida's life also references two car accidents in the book that take the lives of a boy, a classmate of Isaac's, and another friend who was about to travel to New Zealand to start a new chapter after a decline into drugs and prostitution.
Tension, sex and violence, liquor, big money and small money, but the book is deep and exciting (I read it twice) and touches on a number of important issues, such as:
Art and the Holocaust
Many of the art dealers and Spaniards whom Isaac, originally from Haifa but a man of the great world who travels as much as his hometown in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, and New York, in his search for Soutine's painting, meet are connected in one way or another, on this side of the barricade or the other, to the dark Nazi period. Robbing paintings from Jews, getting rich from trading in stolen paintings, the activities of the Avengers organization, the rise of neo-Nazism in the contemporary period – all of these are discussed in the book in an interesting and informed manner.
Some of the heroes wallow in the mud without any remorse, some of them grapple with self-torture and moral issues. Horace, for example, regrets that he did not keep his soul clean and was tempted to cooperate with the Avengers.
What is permissible and what is not permissible regarding works looted from Jews during the Holocaust – this issue is at the heart of the novel. An art dealer named Solomon, who arrived in New York at the age of 25 as a refugee, explains the freedom he took for himself during that period and the restrictions he placed on it later:
Suddenly Solomon shrugs, his face turning red and his hands shaking a little, he quickly puts the glass on the table and turns to me. “You have to understand.” A tremor runs through his voice. “In the late 1940s, in the 1950s, when I started doing art, a lot of important pictures from Europe came rolling in. We all knew that these paintings came from the war and we thought at the time that their real owners… well, you see.” He looks down. “But I, who came from Lithuania after my parents and three sisters were murdered there, felt that I had a certain right to them, that I had the right to rebuild my life with their help.”
He looks at me with a troubled look and places his hand on my knee. “But when this German gentleman came to me now,” he continues in a low voice, “I didn’t want it anymore and I don’t need it anymore. The long time that has passed since then, my new life, which is so precious to me, and the little time that I still have.” He pulls his hand away from me, “And I offer you the same.” His face darkens as if he’s remembering the noble thing that shuddered in him. “Leave it, nothing good will come of it for you.” He waves his finger at me. “It’s true that in fifty or sixty years, when I and you too will probably be underground, these pictures will still be here, hanging on the wall, and what happened to them during the war will be just a small, forgotten chapter in what happened to them. Whoever looks at them, loves them, buys or trades in them in the future, this chapter will be like a small, almost unimportant anecdote. Our actions, humans, will not change these works. They have an existence of their own. But today, today is not the time to touch them yet, it is still too early.” He sighed and leaned back. (p. 174).
Payment of debts
On the one hand, the novel shows that there is no justice in the world, but on the other hand, the idea that everyone pays for their bad deeds, sooner or later, runs through the story, for example:
Horace drops the blanket on his knees and raises his voice, “Simon the Healer wants to say, do not be mistaken in thinking that nothing awaits you after your death. There in Sheol you will be held accountable for all the evil deeds you have done, for just as ‘by your own necessity you were created and by your own necessity you die, so by your own necessity you will give account before the Holy One, blessed be He,’ and I,” he lowers his voice, “have always been a man of faith, and I know that in a short time I will give account for my actions.” (p. 243).
Isaac himself, left with a large sum of money that he won from the poor and did not return to the heirs of the rich lady who owed him, decides to give it as a gift to someone who needs it more than he does. There is always the possibility of paying off debts in an indirect way.
Withering and death, the end of all flesh
The awareness of the withering of the flesh and the finitude of life is evident in descriptions of characters on the verge of death, such as the elderly Horace and Isaac's grandfather in his dreams, but also in Isaac's reflections upon the dazzling beauty of wild girls:
They are moving enthusiastically again. In forty, fifty years, I think to myself, there will be nothing left of this vibrant energy locked in their bodies, which drives them. All of this will fade, dissolve, and whatever remains of their beautiful, smooth, defiant bodies, time and old age will eventually come and erase. (p. 24)
And Leah, a tragic character in the novel, is already in the twilight zone, prematurely:
It was said that when she entered a club in New York, the orchestra would stop playing and the singer would announce the arrival of the Queen of Hawaii. That was how she was called. The men could not take their eyes off her and the women surveyed her with envy. But the events of her life steadily corrupted her beauty. Time gradually ate away at the skin of her face, which absorbed her grief and reflected it for all to see. (p. 73).
The meaning of art
From this it becomes more understandable why Soutine's paintings speak so much to Isaac's heart:
I make my way among the people. I move from picture to picture, examining them one by one. Soutine's portraits draw me to them like a magnet. I have already seen many of them, but again and again I am disturbed by the stains of paint that Soutine has placed on the canvas in a state of mental turmoil, by the astonished, lost expression of the figures distorted in their agony. Some of them kneel down from the sorrow of mental anguish and some from the sorrow of the low spirit that comes from the hardships of everyday life. Their faces are marked by the defeat of life and the fingers of their bony hands are twisted in the attempt
The one who fails to grasp and control the reality of their lives.I reflect on portraits painted centuries ago and up to the present day. On the elegant figures full of self-importance and imposing on us, as we look at them, a boredom that arises from their empty puffiness. We are indifferent to them because of the perfect being they seek to present. A being that we know is false. Whereas here, in these distorted figures of Soutine, fragile and vulnerable, the figures touch us so much that we want to wrap them up and protect them from their sorrow. (pp. 64-65).
the meaning of life
And if so, what is the right attitude to adopt? Maybe Dominic's?
“Dominic,” I laugh, “you’ve always been such a philosopher, but where exactly are you going?” “Where am I going? Don’t you understand?” His voice booms and the cigar almost falls from his fingers. “We’re nothing here, we understand nothing, we know nothing and we’ll always be in this situation where our lives are one big nothing, not even a comma, but for us,” he pats his stomach and lowers his voice a little, “for us our lives are everything. They’re so important, and even when you contemplate your situation in front of this huge universe, you at least know that every moment in this semi-comma of yours is precious, and I,” he straightens up in front of me, “I decided years ago that I would embrace every fucking moment in this life, and from what I and only I understand in my little ant brain,” he blurts out the end of his words and pats his chest.
I am silent in embarrassment.
“And you should know,” he takes a drag from his cigar, “that all the theories and philosophies and religions and beliefs and all that crap don’t interest me and aren’t worth anything to me, I piss on everything.” He pauses for a moment and catches his breath. “Only what brings me peace of mind, inner balance, a life that I find good, happy and enjoyable, that’s what matters to me.” He looks at me and smiles.
“Wow, that was a speech,” I laugh. (pp. 182-183).
Why you should read the book
A fascinating thriller for art lovers (Picasso, Calder, Kadishman, Magritte, Basquiat, Nolde, and more), history lovers (the Holocaust and its implications for future generations), music lovers (“Abba,” “Blonde,” Elvis Costello), and literature lovers (fine style, interesting structure, hidden threads).
The psychoanalytic layer, which brings the heroes' dreams, the references to the Bible and Judaism in general (Isaac is Isaac, the Binding of Isaac - Fathers and Sons, the story of Jonah and Nineveh as an expression of sin and the issue of forgiveness, and more), the correspondences with Hebrew literature (the chapter "Behind the Fence" alludes to Bialik's eponymous story, the garage owner, Naim, in the last chapter, recalls A.B. Yehoshua's "The Lover," and more) are beautifully integrated into the plot. Reality and fiction are woven and interwoven in a tangle that challenges the reader and provokes thoughts about the Jewish-Israeli situation in particular and the human situation in general.
The book touches on important topics such as the essence of art, the essence of life and the connections between them, reflections and questions about eternity and time, about artists who will remain and artists who will be forgotten. And above all, the figure of the gypsy floats, who at the end of the book emerges from Soutine's picture and sheds skin, flesh and sinews in the form of a hunched and battered bar pianist, bursting into a Hasidic tune. Because gypsy music and Hasidic music are similar to each other and both express the joy of life mixed with sadness and longing and reflect the human condition of those who suffer and wander, are confused and lost.
Yossi Zisman, An Art Dealer Called Nimand, Matar Publishing, 2022
Want to read more about Chaim Soutine?
Please read the article. Amedeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine: The Last Bohemians of Montparnasse.
Want to read more about art and the Holocaust?
Please read the following articles:
Pazit DAhan
I started reading your review and this morning I purchased the book on the Hebrew website. It's hard to put it down. I'll come back to your in-depth review as soon as I finish reading it. Thank you very much for the recommendation and the in-depth review!!
Nira Kedar
After reading Orna Lieberman's review and because Soutine is my favorite painter, I will rush to purchase the book.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Yehudit Mizrahi
I was giddy, it seems like there is no dull moment. You succeeded exceptionally, as usual, in arousing my curiosity to read the book, especially since it touches on the Holocaust. Thank you for an interesting and fascinating post.
Author Yossi Zisman presented my article this way when he shared it on his Facebook:
“Dr. Orna Lieberman wrote a profound and sharp article analyzing “An Art Dealer Named Niemand.” She discusses many aspects of the book, its layers, and analyzes the central characters from an interesting angle. I recommend that those who have not read the book, and certainly those who have already, read the article.”
In a conversation with the book's author, Yossi Zisman, more points of connection between his book and prominent works in Hebrew literature emerged. Here are the author's words:
In Chapter 5, where Hanoch first appears, he meets Krebs and another person. This entire situation in the hotel room parallels Nathan Zach's poem - "A Final Farewell." Like Hanoch who separates from his previous life, Zach also separates from his girlfriend. He meets three people in the cafe, "tall, fat and thin. And the fat one had two red flowers on his chest," like the fat expert on page 90 and like Poppy who announces "This is it" (end of 91) and gives the seal for the sale of the painting and this for the end of the life from which Hanoch asked him to "say a final goodbye."
The chapter “Behind the Fence” corresponds with Bialik’s eponymous story. The name Marina in the book is the name of Bialik’s heroine, and the youths of the two women named Marina are parallel in their lines. It is possible that this is also her grandmother, the same one who had an affair with the Jewish boy who abandoned her while pregnant (she also herded geese as a child). Marina tells Niemand that her grandmother had a son who she is told was born to her in her youth by a Jew (page 111). The chapter is essentially a story “Marina’s Revenge” about the deed of Bialik’s Jewish boy. She deceives him and steals his money from him, and he notices her disappearing “behind the fence” of the hotel early in the morning (page 121).
In the novel “The Lover” by A.B. Yehoshua, the story is about Naim, the Arab boy who works in a garage. In the books, Abu Naim is already the owner of the garage. He is the successful Arab, who buys Horace’s house and is about to move in. He “moves” from the lower city to the Carmel, to the most beautiful street there, and is about to “settle” in the house of Horace, the same Jew who wandered between continents and whose wife returns to America.
Niemand in German means – nobody. Like the biblical Isaac, that lawless man whose desires were not considered (the Akida), he did not see the reality around him well (hard of sight), Rebekah and Jacob deceived him and he took refuge in the shadow of Abraham and his son Jacob who constantly manipulated him.
And this leads me to the midrash and the stories of the Hasidim, which are essentially the “engines” of the plot. I will only refer to the last midrash at the beginning of the last chapter (page 351). The Jew plows his field with his ox. He lives in one place, engages in agriculture, and has a spiritual and religious center in Jerusalem. An Arab passes by and tells him that the Temple has been destroyed. The Arab also tells him that the Messiah has been born. The Jew breaks away from his land and begins to wander. He becomes a traveling merchant between the towns. He seeks the Messiah, that is, his redemption. But even when he thinks he has found him, it disappears from him – “winds and storms have snatched him from my hands.” His destiny, like the fate of the Jew Nimand, is to wander and seek his redemption. His center of gravity no longer exists.
This midrashic story, which appears in the Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Berchot, is essentially a summary of the entire plot.
Yehudit Mizrahi:
I read the article and felt like I was on a merry-go-round. A rich book, full of depth and happenings. There is not a dull moment. I was very impressed by your thorough, meticulous, in-depth analysis. You aroused my curiosity to read the book, and I will do so.