An Israeli Painter’s Broad-Minded Brush

Summary
When Hamas attacked, I thought of Tal Mazliach, whom I visited last year on her kibbutz next to Gaza.Ever since Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel on Oct. 7—a Shabbat morning that also happened to herald the end of the Jewish holiday of Succoth and fell one day after the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the 1973 Yom Kippur War (the symbolism runneth over)—I have been thinking of Tal Mazliach. A gifted artist and magical woman, she lives in a two-room house in Kfar Aza, one of the southern kibbutzim close to Gaza that were attacked.
As I watch the news, flinching at yet another report of bodies mutilated, babies murdered, soldiers shot asleep in their underwear, or helpless grandmothers taken hostage, it occurs to me that it is difficult, however much we try, to think of that many people’s deaths at once, especially those who were stabbed, shot, or, most horrifically, decapitated. How to imagine body after body, face after face, consciousness after consciousness, all come to an abrupt and violent end? The tragedy isn’t lost on one so much as slightly blurred, like a gruesome video image that fails to come into precise view, perhaps because of the camera’s jerky movements or perhaps because of the carnival atmosphere, interrupted by shouts of “Allahu Akbar!" and yelps of joy.
Among its first moves, Hamas ravaged Kfar Aza, gunning down many of the inhabitants and taking hostages. That’s why I find myself thinking of Tal, who was born in Kfar Aza and once called it a “paradise" in an interview with Haaretz. I visited Tal, whose last name means leader or someone successful, there in February 2022 together with my sister, who has lived in Jerusalem since 1983 with an ever-growing family of four children and 12 grandchildren.
I discovered the artist’s work, which is in many collections in Israel, at the Alon Segev gallery in Tel Aviv. I have often thought Israeli artists are overlooked internationally, in part because Israel is frequently treated like a canceled entity whose art is suspect, and I always go gallery-hopping when in the country. Tal’s paintings, with their bold colors and childlike hieroglyphic-style markings, immediately captivated me. They reminded me of the paintings and drawings of Outsider Artists like Henry Darger and Jimmy Lee Sudduth, who are untrained and work outside the usual artistic conventions. She filled the canvas to its edges in a way that was reminiscent of the Outsiders’ horror vacui (fear of empty spaces) and included much repetition of images. Her figures, including dolls, other toys and body parts, were sprinkled with black dots, like a graphic form of measles, which I later learned represented Tal’s own rare skin disease, nevus, and were a tribute to the idea of human differences. She also frequently uses the colors of the Palestinian flag—green, white and red—in her paintings. One of Tal’s main concerns is Otherness, psychological and physical, and how to de-Other the perceived enemy, whether Arab or Israeli.
The kibbutz was charming, sparkling in the sun with street signs off small lanes. I’d been told the painter was reclusive and ill at ease with strangers, but in the event she was a gracious hostess, offering us grapes and hummus. She chatted merrily (my sister speaks Hebrew fluently and I speak fairly good Jewish day-school Hebrew) about her creative process and the group of children she had befriended who regularly visited, which included her nieces and nephews. (Tal is single but has family in the kibbutz.) The walls of her home were covered with her singular and whimsical work, like a map of a country of her own making, including unfinished pieces and bits of drawings that signified the start of a new idea.
Before we reached Tal’s house the two friends who were driving my sister and me stopped at the barbed-wire fence that separated Kfar Aza from Gaza, which lay some yards in the distance. I got out, walked up to the fence, and felt a flicker of fear on behalf of the kibbutzniks. Were they tempting fate, parading their seemingly good life a stone’s throw from a beleaguered, disempowered neighbor? l was told that there had been a few skirmishes but that the members of the kibbutz felt relatively secure. l wondered at the trust it took for this relatively small group to build a foundation so near a crowded strip of land governed by their sworn enemies, Hamas, whose very charter demanded the death of the Zionist state.
Last week a former Hamas leader invoked jihad and called for a global day of rage in memory of the dead in Gaza. A sense of apprehension, not felt since the Holocaust, is building in Jews across the world. Jewish day schools on Manhattan’s Upper West Side were closed Friday, and Columbia University closed to the public a day earlier, in anticipation of protests. Across last week, there were large rallies, including in Athens, London, Paris and Sydney. The throng in Australia screamed, “Gas the Jews."
Closer to home, Palestine supporters filled a theater in Dearborn, Mich., Tuesday where one of the speakers—president of the New Generation for Palestine, Amer Zahr—asserted that “this is not complicated" and that white-supremacist rallies are studded with Israeli flags. He claimed Zionists march down the streets shouting “Death to Arabs," while pro-Palestinians agitate only for their liberation: “Free, free Palestine."
Many of the young and those on the progressive left have responded with enthusiasm, their thinking muddled by disinformation and a profound ahistoricism—and, in some cases, Jewish self-hatred.
As the script always goes, Israel has been given a pass for a few days in which it can elicit sympathy, before the country is demonized again as the sole aggressor in the region and Jews fall victim to open, unbridled declarations of anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, I think of Tal. I wrote to her gallery in Israel to clarify her fate and was thrilled to learn that she survived, after hiding for 17 hours in her bomb shelter. Her family survived too, but 52 people in the kibbutz were killed, seven taken hostage, and 13 others are missing. In my mind’s eye, I see her drawings flapping in a faint breeze on a wall that has been left standing amid the destruction, speaking to a spirit of inclusiveness and tolerance that has evaded the Mideast since the day Israel was proclaimed a state.
Ms. Merkin is a novelist, critic and memoirist. Her most recent book is “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love."