Zeva Oelbaum: Hand to Hand

"Manipulating imagery from her families’ books and others sourced from the Jewish community, Oelbaum creates a body of work that transforms markings written in multiple languages –– Latin, Russian, German, Polish, Aramaic, and Yiddish –– into a coherent visual story. With her camera, Oelbaum immortalizes the inherent lyricism in a word, a scribble, and even something as seemingly insignificant as an ink blot, as they dance across the page, transformed from language to pure form..."


Nextbook: Biblical Marginalia

Dr. Miller is a little more skeptical of the markings’ importance, and gently teases the photographer: “It’s scribbling, it’s scribbling!” Asked if anyone else had shown interest in the topic, he replies, “Not that I know of. It’s so common, it’s vokhedik, as we say in Yiddish, it’s everyday. I couldn’t tell you how many thousands of books we have here with that kind of little graffiti. Zeva’s attuned to it, she’s perceived it as art, the way Andy Warhol saw art in Campbell’s soup cans. Whenever I find something now, an endpaper that she’d think is yummy, I set it aside for her.”