Published: 10 October 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Before the Russian Revolution, Yampil was part of the Czarist empire - when rivers were commercial arteries. Today it’s a border town in beleaguered Ukraine. Across the river lies the now separate country of Moldova.
“Towns like Yampil were a mix of cultures,” Sharpe continues. “Some towns were half Jewish. Now in the Ukraine less than one in a hundred citizens are Jewish. Either they left, or they were killed.
“There’s no vestige of Jewish heritage left in Yampil, partly because it was bombed so heavily in WW2. But we did see the Dnister which gave us a sense of how it was back then.”
The much-travelled Sharpe recently returned from Yampil and is planning a moving artwork inspired by her Ukraine odyssey for an exhibition at the Sydney Jewish Museum (no date has been scheduled yet).
In August Sharpe flew to the Ukraine with British cousin, Ruth Fishman, to explore part of their joint family tree that neither quite understood.
Since she was a young girl, the six-time Archibald finalist - including her winning self-portrait Diana of Erskineville) - has known her surname is appropriated.
Her late father, writer and historian Alan Sharpe, had been born in London’s East End. He told her their surname should be Cohen or Shapavitch.
“My real grandfather was Ben Cohen,” Sharpe explains. “He’d married my grandmother Bessie Fishman, but died when he was 28, leaving her with two young sons - my father and his younger brother Ronnie.”
Eventually Bessie remarried. Her new husband, David, had changed his name from Shapavitch to Sharpe. (“My grandmother must have been very pleased to gain an Anglicised surname because she had calling cards printed with Elizabeth Sharpe written on them.”)
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The artist, an only child, was born in Sydney’s northern beaches after her father and non-Jewish mother, Marjorie, emigrated as Ten Pound Poms in the 1950s.
Though irreligious, Sharpe was always intrigued by the Jewish side of her family history - not least because Bessie and her older sister, Anne Fishman, were noted psychics.
“My father believed in spiritualism too,” Sharpe says. As a child he’d been embarrassed by Bessie approaching complete strangers to pass on messages from dead relatives.
It was that occult side as much as the Jewish connection which prompted the two cousins to travel to the Ukraine to search their roots. “Bessie was born around 1905, the youngest of many children,” Sharpe explains. “Most of what we know about the Fishmans came from my great-grandmother, Rachel.
“She said they were Orthodox Jews who had escaped Russia, from a town near Kamianets-Podilskyi in what is now, western Ukraine. They had fled one of the many pogroms and ended up in the East End.”
Kamianets-Podilskyi has two claims to fame if you Google it, Sharpe points out. “There’s a huge fortress which is listed by Lonely Planet as one of the tourist highlights of the Ukraine. Then there’s the horrific massacre of Jews by the Nazis.”
Over two days in 1941 - August 27 and 28 - 23,000 Jews from the Kamianets-Posilsky ghetto were killed, including 16,000 refugees expelled from Hungary. It is recognised as one of the first atrocities of the Holocaust.
The two cousins found a specialist Jewish travel agency which was able to put together an itinerary which included Kiev, Kamianets-Podilskyi and Yampil, visiting Jewish museums and talking to historical experts.
“All over the Ukraine, synagogues have been turned into something else. We saw one that is now a cinema, another that is a restaurant. But, unlike Germany, there’s no plaques to remind people about their Jewish past.”
The hire car journey from Kamianets-Podilskyi to Yampil, along bad roads, took them three hours. “Back when the Fishmans lived there, it must have taken weeks to walk on foot,” Sharpe points out.
“I think the idea that it will be obliterated is symbolic of what happened to the Jews of the Ukraine."
In Yampil, the cousins were deeply moved to find huge Jewish graves, all the more melancholy because they were so untended and overgrown.
Naturally, the artist drew as she travelled - and will use those sketches when she comes to create her Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition. She plans to draw directly onto the gallery walls, depicting their voyage into the past. Then, when the exhibition is over, her mural itself will be painted over.
“I think the idea that it will be obliterated is symbolic of what happened to the Jews of the Ukraine,” she says.
The exhibition title Where is the little street? is a reference to a Yiddish song, Vi iz dos geseleh? which her grandmother Bessie used to sing, lamenting the loss of such a rich culture.
In the meantime, Sharpe has just opened another travel-based exhibition at the Manly Art Gallery to whet the appetite for her work inspired by Ukraine.
Wendy Sharpe: Wanderlust, an exhibition of works from various travels, is at the Manly Art Gallery and Museum until October 20.
Photo: Wendy Sharpe at a cemetery near home town of Yampil
