Nostalgia Sunday

July 6, 2008 - 4:06 PM by Rachel Neiman

My mother’s uncle, Zvi Zinkin, was a painter. Not a famous one, except in our family lore. Dod Zvi and Doda Batya, as we knew them, were among the many eccentrics that called Tel Aviv home and made it a city like no other. They were elderly, agoraphobic, hard-of-hearing vegetarians when we met them in the 1970s, making their own watery beet juice and salt-free noodles (this was before veggie food was popular or palatable), composing poetry and melodies for Batya to dance, Isadora Duncan-style, around a living room embellished with wall murals of Zvi shaking hands with Moses, Herzl and Jabotinsky in the heavenly Jerusalem. Zvi’s true loves – Batya and the Land of Israel – were expressed through his paintings, some of which were handed down to my sisters and me.
Zvi Zinkin - Yarkon River 1
Zvi Zinkin - Yarkon River 2
One of Zvi’s recurring themes was the Yarkon River, usually depicting himself and Batya in a rowboat, or sometimes with just a solitary rower. He was also fascinated by the Reading Power Station. In these paintings, Reading’s distinguishing characteristic, the smokestack, has apparently not yet been erected.
Zvi Zinkin - Reading Power Station

Both Batya and my mother died aroud the same time, in 1975, and Zvi passed away a few years later. (I imagine the apartment went to people who scraped and plastered over the wall murals – I’ve never had the guts to go and check). My father, sisters and I managed to visit him only once, in 1976 – and it wasn’t easy to arrange. Zvi didn’t have a phone or couldn’t hear the phone – I was never clear on the details – so you had to send a postcard telling him about your plans to visit. Also, our relatives warned us that he’d become even more peculiar since Batya’s death. “He made a life-sized statue out of her old clothes and paper mache, and he talks to it,” they told my dad chillingly. “The girls will be frightened.” Actually, it was both Batya and Theodore Herzl, sitting opposite one another at the folding table, with a tape recorder of Batya playing the piano and singing. Somehow, though, it wasn’t really scary. It just was what it was: art and life, one and the same.