Leaving Cheder
Adam Muszka was born into a Jewish family of synagogue cantors in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland in 1914. He attended Cheder (a school for Jewish children teaching Hebrew and religious knowledge) and began painting at the age of ten. After leaving school, however, he worked to help his family, while attending part-time classes at the Warsaw School of Decorative Arts. During the Second World War, he fled with his wife to Tashkent in the USSR, but his hometown, Piotrków, became one of the first wartime Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland, and upon his return he found much of the town had been destroyed and many members of his family had perished. He spent the next 20 years in Łódź , but in 1967, moved to France, settling in Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life. A solo exhibition of his paintings and drawings was held at Ben Uri in 1971. Adam Muszka died in Paris in 2005. His painting celebrates Jewish life in pre-Second World War Poland and can be found in public collections including the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Warsaw National Gallery and the Lodz Museum of Art in Poland.
