Today we’d like to introduce you to Boris Lemon.
Hi Boris, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
As a child in Leningrad, the bleak, stifling atmosphere of Soviet repression was invisible to me. My parents were protective of my brother and I and worked very hard on providing for us the conditions for a “normal” childhood. My father was a chemist who worked for the Faklempt Gornish Lead Paint Collective in Pavlovsk. My mother was a professor of agricultural engineering at Lermontov University. They were both extremely cultivated, and our home functioned as an informal salon for Russian intellectuals and artists of every political stripe. You’d be surprised to learn that the authorities were fairly indulgent of this type of bourgeois parasitism. Until, of course, they weren’t.
My uncle Yeke, a professional klezmer musician, was moonlighting as a police informant in order to put some money aside for a down payment on a dacha in Sochi. It turns out that Yeke, though a terrific clarinetist, was a terrible quisling. The KGB got so tired of his meandering, obfuscating, noncommittal weekly reports that they arrested him, sentenced him to five years in prison, and shut down my parents’ genteel, apolitical coffee klatches.
That signaled the beginning of the end of our pleasant cosmopolitan life. Now that we were under the radar of the state security apparatchiks, little by little, the shadow of communist repression darkened our prospects for an anonymous, uneventful future. When we were given the opportunity to get an exit visa for Israel, we grabbed it.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
We never made it to the ‘promised land.’ This being the 1970s, there were no direct flights from Russia to Tel Aviv. All emigrants had to be processed first at a ‘transit center’ in either Austria or Italy. As luck would have it, we landed in Ladispoli, though my brother and I were convinced we had died and gone to heaven. Through his research of the drying accelerants of titanium, my father was acquainted with Primo Levi’s lab assistant, Sebastiano del Piombo. Through Sebastiano, we were able to get a temporary work/residency permit, allowing us to live in Turin for eighteen months.
I was immediately enrolled at L’Istituto delle Lenti Correttive e delle Opere d’Arte, the only school that was open to foreigners. I was fifteen and had never drawn anything other than clumsy sickles for May Day youth parades. My teacher, Professor Taddeo Zucchero, saw my potential and encouraged me to take my art studies seriously.
The rest is history.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
After a year and a half in Turin, we managed to get a visa for the U.S. We moved to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, and I finished high school at the Yeshiva of Flatbush. That one seminal year at parochial school proved critical to the development of my work as a professional artist. I became obsessed by Jewish history and would spend hours at the local library reading biographies of famous Jews. Among my favorites were Flavius Josephus, Albert Einstein, Sandy Koufax, Jesus, Rosa Luxemburg, Sammy Davis Jr., Crazy Eddie, Marcel Proust, and Gene Simmons.
Now, I focus on small, autobiographical narrative drawing. What I try to do is try imagine how my uneventful life would be seen by one of my heroes. For example, I did a series of pastels where I put myself in paintings by Camille Pissarro, lounging around under the trees with a reed between my teeth. I called that series “Conversing with a Converso.” Currently, I’m working on a group of small-scale ink drawings where I play the part of Albert Cohen’s Solal in Belle de Seigneur.
What sets me apart is that I have no shame.
What are your plans for the future?
My hope is to return to Italy, buy an apartment in Rome, and spend my dotage in Trastevere sipping coffee and reading Manzoni.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://borislemon.blogspot.com
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@borislemon4206
