Chaim Goldberg (1917-2004), Fiddler at the Shoemaker's,

Chaim Goldberg (1917-2004) was a prominent Jewish artist. He was born in Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula River, where he grew up and began creating. In 1931, while staying in Kazimierz, Saul Silberstein discovered the boy's work in his father's shoemaking workshop. Thanks to this meeting and Silberstein's influence, Goldberg was able to study art. Attorney Felix Kronhstein and sculptor Henryk Kuna also funded him with a scholarship. And so Chaim studied at the School of Fine Arts in Cracow and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, from which he graduated in 1938. He studied under such masters as Xawery Dunikowski, Henryk Gottlieb, Henryk Kuna and Tadeusz Pruszkowski. The latter organized famous open-air workshops in Kazimierz Dolny for his students. Although Chaim Goldberg returned to his hometown with a group of fellow painters, his artistic sensibility had already been formed by the Jewish tradition. In his paintings, sometimes similar in poetics to the work of Marc Chagalle, he depicted the daily life and spirituality of the shtetl.