The book launching event of Laura S. Shor’s new biography Sophie Halaby In Jerusalem: An Artist’s Life, took place on a rainy cold Jerusalemite evening in the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. Arriving in the old historical building that itself carries a rich history, the Jerusalem winter outside is immediately forgotten. Schor welcomes her guests in the impressive historical Pasha Room with warm light. In one corner you can see a grand piano and in the middle of the room a painting by Sophie Halaby that shows a severe-looking woman dressed in green. The painting is part of Mazen Qupty’s collection, the Palestinian lawyer and art collector, with special interest in Sophie Halaby’s work. He is also present as a discussant. The whole ambience spreads a graceful mood and already indicates what this evening is all about: History and art, more precisely about a Palestinian woman, Sophie Halaby, and her contribution to Palestinian history and culture.
Learning about Sophie Halaby
Mazen Qupty starts the evening by emotionally talking about how he met Sophie Halaby when she came to his office once to seek his advice as a lawyer about a matter of unfair properties in Bethlehem. Even though they met several times, she never spoke with him about her art, and always refused to show him her paintings. After her death in 1997, Qupty met a man who invited him to his home and said that he was in possession of Sophie Halaby's art collection. Qupty immediately knew that it was important to save Sophie Halaby’s work and laughs while telling that he bought the whole collection for only $5.000. In 2008, the Jerusalem Post wrote an article about Mazen Qupty and his collection of Sophie Halaby’s art. In this article Qupty made one passionate statement that would rise Schor’s interest in Sophie Halaby and was thus the starting point of the entire project of writing a biography:
“It’s important for everyone, including Israelis, to see that Palestinians have a cultural life and cultural history and are not just shooting and throwing stones and blowing themselves up.”
The American historian Laura S. Schor, who had authored numerous studies on other pioneering women, directly thought about a new project featuring the life and work of Sophie Halaby. She contacted Qupty and visited him in his home in Beit Hanina. “The variety and beauty of the works in Qupty’s collection moved me and I decided to learn more about Sophie Halaby and her work”, she says.
“Finding/discovering” Sophie Halaby
Laura Schor began her presentation by describing the process of “finding” Sophie Halaby. “I began this project with the intent of bringing Sophie Halaby’s life and works onto the stage of history”. Schor talked about how she brought together Halaby’s art, research from oral histories, papers from family members peers and from various institutional archives to sketch the contours of the artist’s life against the backdrop of 20th century Jerusalem. Schor met with people, mostly women, who had known the artist at different periods of her life. Through their personal voices, Schor started lucidly threading the pieces of Halaby’s life story together and sketches for the audience, step by step, and the world that Halaby inhabited.
Life of Sophie Halaby
Sophie Halaby (1906-1997) was born into an affluent and educated Jerusalem family. She was a multilingual child of a Russian Orthodox mother and an Arab Orthodox father and grew up in Musrara, a vibrant neighborhood outside the walls of the Old City, from her birth in 1906 until 1948. Having attended the diverse and prestigious Jerusalem Girl's College, Halaby spoke four languages, worked for the British Administration and floated in the intellectual circles of Jerusalem's society that traversed religious barriers.Sophie and her sister Asia to whom Sophie was very close, were members of the elite society of Jerusalem who attended teas and other social functions also at the American Colony Hotel, another reason for the location for today’s event.
Schor passionately explained that Sophie Halaby was not only the first woman but also the first independent talent in Palestine who was determined to go on her own to further her art studies abroad. Paris, the world capital of art during the late 1920s and early 1930s, was where the twenty- three-year-old talent from Jerusalem opted to pursue her art studies. As the French wanted to have more influence in the region, they offered students from Palestine to study in France. This was a great opportunity, because Jewish institutions didn’t accept non-Jewish students and in Amman they didn’t have an art department. From 1929-1933, Sophie lived in the Foyer International des Etudiantes in Paris.
Nevertheless, regardless of her privileged upbringing, her life, according to Schor, was still "deeply affected by Arab and Zionist nationalism" and by the "continuous physical changes to her city." She and her family were subjected to displacement, land seizures by the Israeli government and raids of her home and studio. In 1948 during the Nakba, she found temporary refuge in a Russian Orthodox convent in the Old City. The rest of her life she lived in Wadi Joz, a section of Jerusalem governed by Jordan and later occupied by Israel. Luckily, in 1948 Sophie succeeded in saving her work amid the dislocation and destruction of war.
While other artists in Palestine turned to overtly political themes, Halaby's art remained subtle and poetic.The political turmoil of her times is largely not depicted in her art.Instead she focuses on a single bouquet against a muted background, or a small cluster of wildflowers against soft expanses of hills and valleys. While showing the audience pictures of Sophie Halaby’s paintings on a big screen, Schor explained her interpretation of Halaby’s art: "Her persistent painting of Jerusalem as she willed it to be, was her private form of resistance."
Schor then explains a discovery that “added another dimension to the picture I had been forming of her long life”. In the Palestine and Transjordan Weekly published during the Arab Revolt 1936-39, Schor found nine political cartoons by Sophie Halaby that challenged both the British and the Zionist. “These political cartoons represent a moment in Halaby’s life when she was directly involved with vigorous political discussion in Palestine,” Schor explained. Nevertheless, with the exception of these nine political cartoons, Sophie Halaby was mostly not involved in politics, in contrast to her more politically active sister.
Sophie Halaby suffered from a heart disease and was buried at the Mount of Olives in 1997. Her sister Asia, her lifelong companion, couldn’t be at the funeral as she was in the latest staged of dementia in a nursing home.
Schor hopes that Halaby's story will inspire others, like herself, "to work for a better present and future for Jerusalem and for the Palestinian people." She emphasized that “additional work is needed to digitalize all of her paintings and to make them available to art historians and other scholars” and said that the next step should be an exhibit of her works, ideally accompanied by a conference to discuss her place in Palestinian art history.
It became clear to the entire audience that Schor's biography plays an important role in shedding light on this little known but outstanding artist and enriches our understanding of modern Palestinian history. Schor offers a much-needed nuance to Palestine women's and art history and through her judicious research and writing, Sophie Halaby in Jerusalem recreates the world Halaby inhabited and amplifies her quiet, but powerful voice. During the discussion,Nora Kort,President of the Arab Orthodox Society who is engaged in various women projects and knew Sophie and her sister Asia personally, said that “If we talk about Palestinian women, we talk about these two sisters, they were so empowering. The memory of these women should be also recognized by the local community”. Powerful closing words for a great and inspiring evening.
