Every payday from 1926, the year Ab and Celie married, Ab, a shoemaker, gave his wife his brown wage envelope containing, in all probability, the housekeeping money. On each he drew a picture chronicling his love for Celie, the highs and lows of their married life, and the pressures on that relationship from relatives, from the challenge of parenthood, cultural demands and aspirations and from external and international events. In total, the number of drawings amounted to 3,000, stored in battered boxes, and passed on to Braverman, Ab’s great-nephew, by his mother.
While the audience are able to view these treasured drawings, displayed in glass cases on the Seymour’s Centre’s top floor, Braverman’s show is structured around the dissection of selected images and a story, possibly conjecture, arising from or connected with them. For instance, a sad picture of Ab and Celie slumped in arm-chairs, facing in different directions, and divided by a brick wall, records their despair. While they could manage their autistic son as a child, the Solomons were forced to take the unpalatable solution of placing an adult Harry in an institution. On their return home after a weekly visit, the distance between husband and wife evidences the emotional exhaustion of such heart-breaking circumstances.
However, typical of Abe, the presentation’s title “Wot? No Fish!” is taken from an illustration showing that he can leaven even this sorrow with wit. It is perhaps a particularly Jewish joke as Harry, looking at the meal brought for him by his visiting parents, appears deeply surprised at the lack of the de rigeur gefilte fish. Bravener’s apparently casual ice-breaking discussion of the taste of the fish-balls references Ab’s work as a whole: he can be bitterly honest, critical of Celie and of himself, of Celie’s interfering sister Lily, of competitive Jewish grandparents when at last the couple move to the socially upmarket Golders Green, yet there is always a sweetener.
Another attribute of the famed fish sauce, we are told through the homely anecdote of irremovable stains on tablecloths, is its indelibility. Having seen Ab Solomon’s weekly chronicle, which ceased with Celie’s death in 1982, its increasing skill, its telling and charming details, its charting of Ab Solomon’s love for his cherry-nosed wife, it is doubtful that it can ever be forgotten. Nor can the generosity of Danny Bravener in bringing his great-uncle’s incredibly moving anthology to the world.
