Zoya Cherkassky, “Soviet Childhood”

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, some one million Russian Jews came to Israel in a wave that effectively expanded the country’s population by 20 percent. Among the arrivals was a then 15-year-old Zoya Cherkassky, a Kiev-born artist whose paintings—in a style that could be called primitive socialist realism—chart the vicissitudes of a group obliged to balance assimilation into Israeli society on the one hand with their own deeply rooted Russian identity on the other. For her first solo exhibition in the United States, Cherkassky returns to her roots with scenes that depict her life growing up in Ukraine as part of the last generation of Soviet children.