Rachel Suckever

Rachel Suckever (2 November 1904 – 1943 or 1944) was a Jewish painter active in interwar Vilnius. A member of the modernist Yiddish arts collective Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna), she was murdered during the Holocaust, having spent her final years documenting fellow prisoners in the Vilnius Ghetto.

Early life

Suckever was born in a Jewish family in Smarhon, Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire (now in Belarus), and had a younger sister, Chaya. During the First World War her family was deported into the Russian interior. They spent the war years in Siberia and, afterward, settled in Vilna by 1922. They lived in the old Jewish quarter of the city; the family was poor. At some point she adopted the more modern name Roza in place of Rachel, a change art historian reads as a deliberate break from religious tradition, alongside a developing interest in left-wing politics.

Education and career

Suckever studied at a Jewish gymnasium while also attending the drawing school of the Polish artists' society in Vilna. In 1925, she enrolled as a non-matriculated student in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Stefan Batory University. Between 1928 and 1930 she traveled to New York with her father, Naum Suckever, working as a hotel maid while continuing to paint.

Back in Vilnius she resumed her studies under Ludomir Sleńdziński, one of the city's most influential painters, and joined Yung-Vilne, an artistic group that included poets Chaim Grade and Abraham Sutzkever and artists such as Sheyne Efron. (Sutzkever later noted that he and Roza were not related, or only very distantly.) She also designed covers for poetry collections of her fellow group members:

In 1938, she organized her personal exhibition in Vilnia, in 1943 or 1944. Her exact date of death is unknown.