In Wot? No Fish!! at Battersea Arts Centre, Danny Braverman ambles on to the stage with some Tupperware and a shoebox. The Tupperware holds gefilte fish and sauce. He invites the audience to taste, asking who can identify the ingredients. Inside the shoebox is the work of an unknown artist, the source of a beautiful hour and a half of memory and speculation.
From 1926 to 1982, Braverman’s great uncle Ab Solomons chronicled his life in vivacious sketches. His records were regular: one a week. His canvas was always the same: the small brown envelope in which his wages as a shoemaker were placed. The first time he handed his wages to his young wife, he made a simple line drawing of a broom and saucepan on the back of the packet. He quickly expanded his range. With pen and ink and later paint, and a light touch, he drew in these uniform squares the history of a Jewish family in Dalston, east London.
Projecting the images on a screen, Braverman teases out their significance. Abe’s wife Celie is usually pictured with a clownlike red nose: that’s because she had a cold on their wedding day. She is seen ogling a coat with a fur collar (they were never rich), and hinting at sexual acrobatics. The couple are shown in bed shouting at their younger son to be quiet. He was, though never diagnosed, autistic and not able to contain his shouts and songs. His father drew him in his 20s, sitting beside his bed in a residential home. He is saying to his parents: “You can go now.”
Affectionate and unsparing, Braverman makes the unwinding of the story look effortless. As if he had just come across the material. As if the pictures told their own story. Actually, events and emotions have to be supplemented by research and guesswork. The show is an incentive to see the innate drama in daily lives and to look again at modest, gifted recorders of those lives. One extraordinary mini-epic by Ab shows his family of four holding hands while climbing a flight of stairs. They look springy and hopeful. They cannot know that if each step counts as one year, at the top there is catastrophe. It will be 1939.
