Peter Z. Malkin

 "The South American Handbook"

"I bought a copy of the South American Handbook in France en route to Buenos Aires. I could never have imagined, however, that these pages with their information on Argentina would eventually function as the background to my own pictures. Once I started, I couldn't stop until most of the pages were covered by drawn and colored images and by scribbled sentences and signs.

"I took the little red book with me wherever I went. No one could possibly have suspected that I related to it as my diary. During the day, I would sketch houses, and toward the evening, figures from the carnival celebrating Argentina's 150th anniversary of Independence. In the small hours of night, however, I depicted Eichmann, Nazis, personal memoirs, and members of my own family, as well as local people I encountered during my stay in Argentina. For four whole months, I filled the book with my colored drawings, continually revising.

"Upon returning to Israel, I hid it in a closet in my mother's house. Following her death seventeen years later, I recovered it just as I had left it. Now I saw how each picture told a story and how every snatch of sentence in color hinted at the event it described.

"Today, after almost 40 years, the book still affects me, as if I had made these drawings only yesterday."

At the time of the capture and captivity of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, Peter Z. Malkin painted 60 images on both sides of the pages in a copy of The South American Handbook. In 1991, curators from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, preparing for an exhibition, carefully removed the pages from the spine of the book. The paintings were placed in 14 double-sided frames (like an open book); two images were viewed from the front of each frame, and two others from the back. 

The paintings were rebound in the original handbook, which is presently in the artist's private collection. They are museum quality with priceless historic value.

The South American Handbook paintings have been published with the artist's memories in Volume I of The Artwork and Memories of Peter Z. Malkin.

The South American Handbook Paintings

The South American Handbook Critique