Artist, innovator in papercutting
Tsirl Waletzky, mother of Josh Waletzky, partner of former Harvard resident Jenny Levison, died on Dec. 8 at the age of 90.
Tsirl was one of the major artists of the American Yiddish cultural world and an innovator in the art of Jewish papercutting. She invented a visual language of symbols, many from Biblical and folkloric sources. Tsirl was particularly fond of incorporating birds into her compositions—above all, the dove. One of her papercuts, “The Dove of Peace,” hangs in the home of East Bare Hill Road resident David Durrant. She suffered a gradual loss of vision in her later years, but was able to adapt her style by creating assemblages that combined cut-paper elements with items culled from watch parts she inherited from her father, a jeweler.
Donations in Tsirl’s memory may be made to the Foundation Fighting Blindness, www.blindness.org.
Left: Tsirl Waletzky in the 1950s (Courtesy photo) Right: “The Time of the Singing of the Birds,” papercut by Tsirl Waletzky . (Photo by Elaine Liebenbaum)
