Jacob's Ladder: From the Bottom of the Warsaw Ghetto to the Top of New York's Art World

Jacob D. Weintraub, Author Madison Books $29.95 (312p) ISBN 978-1-56833-035-8

Weintraub here describes his 40-year career in the art world, which began in 1947, shortly after he and his wife, Barbara, immigrated to the U.S. from Poland. After making his reputation as a collector and dealer of German Expressionist art, he opened the Weintraub Gallery in Manhattan in 1967. The middle third of his memoir is a harrowing account of life in the WWII Warsaw Ghetto-Weintraub lost his entire family. He and his wife escaped to the ``Aryan'' side and posed as Catholics under the names Tadeusz and Mentlak Winiawski until the war ended. Barbara died in 1975 and Weintraub married his present wife, Bronka Rabin, in 1979. His blunt opinions on the art business are a curious foil to his account of the Holocaust. Both sets of experiences are linked in a concluding quote: ``[Museum] curators are not in my view a higher class of human species than dealers. As a survivor of the Holocaust, I remain forever suspicious of any social scheme that seeks to place one class of individuals above another.'' Illustrations. (Nov.)

Reviewed on: 11/28/1994

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