The letters of Abraham Israel Scheptowitzki to Lasar Segall

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus of 3 letters written by the Jewish artist Abraham Israel Scheptowitzki to Lasar Segall, preserved in the archive of the Lasar Segall Museum, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Dating from 1939, the correspondence documents an artistic friendship and the progressive exclusion and persecution of a Jewish intellectual in Nazi Germany. Through close reading of the letters, the study reconstructs Scheptowitzki’s efforts to emigrate, his reliance on transnational Jewish networks of assistance, and the emotional experience of living under escalating political threat.The letters also illuminate Segall’s role, from Brazil, as an intermediary who mobilized international aid institutions and personal contacts in attempts to assist persecuted colleagues. At the same time, the article reflects on the methodological challenges of reconstructing an individual trajectory from an archive that does not belong to the subject himself. Scheptowitzki’s biography emerges only fragmentarily, mediated by Segall’s documentary field and marked by significant archival gaps. By situating this correspondence at the intersection of art history, Jewish migration studies, and  the historiography of Shoa, the article demonstrates the value of epistolary archives for recovering marginalized lives and for understanding how personal relationships and cultural networks functioned as strategies of survival under conditions of forced displacement and genocide.