Friends of the family of Boris Pasternak, Soviet-Jewish author who was named this year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature for his novel “Doctor Zhivago” today emphasized that his father Leonid, a world famous painter who left Russia after the Communist revolution and settled in Berlin and later in London, was a close friend of Dr. Chaim Weizmann and painted his portrait. The mother of the Nobel Prize winner, Rose Kaufman Pasternak, was a musician.
Leonid Pasternak was also a close friend of numerous Hebrew writers, including Chaim Nachman Blalik, Saul Tschenichovky, Zalman Schneur, Nahum Sokolov and others whose portraits he painted. He also visited Palestine in 1924, where his portrait of Prof. Albert Einstein is on permanent exhibition at the Hebrew University. In 1923, a book he wrote on Rembrandt and the Jews was published in Hebrew and Yiddish.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
