The Jewish Artist Who Created Iconic Soviet Imageries

Cheburashka goes into a store and asks: “Are there any rangez?” “Not rangez – oranges. And no, there aren’t any.” Cheburashka shows up again and asks: “Are there any rangez?” “Not rangez, but oranges. And no, we don’t have oranges.” Cheburashka shows up a third time. “Are there rangez?” “The word is ‘oranges,’ not ‘rangez.’ And if you ask again, we will nail your ears to the wall.” The next day Cheburashka returns: “Do you have nails?” “No.” "A hammer?” “No.” “And rangez?”

This joke, one of many spawned by the animated cartoon series featuring Gena the Crocodile and his good friend, Cheburashka, aka “the animal unknown to science,” captures the essence of the symbolic importance Cheburashka acquired in Soviet and post-Soviet culture: Although odd, clumsy and cut off from an often-hostile reality, this furry, naïve and helpless creature evinces a brave spirit when confronting various circumstances and succeeds in overcoming them.

Leonid Shvartsman, the legendary creator of the endearing Cheburashka, passed away on July 2 in Moscow at the age of 101. During his lifetime, he helped produce more that 70 animated films – 57 of them as chief artist and designer, and 13 as director – and was responsible for dozens of characters that have become icons in the world of Soviet and international animation. Starring on this list are a heartwarming boa constrictor and his friends, a mischievous she-chimpanzee, a very self-confident parrot and a little shy, bespectacled elephant who appeared in the children’s cartoon series “38 Parrots” (directed by Ivan Ufimtsev and scripted by Grigoriy Oster); and also the restless band of monkeys and their exhausted single mother in the “Monkeys” series Shvartsman designed and directed in the 1980s and '90s, which children still love 40 years later.

Among his most familiar characters is the protagonist of "The Snow Queen" – the classical Soviet fantasy film, based on the Hans Christian Andersen story and directed by Lev Atamanov – who was also one of his own favorites, a combination of female beauty and supreme coldness. The renowned Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki once related in an interview that he admired this 1957 version of “The Snow Queen,” adding that it convinced him to continue to make animated films during a period of creative crisis.

• Soviet Emigres Publish Their Own Israeli Cookbook
• One, Two, Three, Four – We Opened Up the Iron Door
• How the Soviet Union's Collapse Changed Their Lives – and Our World

“Leonid Aronovich Shvartsman was apparently the greatest creator of characters on earth,” says Sergei Kapkov, the editor-in-chief of the auteur films at Soyuzmultfilm, the leading Russian animation studio, based in Moscow, who was Shvartsman’s friend in recent years. “Probably no artist has created as many characters as Shvartsman did during his career. He had no competitors. One of his secrets was this: To complete a character, it was important that in his own mind the character would be connected to someone. He would look around and latch onto a specific individual, from whom it sufficed for him to take the eyes, the hair or the style of dress.”

Undoubtedly, though, Cheburashka – a big-eared creature with mournful eyes – was the most legendary character created by Shvartsman. Cheburashka has been featured around the world on T-shirts and as stuffed toys, he served four times as Russia's Olympic mascot and has had many incarnations in popular culture. Some four decades after the first film he starred in was screened in the Soviet Union, a sequel series in anime style was broadcast in Japan. He has starred in numerous memes, including in a macho-aggressive incarnation as “Cheburator.”

In interviews, Shvartsman talked about the exhausting process of creating the figure at the heart of the series of short films that debuted in 1969, which, though permeated with socialist optimism, deals seriously with issues like friendship, loneliness and rejection. In the original 1965 story by children’s author Eduard Uspensky, on which the series was based, Cheburashka was depicted as a sort of misfit toy. The character Shvartsman created was ultimately very different from Uspensky's original, with ears that “crawled” down the sides of his head and grew bigger, while the legs became shorter until only the feet remained and the tail disappeared. All this gave Cheburashka a particularly appealing and identifiable look – not human, but not an alien from another planet either.

According to Kapkov, Cheburashka’s popularity in part is connected to the ease with which children can identify with his character: “The child sees him as someone who's even weaker than himself. The child is accustomed to being cared for, being the smallest, the weakest, and then something comes along that is even weaker. He isn’t a hero – he doesn’t do heroic deeds, he isn’t a leader, he has come out of nowhere. When the other characters build a house, he only gets in the way. He can’t manage to do anything with his hands, he is just underfoot all the time but for some reason the Jewish sadness in his eyes and his helplessness make viewers want to feel sorry for him, to envelop him in affection. Everyone sees something different in him. All the people who worked on the film got it exactly right, and from there it became something irrational that touches the heart and the mind, bringing a smile to the face and a tear to the eye.”

Religion and art

Leonid Shvartsman was born in Minsk, in the period when the Soviet regime had just begun to stabilize in Belarus, to a traditional Jewish, Yiddish-speaking family.

“At that time Minsk was multinational and there were many Jewish aspects of life there,” says film critic Larisa Malyukova, author of the book “Leonid Shvartsman: The Artist of Image.” “His father, Aron Nachmanovitch Shvartsman, and his mother, Rachel Solomonovna, were poor and hardworking. On Rakovskay Street, where they lived, there were several synagogues. Shvartsman once told me about a childhood memory of his father taking him to the synagogue; he tried to feel something but couldn’t.”

That moment – a child standing next to his father in a synagogue, facing the holy ark – was documented in a series of paintings Shvartsman devoted to old Minsk.

In an interview, the artist recalled how as a child he was forced to endure Hebrew studies for two years with a “rebbe” who would come to his home, but he resisted the lessons with all his might. Ultimately, according to Shvartsman, the rebbe left the home in a fit of nerves after hitting his student on the head with a prayer book.

Shvartsman's father died when he was 13, whereupon the teenager left Minsk to live in Leningrad with his sister for a few years, before Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. His neighbors and families of his friends perished in the Holocaust but he and also apparently most of his relatives, survived. His mother, whom he managed to get out of Minsk at the beginning of the war, died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad. He had begun studying art back in Minsk, continued in Leningrad and after the war was accepted to the animation faculty at the USSR film academy in Moscow.

In the credits for the early films on which he worked as artist-designer, he appears as “I. Shvartsman” – his original name was Izrail (Israel). However, during the Six-Day War, when the Soviet Union cut off diplomatic relations with Israel and subsequently embarked on an anti-Zionist campaign in the media, Shvartsman changed his name to the less-problematic Leonid; afterward, he always appeared in the credits as “L. Shvartsman.” Malyukova, the author, says she once asked him why he made that decision, and he replied: “That was the state, that was the situation, and many people had to change their names.”

In recent years, many people have sought to find Jewish elements in the depiction of the furry little Cheburashka by the creative team that invented him, many of whom, most notably director Roman Kachanov and chief art designer, Shvartsman, were indeed Jewish. For her part, Israeli art historian Maya Balakirsky Katz, of Bar-Ilan University, stresses in her book “Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews in the Golden Age of Soviet Animation” that the original literary version of Cheburashka was found in an orange crate, adding that in the 1960s the identification of Jaffa oranges with the State of Israel was very strong in the Soviet Union. She also notes Cheburashka’s obvious foreignness and suggests that by means of his character the creators allowed themselves to hint at sensitivities related to the Holocaust, the memory of which was silenced in the Soviet Union.

Shvartsman himself, insofar as is known, never hinted at the possibility of such an interpretation. Now, sadly, it is too late to ask him about it. Author Malyukova, who kept in close touch with him in recent years, says that above all he was "a cosmopolitan and a Soviet” and it is unlikely that he ever tried, at least consciously, to transmit hidden messages by means of his animations.

“Animation was indeed a field where people who could not express themselves in any other way hid,” says Malyukova. “This is especially true of writers. Therefore, at the Soyuzmultfilm studios there was quite a free atmosphere. However, the censorship did get to them as well, even if a bit less so than in other fields. Shvartsman’s films, too, were distorted by the censor. But Shvartsman chiefly created characters, and as a director really did make films for children. He didn’t engage in politics in any way, and thus in his films there could not have been any hidden political messages.”

“In the context of the persecution of the avant-garde, Jews and dissidents, Soyuzmultfilm was a kind of exclusive members’ club – an island where everyone found their equilibrium,” says Kapkov, the editor. “Composers, writers, poets, actors, directors, anyone who was banned [by the authorities] found solace there. They gave one another work, they enabled one another to create, and they gave one another humor. They laughed and drank endlessly, from morning till night.”

Though Shvartsman never usually spoke out publicly on political matters, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February, he signed a protest letter against the war along with other prominent Russian animators, among them Yuri Nurstein and Gary Bardin.

In his latter years, after the death of his wife, animator Tatyana Dombrovskaya, Shvartsman converted to Christianity although he had been an atheist all his life. As Malyukova explains it, he did this just in case there really is life after death – in order to rejoin his wife in the next world.