Anya Liptser vividly remembers the cold Sunday autumn afternoon in Moscow when her father took her to her first drawing class. The first-grader did not go willingly. She wanted to stay home and watch a cartoon show on TV.
Fortunately, her father insisted.
“We arrived at the artist’s house – a Jewish family who had been waiting for years for a permit to leave Russia – and I fell in love with the classes. I spent about seven years there, almost every day, until they received a permit and left Russia. I studied oil painting, watercolors, graphics, and many other things,” she recounts.
Her next art teacher was also Jewish and eventually received permission to leave Russia as well. At that point, despite her promising potential, Liptser stopped painting and didn’t pick up a brush for 35 years. However, her eye was always drawn to paintings in museums and galleries that used special techniques or conveyed unusual concepts.
Having spent so much time with talented Jews leaving Russia for a freer and better life, which included colleagues of her Jewish father, a mathematics professor, she dreamed of seeing the world beyond the Iron Curtain. “Around the age of 17, I already knew that I would leave at the first opportunity,” she says.
Meanwhile, she trained as a metal fabrication engineer and married Anatoly Zaidman, a physician. Their son was born in 1987.
At the beginning of 1990, as Russia opened its borders for Jews to emigrate, the couple decided to make aliyah.
“The truth is that I knew almost nothing about Israel. It really didn’t matter. Because breaking through the borders of a closed country was a transition to something that was real freedom. That’s how I thought, a little naively, but even now I really appreciate having a passport and knowing that at any given moment you can get a ticket and fly freely in any direction you want,” she explains.
Her parents followed in 1993, after her father accepted a position at Tel Aviv University. He worked there until his death in 2019.
The Liptser-Zaidmans lived in Safed for a few months, then in Kfar Saba. “We were so young and optimistic that we didn’t feel any special difficulties,” she recalls. “We took everything with ease and love. We were a bit overwhelmed by language studies; in Russia, we didn’t have time to learn Hebrew.
“I think the hardest thing was our first winter in Israel, 1991 to 1992. It was particularly cold, with snow and hail in Kfar Saba. It’s hard to be in a cold house without central heating like we had in Russia. But we got used to it pretty quickly and managed to enjoy every moment.”
They moved to Karnei Shomron in 1996, a Samarian settlement surrounded by “peace and quiet with amazing, pastoral landscapes.”
Liptser worked for a car importer for nine years. For the past 24 years, she has been employed as a purchasing manager in a leading auto-leasing company.
The birth of an artist
THE ONLY picture she painted until eight years ago was of an elephant or a dragon – she doesn’t recall which – on the wall of her son’s bedroom in Kfar Saba.
Her return to art began when she happened upon the studio of artist Yoram Gal in Old Jaffa. She was captivated by his exquisite bird paintings. “At that moment, I thought maybe I should paint one for myself,” she says.
She bought acrylic paints, which did not exist where she grew up, and after a few attempts made a bird painting good enough to hang on her wall.
“At that moment, I felt that I had to learn something new. I felt a need and desire to take a brush in my hand.”
Today, though her professional responsibilities keep her busy all week long, she devotes weekends to “drinking coffee in front of a mountain view, studying, and drawing a lot.”
Liptser trained in Japanese painting, as well as Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. “Japanese calligraphy is like painting and gives a feeling of ‘fluttering’ from the brush like a butterfly fluttering over flowers,” she says.
A member of the Petah Tikva Artists Association and an international Chinese-Japanese painting association in Tokyo, Liptser draws mostly in shades of gray on rice paper, using Japanese ink and mineral paints.
Her style is strongly influenced by the Japanese techniques of Sumi-e, a monochrome inking style; and gyotaku, which involves inking a fish on paper and pressing it onto another paper or fabric.
She attributes her affinity for Japanese imagery to the fact that her grandparents and mother moved at the end of World War II to Sakhalin Island, a Russian island in the Pacific Ocean just north of Japan.
“They lived together with Japanese people in Japanese houses for a few years before the Russians deported the Japanese back to Japan. My father’s family arrived there in 1948, and my parents attended the same school.”
Her parents filled their home in Moscow with Japanese items such as utensils, kimonos, art books, and paintings. Liptser grew up with a love for “everything related to Asia,” even though Moscow had only one museum exhibiting Oriental art.
“I have been to Hong Kong and Thailand, and to Japan twice – the first time on my mother’s 85th birthday and the second time last year, when I participated in an exhibition of the International Sumi-e Association. In the winter, I intend to go to Tokyo again; I have already sent paintings to the exhibition organizers.”
From November 8 until December 26, her exhibition Crazy Cage: Illusion Unlocked will be on display at Tel Aviv’s Frishman 46 art gallery.
“This is an exhibition about internal limitations, feelings, fears, illusory thoughts; the ‘cages’ that each of us builds for ourselves, or that someone else builds for us, during our lives.”
Much as Liptser enjoys traveling abroad, often with Russian friends and family, she also enjoys simply walking around Karnei Shomron. “It is very relaxing and helps me with painting because here in Samaria we have amazing nature, trees, and flowers like in the East. Almost everything I need is here.” ■
ANYA (ANNA) LIPTSER, 58 FROM MOSCOW TO SAFED AND KFAR SABA, 1991; TO KARNEI SHOMRON, 1996