Ida Bernstein, 94; Used Paintings to Chronicle War-Torn Ukraine

Ida Bernstein, who chronicled her tragic childhood history in war-torn Ukraine by painting somber stylistic oils, has died. She was 94.

Bernstein died Sunday night in her Los Angeles home, said her daughter, Rozanne Hinner, of myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disease.

Born in Dubova, Ukraine, in 1907, Bernstein survived the tumultuous Russian civil war, although many members of her family did not.

Like a latter-day Grandma Moses, she began painting when she was about 60 to document her life.

“I’m not a writer,” she told The Times in 1998 when the A Shenere Velt Gallery, operated by the Workmen’s Circle, staged a show of her work. “But I always wanted to tell my story. When we came here, nobody paid attention to why we came.”

In 1919, when she was 11, bandits had attacked her family, hacking to death her 17-year-old sister and 2-year-old brother and murdering her father as he prayed at a nearby synagogue.

She and her other sisters fled their house in a hail of bullets. Separated from the others, Bernstein hid in a ditch overnight with a neighborhood boy and the next day moved to a haystack where a kindly woman fed the two children for two more nights.

Bernstein was reunited with her sisters and her seriously ill mother, but her mother died shortly afterward. One of the aging artist’s most moving canvases was a portrait of her mother.

“I don’t have a picture of my mother, so I visualized her,” she said in 1998, standing near the painting. “She’s lost her children, her husband, her home, her money, and she’s sick and no one will help her.”

Bernstein and surviving members of her family came to America in 1923, settling in Chicago. In 1935, she moved to Los Angeles, where she and her husband raised a son and twin daughters.

Among her works of art were etchings of the 1919 childhood flight from the robbers and dozens of drawings and oils reflecting events throughout Bernstein’s life: her labor in the garment industry in the 1930s, the Holocaust in the 1940s, the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg during the McCarthy era of the 1950s and anti-war protests of the 1960s.

Educators and art critics credited the 4-foot-6, white-haired Bernstein with creating an illustrated history not only of her life but also of major traumatic events of the 20th century.

In addition to Hinner, Bernstein is survived by two other children, Marvin Bernstein and Marianne Spiegel; six grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren.

Services are planned for 11 a.m. today at Mt. Sinai Mortuary. The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to Choose Ability First (formerly called the Crippled Children’s Society) at 6530 Winnetka Ave., Woodland Hills, CA 91367.