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- Berthe Lipchitz
- Title
- Draft letter 2 from Berthe Lipchitz to a Minister
- Date
- [13 September 1930]
- Format
- Document - correspondence
- Collection
- Tate Archive
- Acquisition
- Presented to Tate Archive by Rubin Lipchitz, March 1989; the cataloguing and selective digitisation of this archive collection was supported by Mr Timm Bergold, 2023
- Reference
- TGA 897/1/3/22/2
Description
Berthe was writing to a minister which is most likely the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. She describes the situation with her son Andrei Shimkevich, who travelled in 1929 to see his father, Mikhail, in the USSR and has been trying to return to France since. Mikhail resists his return and Andrei tried to escape the country several times, was arrested and put into prison. Berthe asks the recipient to interfere and to save her son. Full text in translation:
'Sir,
Your childhood friend, Jean Giradoux, who spoke to you on numerous occasions about my poor son [illegible sentence] last winter, travelling at the moment, I take the liberty to write to you directly.
[illegible sentence] our request for you to intervene against the USSR authorities and to repatriate my poor son, Andre Schimkévitch to France near his mother. He was arrested a while ago, in May I think, near Batoum in Caucas, when he was about to cross the Turkey border with two friends so he could come back to France, his country and near his mother.
This is his sad story, my son, Andre Schimkévitch, born in Paris on the 20th of February 1913, myself, his mother I'm French as well as my very well-known husband, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, with whom I lived since 1915 and who has been looking after every need of my son and has helped to raise him, his father having never helped. Even if my son and my husband loved each other [illegible sentence].
My son was at the Janson de Sailly high school until the end of October 1927 when he was taken by an invincible and sudden urge to meet his father. He made an enormous fuss. This is why we agreed to let him leave at the age of fourteen. His father, who promised me to send him back immediately, never did. The little one feeling abandoned and sad kept begging us to bring him back to France. With this goal his French passport was sent and given to him by the French Embassy in Moscow. It's probably at the time that Mr. Giradoux wrote to ask you to help my son due to his young age. But because of the differences between my son and his father, who didn't want to help him, my son left the paternal home.'
Archive context
- Personal and professional papers of Jacques Lipchitz TGA 897 (451)
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- Correspondence TGA 897/1 (212)
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- Correspondence to and from Berthe Lipchitz (Kitrosser) TGA 897/1/3 (28)
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- Draft letters from Berthe Lipchitz to a Minister TGA 897/1/3/22 (3)
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- Draft letter 2 from Berthe Lipchitz to a Minister TGA 897/1/3/22/2