CALL him Grandpa Moses — Mayer Kirshenblatt didn’t put brush to canvas until he was 73 years old. After that, there was no stopping him.
Pressed for stories of his childhood in Poland, he re-created a past from memory: the kitchens, synagogues and classrooms, rivers and markets.
The results, on display in “They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood,” opening tomorrow at the Jewish Museum, are what Sholom Aleichem might have produced if he’d used oils instead of words, or what Chagall might have done if he hadn’t fantasized that much — or what Matisse might have painted if he’d grown up as a Polish Jew.
Vibrant with color, they’re the antithesis of every drab shtetl scene you’ve seen before — a valentine to the town of Opatow, Poland.
We see the kitchen (spacious to New York eyes), where he practiced the violin while his mother cooked; the courtyard where a cellist played for coins; the river where the carp swam en route to becoming gefilte fish. Here, too, is the marketplace where the village’s resident kleptomaniac smuggled a fish in her bra; and “The Gramophone,” which shows a cluster of neighbors peering in through the window.
And if some paintings seem a little rushed — look closely and you’ll see bare patches of canvas — well, Kirshenblatt, who’s still painting at 92, figures he doesn’t have a lot of time.
What he does have is near-perfect recall of the people and places he left 75 years ago. “God gave me a good memory,” he said the other day. (The video accompanying the exhibit shows him shoveling his Toronto driveway.)
What he didn’t see for himself, he imagined. How else could he have painted the scene of women scrubbing themselves in the ritual bath, the mikvah?
“Listen, I’m an artist,” he tells The Post. “I know what the mikvah looked like, I added women. What’s the big deal?”
Judge for yourself. Kirshenblatt plans to attend the show’s opening tomorrow from 11:30 a.m. on, so catch him while you can.
“They Called Me Mayer July” runs through Oct. 1 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave., at 92nd Street; thejewishmuseum.org.