GUEST: This was carved by my great-grandfather. He was from Eastern Europe, a town called Zhitomir, which is in the Belarus/Kiev/Ukraine area.
APPRAISER: Yeah.
GUEST: He immigrated with his family to the United States around 1912, approximately.
APPRAISER: Yeah.
GUEST: He was a wood carver, carved furniture as a trade, and on the side, he did this piece of art as... I guess just to do it. It may have been carved for a bimah in a synagogue in Chicago, where he lived.
APPRAISER: It's a wonderful piece of American folk art, but it represents both American folk art, it represents immigrant art. It also has a layer of Judaica because of the subject matter and because of some of the inscriptions here.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: So you and I have been talking about what these different inscriptions mean.
GUEST: I can read the English, and it says, "Adam and Eve was tempted by the snake. With sweat, you should work." I like the Yiddish inflection.
APPRAISER: Right, and the sentiment.
GUEST: Yes. "On your earth, go out of the garden."
APPRAISER: And that's the English.
GUEST: I did get approximate translation for the spanner here to mean, "From dust to dust."
APPRAISER: Right, which is a strong biblical sentiment.
GUEST: Right. It does have some depictions of the creation story and the animals, even the seed pods, and there are these animals, and there's a little bit of inscription over here on this bowl and on the fish.
APPRAISER: Right. We have actually a pictorial representation of the story of Adam and Eve as it appears in the Bible.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And I love the way that Adam is depicted because he almost has a handlebar mustache, so it's a little bit of a transference of what was men's coiffure of the period.
GUEST: I believe my great-grandfather also had a mustache like that.
APPRAISER: So there you go. So it's very rich and very fulsome, and because you have that overlay of different collecting interests, I think we are all pretty confirmed that the right auction estimate for it would be something in the range of $8,000 to $10,000.
GUEST: Very nice. I'm keeping it in the family, as they say.
APPRAISER: Right.
