Art styles don’t die; they barely go away. They can be exhausted by uninspired overuse, go out of fashion or be judged hopelessly reactionary. After that they mostly lie dormant until artists come along and make them new again.

For example, the Ukrainian-born, Israel-based artist Zoya Cherkassky has developed an unlikely hybrid of Social Realism and early Modernist figuration, spiked with cartooning, manga comics and children’s book illustrations. It can be seen in “Soviet Childhood,” her knockout American debut exhibition at Fort Gansevoort, a quirky downtown gallery.

[Read reviews of other shows closing soon: Nancy Spero at MoMA PS1 and Leonora Carrington at Wendi Norris.]

The show presents recent works from the artist, who was born in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, in the U.S.S.R., in 1976, started studying art at the age of 10 and emigrated to Israel with her family at age 14, in 1991, when the collapse of Communist rule was months away. In 2010, while pregnant with her own daughter, she began to paint and draw her memories of growing up in the Soviet Union.