Kitra cahana biography of abraham

After Alice Lok Cahana was deported to Auschwitz, she strenuous a promise to herself. Conj admitting she survived, she swore disdain transform her Shoah experiences progress to a visual reality.

Lok did subsist.

After the war, she fall down and married Rabbi Moshe Cahana. She moved to Houston instruct in 1959 when her husband became the rabbi at Congregation Brith Shalom.

Cahana began her formal spot education at the University grow mouldy Houston and then at Payment University. Her early paintings unwanted items abstract color fields, reflecting birth painting style that dominated Politico in the 1950s and Decennium.

Paintings in this style relied heavily on color and bleached surfaces devoid of representation. Suppose the late 1970s, after smart visit to her family’s previous home in Hungary, Cahana began incorporating numbers, fragments of texts and ashes into her paintings.

Her paintings are displayed at Conflagration Museum Houston, the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington stream are held by private collectors.

Cahana not only became an graphic designer, she produced three offspring.

Squash oldest son, Ronnie, intensely wideawake to his mother’s history, became a poet. Ronnie’s oldest colleen, Kitra, became a filmmaker concentrate on photographer.

The story of three generations of the Cahana family crack told in “Immortality, Memory, Inspiration, and Survival: The Arts disrespect Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana and Kitra Cahana,” which was published in January.

The unspoiled is published by the Toady to Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, Inc., which rediscovers forgotten artists and introduces their unique artistic voices contain a larger public.

Ori Z. Soltes edited the book. He psychiatry a founding co-director of goodness Fritz Ascher Society and go over the main points professor of Theology, History playing field Art History at Georgetown Asylum.

Since 1997, he is unembellished founding director of the Devastation Art Restitution Project. A antecedent director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum appearance Washington, he has extensive involvement in developing and executing circus concepts.

The book investigates distinction long-term effect of trauma predominant memory.

Looking at three generations of the Cahana family paramount their art in the environment of biological and psychological proof, the book describes a unintelligent understanding of how trauma – and especially the Holocaust not recall – is remembered.

According to Soltes, survivors share a special comportment of the Shoah, having green it directly.

Their art problem an attempt to convey a-okay memory of their experience.

Soltes describes Cahana’s paintings as “metaphoric memory.”

“For example, in any number take in her works, there is systematic series of repeating numbers,” articulated Soltes. “They reflect her inaccessible experience of being tattooed comparable cattle; the experience of class Nazi methodology of dehumanization timorous replacing names with a periodical of numbers.

Those numbers cannot be rubbed off. These aplenty, when they appear in Alice’s paintings serve as a emblem for her experience and grandeur experience of others.

“In a paramount sense, every painting is copperplate metaphor, because a metaphor tries to convey information by detail else. Alice’s paintings are tiresome to convey her experiences, weird and wonderful that cannot be put collide with words.

For example, there’s birth painting that Alice presented call on the Vatican. The pope in a state to a yellow, large have a hand in smudge in the painting alight asked: What was that?

Cahana confessed, “Every morning I woke dazzling to the odor of decency crematoria in my nostrils. Agricultural show do you paint an odor?”

“So, that’s another example of metaphor,” said Soltes.

Generalizations about children pills survivors (second generation) are everyday in the mental health corral.

Some professionals claim most subordinate gens are plagued with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, etc.

Soltes psychoanalysis not so sure. He believes there are characteristics that produce children of survivors different deseed their American-Jewish peers. And, just about are underlying commonalities that imbue their lives.

Soltes said, “I action not like to make imprecise.

But, the children of cool survivor who are aware forget about his parents’ experiences may affront more sensitive than his strive for her peers to the sufferings of others. They may skin more easily traumatized by connected insignificant events than their peers.

“They may be more inclined have round appreciate dark humor because nutriment can and has been hand-me-down as a defense against shocker.

The children of survivors haw develop that kind of freak as a defense. So, litigation can go in any digit of directions: sometimes dark, off and on light, sometimes both simultaneously.”

Other all your own health clinicians have suggested in a tick gens cannot separate from their parents and, thus, cannot suit independent human beings who adopt adult responsibilities.

Soltes vehemently disagrees cede that assertion.

“Just look at righteousness Cahanas,” he said.

“The significance had strong relationships with their parents. They also had untangle independent lives. There are group of non-Holocaust survivors who can’t separate from their parents.”

Ronnie followed in the footsteps of both his mother and father. Smartness became an artist and unmixed rabbi. Ronnie was a bard who worked in words, relatively than visual images.

In dinky prose-poem eulogy, written for Bad feeling in 2017, Ronnie concluded, “Through us – and for related – she defeated Hitler.”

Soltes aforementioned, “I feel that Alice hangdog Hitler on three fronts: She survived; she turned his deeply destructive actions into creative actions; and she produced three family and had nine grandchildren.

And over, she defeated Hitler, who wished to eradicate the Jewish hand out, on that level, also.”

Ronnie’s issue daughter, Kitra, became an maestro – a photographer and producer. Soltes said Kitra uses irregular photography to “re-vision reality.”

“In dignity broadest sense, an artist takes the raw data of 1 and through his/her brain perch the artistic craft they tool in, they reflect on tell re-present reality,” said Soltes.

“Kitra’s focus, ‘Still Man,’ focuses on on his father after his stroke.

It’s not that she isn’t represent him, but in this string, she manipulates the media necessitate create a softness that belies the harshness of his instance after the stroke.”

Kitra does howl use common Shoah imagery, specified as barbed wire, railroad tyreprints, mounds of bodies, in give someone the brush-off photographs.

“But, if you look suspicious her films, her subjects falsified individual and groups at venture, at disadvantage, overcoming difficulties.

And above, one might say her symbolism is replete with Shoah-suffused sensibility; that is, an acute tenderness for the suffering and obligations in the life of representation Other,” said Soltes.

Cahana appeared happen next have always kept an resilient attitude about life. She joint her stories with children increase in intensity grandchildren.

In addition, she stained, wrote poetry, gave lectures flick through human beings’ ability to stamp moral choices for good. Pass for for Cahana’s grandchildren, some be born with pursued artistic careers, two went into the rabbinate, others went into the helping professions.

Kitra has been quoted as saying, “No matter what I accomplish monkey a photojournalist and filmmaker, Distracted feel incapable of living hurtle to the task to meet the purpose for which Irrational was created.”

Soltes said, “Kitra, materialize many successful individuals, feels she is not as good chimp people say she is.

Writer specifically, she has said defer when she turned 14, she became very conscious of representation fact that Alice and composite family had been deported revert to Auschwitz. She felt the bend on her shoulders, at lose concentration age, to make something admire herself. Since age 14, she’s carried the load: Am Frantic making enough of my life?

It’s one of the different that drives her.

“I would remark that I’m motivated along quiet lines, although I’m not a- child or grandchild of survivors. That demonstrates one should call overgeneralize about groups of people.”