Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss

  Daughters of Absence

  Transforming a Legacy of Loss

  Mindy Weisel, Editor

  Dream of Things

  Downers Grove Illinois USA

  "Who can return the violated honor of the self? I cannot claim that art is all powerful magic, or pure faith, but one virtue cannot be denied it: its loyalty to the individual, its devotion to his suffering and fears, and the bit of light which occasionally sparkles within him …”

  Aharon Appelfeld,

  Beyond Despair

  "Sensitivity to separation, feelings of mourning and guilt, the desire to protect their parents and suffering people in general, are common threads running through the fabric of the lives of survivors’ children. They share feelings of excessive anxiety, bereavement, over-expectation and over-protection.”

  Dina Wardi,

  Memorial Candles

  Copyright © 2012 by Mindy Weisel

  First Dream of Things Edition, December 2012

  Published by Dream of Things, Downers Grove, Illinois USA

  Originally published by Capital Books, Inc., in 2002

  Dream of Things provides discounts to educators, book clubs, writers groups, and others. For more information, visit www.dreamofthings.com, write to customerservice@dreamofthings.com, or call 847-321-1390.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except for brief quotations in critical articles and reviews, without the prior written permission of the editor and publisher.

  ISBN for this edition: 9780988439030

  Library of Congress Control Number for this edition: 2012952844

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Daughters of absence: transforming a legacy of loss / Mindy Weisel, editor.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-892123-37-1

  1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) - Influence. 2. Children of Holocaust survivors - Psychology. 3. Loss (Psychology). 4. Jewish women - Biography. I. Weisel, Mindy.

  D804.3 .D373 2001

  940.53’18-dc21 2001025393

  Contents

  Preface: Memorial Candles - Beauty as Consolation by Mindy Weisel

  Introduction: Transforming a Legacy of Loss by Eva Fogelman, Ph.D.

  Chapter 1: Normal by Helen Epstein

  Chapter 2: My Life in Music by Patinka Kopec

  Chapter 3: Journey to the Planet of Death by Hadassah Lieberman

  Chapter 4: It Isn’t Easy Being Happy by Kim Masters

  Chapter 5: Kicking and Weeping by Deb Filler

  Chapter 6: Traces Along a Broken Line by Vera Loeffler

  Chapter 7: Keeping the Family Name Alive by Aviva Kempner

  Chapter 8: Family Mythology by Sylvia Goldberg

  Chapter 9: Starting Over by Rosie Weisel

  Chapter 10: A Hat of Glass by Nava Semel

  Chapter 11: Fragments and Whispers by Miriam Mörsel Nathan

  Chapter 12: Letting Myself Feel Lucky by Lily Brett

  About Dream of Things

  The Leaving

  Gently, tenderly

  disengaging

  branches barely aware,

  foliage in formation

  creating

  an array of colors—

  clinging, proudly poised,

  beneath lush blankets—

  bountiful layers of life—

  Spring's seedling, Summer's glorious gift

  tended, nurtured,

  defying Nature's formidable decree.

  I do not wish to diminish

  I long to prolong

  seasons,

  detain changes,

  delay

  the leaving

  —Dassie Schreiber

  October, 1994

  Acknowledgments

  On behalf of all the contributors to this book, I would like to thank Kathleen Hughes for her great belief in this project and her tireless efforts on its behalf.

  A special thanks to Mike O’Mary for his vision and expertise in publishing a new edition of this book in 2012 and continuing its message that nothing can wipe out the human spirit.

  To all our dear family and friends, and those lost to us, may this book always serve as a reminder of the great miracle and beauty that is life.

  Preface: Memorial Candles - Beauty as Consolation by Mindy Weisel

  Grandmother Bella Deutsch

  To my grandmothers,

  Bella Weiszman Deutsch and Mindle Basch Deutsch

  (died in Auschwitz 1944)

  To the memory of my mother,

  Lili Deutsch (1922 - 1994)

  To the future of my daughters,

  Carolyn, Jessica, and Ariane

  In memory of Sauci Churchill and Bernice Fishman, and with deepest thanks and love to Lois Adelson, Roz Barak, Dita Deutsch, Beverly Deutsch, Tobee Weisel, Phyllis Greenberger, Jill Indyk, Ginger Pinchot, and Nancy Sheffner.

  Do we ever get used to the feelings of loss? Time supposedly heals all wounds. Does it really? Or do we take that time and take that loss and turn it into something else, something that takes the shape and the form of our loss? Is this perhaps the source of the deepest art? Is it the art that actually gives our lives meaning? There are clearly feelings that are beyond comprehension. It is these feelings that are put into the music, poetry, painting, photography, prose, and theater that enrich our lives, and that are addressed in this book. The women in Daughters of Absence all have one thing in common: as daughters of Holocaust survivors they have found a strong voice through their work. For these creative women, their work has been both life force and life saver.

  I am one of the daughters. My parents were both survivors of Auschwitz. My parents were first cousins—their fathers were brothers. My father found my mother near death, in a hospital near the camps, nursed her back to health, and married her. I was one of the first children born in Bergen-Belsen, Germany—once a concentration camp turned into a displaced persons camp after the war. My life was about trying to be everything to my parents. Like the others in this book, I thought the only meaning my life could possibly have was to fill my parents’ lives with beauty, love, hope, joy, nachas. I, like the others, tried desperately to erase the sadness we inherited. It couldn’t be erased. I, like the others, absorbed it. I, like the others, took on the sadness as my own.

  Beauty, the loss of it, is what my mother grieved for her entire life. Beauty also was the one thing that could give her momentary pleasure. Beauty in a fresh flower, a crisp winter day, a fresh cotton sheet, a bowl of cherries....

  My mother, Lili Deutsch, was one of eleven children. She was raised in an elegant Hungarian home near Budapest. Her parents owned the local bakery. I was raised hearing stories about my grandmother, whom my mother magnificently, through her stories, kept very much alive for me. My grandmother, my beautiful, generous grandmother, who would feed the poor at the back door of the bakery, early in the morning, before the others got up. My beautiful grandmother who kept a beautiful home. A home that my mother tried to recreate for us in America, with her love of crystal, china, fine linens, needlepoint, and fresh flowers.

  All things beautiful. I can’t, to this day, pass a rosebush without stopping to inhale its fragrance—to pay tribute to my mother’s love of roses.

  My mother was the only one of her sisters who survived the war. She watched her sisters and her parents die in the gas chambers. I only learned, after my mother died in 1994, how she survived Auschwitz. I was always too afraid to ask, as I was too afraid of th
e answer. She survived, I learned, because of her rare blood type, which the Nazis experimented with, thus allowing her an extra measure of soup. This experiment and the soup were a daily occurrence for one year of her life. Her twenty-first year.

  Like most survivors’ daughters, while I was growing up, and even well into my twenties, I didn’t know how I really felt about anything. I didn’t have my “own” feelings. I knew how my parents felt. I was not allowed the normal range of emotions. If I was sad or anxious, it made them sad and anxious. And, after all, what was there for me to be sad about anyway? I had not been in Auschwitz. I did not know what it was to be cold, hungry, or devastated. All my feelings not related to Auschwitz were naarish (foolish). How could any feeling measure up to those one lived with after surviving the camps? So, like so many others with my background, I buried my feelings. Till I could no longer. That is when my work took on a life of its own.

  The question that haunts me to this day is, how is one capable of happiness after such devastation and tragedy as my parents endured? And yet, they did know happiness. They knew the pleasure of children, of work, and a full life. But it was difficult for me to understand how one could live and be happy. How could I be “happy,” knowing what my parents had endured? After what they lost and lived through?

  My parents, however, insisted not only on my well-being but on my happiness. To be a good daughter was to be a happy one. Always being understanding, never complaining, and always being there for them. There is nothing I wanted more than to be that good and happy daughter.

  In the beginning of my life as a painter, I was, I suppose, what psychologist Dina Wardi, calls a “memorial candle.” She claims in her book, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust, that in a survivor’s home, there is a child in the family who becomes the link among past, present, and future. That child grows up feeling responsible for “inter-generational continuity, the one who bears the burden for translating the emotional world of the parents into some kind of coherence.”

  Only in my studio, while painting, was my authentic voice disclosed to me. Alone in my studio, I was free to feel whatever I needed to feel. I could play music and dance to it while I worked, or weep deeply at life’s injustices—not worrying that my tears would upset anyone. They were my tears and my joy. The desire was to put these feelings into my work. Ultimately, alone in my studio, painting became a form of prayer, a form of dance, of song, of life itself. A life that had a desire to hold onto the moment as well as to memory, to experience both past and present, and to emotions longing to be released.

  Originally, the paintings were reactions to my personal history. In 1979, I completed a series of abstract, dark paintings in which I wrote my father’s concentration camp number A3l46 (which is tattooed on his arm), all over my work. It was the first layer of the painting. These dark paintings, with layers and layers of writing and color, were ultimately painted black, with only bits of light and color coming through.

  After some years of working with this dark history and palette, and producing a large body of dark work, passionate and intense colors pushed through the black as if to have their own say. These new paintings became the “Black Gifts” series, followed by a series called “Lili in Blue.” There was no black in the “Lili” series. Instead, the work exploded with the cobalt blues my mother, Lili, loved so much. I wrote her name, Lili, all over every painting I did that year. The years followed, with series of works that both responded to the world outside myself and continued to pay homage to my past. As the years have passed, the work has become more and more colorful and full of joy. In fact, after my mother, Lili, the survivor, died in 1994, the work was the most colorful yet. I took strips of fabric from my mother’s beautiful dresses and did a series of paintings called “Lili Let’s Dance.” These handmade paper pulp paintings were my way of celebrating my mother’s life. The work, in the weight of the handmade paper and the bold colors, depicted my mother’s strength and love of beauty. Each piece became a thank you for life itself, and for her belief in me, her “daughter the painter.”

  The word, “talent,” is Greek and means “responsibility.” Each woman in this book has accepted the responsibility of making work that, in its authenticity, honesty, and originality, can be both felt and believed in. The women in this book have taken their personal stories and turned them into works we can all relate to. The desire to live fully, to make peace with the past, to separate from one’s parents’ pain but still respect it, the desire to celebrate life, to celebrate survival and life’s beauty—all these became the fuel for the works in this book. Whether in Patinka Kopec’s music, Aviva Kempner’s films, Miriam Mörsel Nathan’s poems, Lily Brett’s prose, Vera Loeffler’s photography, Helen Epstein’s essay, Deb Filler’s comedy, Kim Masters’ writing, Nava Semel’s fiction, Hadassah Lieberman’s heartfelt record of her trip to Auschwitz, Sylvia Goldberg’s writing, Rosie Weisel’s diary, or Dr. Eva Fogelman’s analysis—we feel the miracle of life itself. Life lived fully, deeply, meaningfully, and with the belief that there is some comfort to be found. I celebrate these women. I admire their courage and their craft and their talent. I admire the honesty of their feelings, feelings hard-earned. I admire their celebration of life in the face of our shared sad and tragic legacy. They have transformed this legacy for all time. In each of their works they have found meaning in absurdity and have dealt with feelings that were theirs only through birth.

  MINDY WEISEL is included in the American Archives of American Artists, and her art hangs in museums and institutions around the world, including the Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum, National Museum of American Art, Israel Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, and the U.S. Capitol. Her work has been featured in thirty one-person shows and numerous group exhibitions. Ms. Weisel has been nominated for awards in the visual arts and is a participant in the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies Program. An interview with her about her art and life aired in 1997 on CNN’s Impact. Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, Art News, and more. She is the author of Touching Quiet: Reflections in Solitude (Capital Books 2000). Mindy Weisel resides in Jerusalem, Israel, and Washington, D.C.

  Introduction: Transforming a Legacy of Loss by Eva Fogelman, Ph.D.

  Dr. Eva Fogelman, Adam Chanes, and Prof. Jerome Chanes

  For Adam Emanuel Fogelman Chanes,

  my creative inspiration

  Public representations of a private memory of growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust are the essence of Mindy Weisel’s vision for Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss. Despite the diverse creative journey of each of the women who speaks to us in these pages, an emotional link—mourning a past they never personally experienced—is present in her writing, art, film, performance, photographs, music, and creative Jewish lifestyle.

  Many thinking and feeling people in the post-Holocaust generation have thought about whether they would have been able to survive the barbaric atrocities perpetrated upon the Jews in the Final Solution. But the descendants of Holocaust survivors relate to the persecution somewhat more personally. They often question whether they would have had the stamina to survive as did their own parents, older brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins. Daughters of survivors compare their capacity for survival to their mothers’ and grandmothers’ survival. Would they instead have been counted among the murdered relatives?

  This interminable grappling with a family history punctuated by outrageous losses can be emotionally debilitating or it can lead to an outpouring of creativity. Psychoanalyst George Pollock emphasized this concept by explaining that from mourning comes creativity. And, indeed, Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss attests to the capacity of second-generation women to embrace life rather than to dwell on the anguish and torment their parents and other close relatives endured.

  We in the post-Holocaust generation can derive no meaning from the Germans’ senseless racist murder during the Thi
rd Reich of millions of Jewish men, women, and children, of gypsies, of Jehovah’s Witnesses, of Seventh-Day Adventists, of homosexuals, of political resisters and dissidents, and of non-Jewish rescuers. And yet, if we attempt to mourn our dead family members, the ghosts we have lived with, in many cases never even having seen a picture or known a name, we ultimately face a desire to transform our feelings—grief, anger, rage, helplessness, guilt, and anguish—into a search for meaning.

  It is the creative process that gives us license to speak about the dead and for the dead. Rosie Weisel writes about what she feels her murdered Jewish family would want from her: the continuity of the Jewish people and its tradition. Indeed, the spirit of her grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts, uncles, and cousins is reincarnated as she celebrates the Sabbath each week, and holidays throughout the year, with her husband and six children in Israel.

  Also from Israel is award-winning writer, playwright, and art critic Nava Semel. The collection of her short stories, A Hat of Glass, which first appeared in 1985, alerted Israeli society to its silence about the Shoah, and its psychological consequences on the second generation of survivors. The process of mourning starts with an initial shock, and then a retreat into denial. Nava Semel’s own search for details about her mother’s experience exemplifies how one can break through denial. In A Hat of Glass the reader is privy to a child of survivors’ intense need to understand her mother’s ordeals, and hence, feel closer to the living and the dead.