June 10
Mobius Talk Focuses on
Jews and
Poland
By Susie
Davidson
Advocate
Correspondent
BOSTON -
“What does memory offer, what do reparations repair, when is genocide
over?” Artists Rachel Kadish, Erica Lehrer and Larry Mayer attempt to
answer these grappling queries in "Reports From Afield: Significant
Others: Jews and Poland” on Monday, June 10 at 7 p.m. at Mobius, 354
Congress St., Boston. The free, 1.5 hour panel on current Jewish Poland, with a
reception afterwards, will discuss the ramifications and growing global
signifance of the Holocaust through these artists’ writings, photography
and documentary work.
“The
program,” says Mobius Communications Director Mary Curtin, “will
consist of readings, animated by slides and video, and an exhibit of
photographs and objects. “Attempts to grapple with the Holocaust, through
memorials, financial transactions, court rulings, and moral debate re-animate
severed connections between Jews and the places they left behind,” she
says. “Poland, a place of great Jewish intimacy and loss, is perhaps the
central place in Holocaust geography. Most U.S. Jews are Polish Jews, many
locked in a tortured embrace with a land whose tragic mythology often obscures
its modern reality.”
Boston-area
artists Kadish, Lehrer and Mayer all spent time in Poland looking for family
roots, identity, cultural memory and property. “Each,” says Curtin,
“comes to the subject from a different perspective, incorporating
photography, video, creative writing, and scholarly social, cultural and
political analysis, responding to questions such as “Who are we today as
we look back to Poland, to the Holocaust? What business, if any, remains
unfinished between American Jews and non-Jewish Poles? In the words of
Polish-born Jewish writer Rafael Scharf - "Poland, what have I to do with
thee?"
Rachel
Kadish, with an M.A. in creative writing from NYU, received grants from the
Whiting and Rona Jaffe Foundations, was a fellow at the Radcliffe Bunting
Institute and a 2000-2001 NEA fellow. Her writings have appeared in Story,
Prairie Schooner, Tin House, Pakn Treger, Lilith, Air France, and Bomb, as well
the anthologies Daughters of Kings (1997), Traveling Souls: Contemporary
Pilgrimage Stories (1999), and the 1998 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her first
novel, “From a Sealed Room,” (Putnam, 1998), was released as a
Berkeley Signature Edition paperback and a Goldmann/Bertelsmann German
translation this year. She teaches at the Harvard University Extension School.
Larry
Mayer, with an M.A. in English Education from Columbia University, Teachers
College, has published articles in Hadassah Magazine and the Boston Phoenix.
His first book, “Who will say Kaddish: A Search for Jewish Identity in
Contemporary Poland, with photographs by Gary Gelb,” will be published
next month by Syracuse University Press.
Erica
Lehrer’s doctoral dissertation thesis in cultural anthropology at the
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor concerns the intersections of Jewish cultural
revival, identity, and tourism in Poland. A 1998-99 Fulbright scholar in
Poland, she has received grants from the Mellon Foundation, the American
Council of Learned Societies, the United States Department of Education, the
International Research and Exchanges Board and others.
Her essays
and photographs have appeared in Pakn Treger, Bridges, the International
Institute Journal, Polin (in press); her photography exhibit "The Motives
of Memory: Commercializing the Jewish Past in Poland," ran at the
University of Michigan and Grinnell College. Her photography has been
recognized by Amnesty International, Lexington (MA) Council for the Arts, and the
Anolic Memorial Fund for Visual Art. She received the Avery Hopwood and Jules
Hopwood Graduate Essay Award at the University of Michigan.
Mobius
Boston is an Artist-Run Center for Experimental Work in All Media. For
reservations (recommended) for “Significant Others: Jews and
Poland,” please call 617-542-7416, email mobius@mobius.org or visit
http://www.mobius.org.