By Lisa R. Cohen

A conversation with oral historian Indira Chowdury, Oral History and “the Keepers of Memory”: Knowledge of Past Times in Cultures of Orality in India, explored the role of art and creativity to bring the past into the present. Lisa R. Cohen looks at three generations of artists who provide a through line to preserving memories, culture and identity taking their own unique creative paths.

On Nov 13, 2021, the Oral History Workshop class heard from historian, writer and researcher Indira Chowdury about oral traditions in India, specifically an indigenous group called patachitrakars, who traveled the country and used the creative arts - song and colorfully panelled scrollwork - to spread both ancient and current knowledge throughout.

As one of the OHMA student presenters of this workshop put it, their practices “engage with contemporary history by drawing on indigenous collective understanding of human tragedy.”

The conversation focused on passing art and creativity down through the generations to bridge past and present. So it seemed almost mystical that a week later, I received in the mail, unsolicited, a book that examined the very same thing through the lens of three generations of artists. 

“Immortality, Memory, Creativity and Survival: The Arts of Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana” is an interdisciplinary publication that examines trauma, art and memory,  produced by The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art. 

I was familiar with one of the three names. Earlier in the year, I had had a conversation with Kitra Cahana, a young Canadian documentary filmmaker after she’d won a duPont-Columbia Award, the award I administer at Columbia Journalism School, which was probably how I received the book. Now I learned about both her father and grandmother, and developed new insights into the sensitivity and humanity Kitra brought to her award winning work, traits that were forged in pain and suffering and passed down. The publication is a series of essays by Georgetown Professor Ori Z. Soltes, recounting the three artists’ personal stories and varied artistic accomplishments, and along the way, it takes a few unexpected detours into the study of memory, loss and generational trauma.

Alice Lok Cahana, Kitra’s grandmother, used mixed media like pen and ink, watercolors and acrylics, as well as real life artifacts to process her past as a Hungarian Jew who survived three different concentration camps and the loss, except for her father, of her entire family.  As a young teen, in one year she passed through Auschwitz-Birkenau, Guben, and Bergin-Belson.  When Bergin-Belson was liberated in 1945, her one surviving sister Edith became ill and the two were separated. Alice never saw her sister again.  “In the midst of a personal and historical whirlwind,” Professor Soltes explains, she “swore to herself that if she survived, she would somehow, one day, as a visual artist, transform the ashen world of her Holocaust experience into a reality with colors like those of the rainbow.” 

Her work is a mix of the testament to the evil she lived through with an homage to the heroes and survivors who maintained their humanity in the face of such evil. In 1978, following a visit to her former hometown, where she discovered all memories of her thousand year old community were wiped out, she committed herself to promoting a visualized memory. Her later works wove both the darkness of those memories with her own need to convey positiveness over overwhelming negativity of the collective experience. 

One prominent work is illustrative of this imperative. Colorful and vivid, her 1981 “Raoul Wallengerg-Schutz Pass” is  dedicated to and features the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews by providing them with  false papers, including those of Alice’s father.  

Well before she created this work, Alice had enjoyed a whole new new life in America and had defeated Hitler on several fronts, by surviving, creating a new generation of Jewish lives, and making something creative out of the horror of Hitler’s savagery. Alice’s art and her story continued to spread throughout the world in the years to follow, with paintings displayed in the Vatican collection, Washington’s U.S. Holocaust Museum and L.A.’s Skirbell Museum, among others.

In 1998 Alice Lok Cahana was one of five Hungarian Jews profiled in Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award winning documentary The Last Days. In 2021, four years after Alice’s death in 2017, Netflix re-mastered and re-released the documentary, where it is now streaming, to tell her story today.

Ronnie Cahana, Alice’s son, followed in both his parents’ footsteps to become a spoken word artist and a rabbi (like his father), who, says Professor Soltes, “offered a particular poetry to the lives - and in eulogies the deaths of his congregation members.” His congregations were made up of survivors and their families, first in Sweden, and then in Toronto. Growing up, his poems evolved out of exchanges that he would have with his mother over the years. His service to his congregants was part of a vow that he made to his mother. Professor Soltes quotes Ronnie: “I promised her to dedicate my life to her people to help ease the sting” of his mother’s past.

This bequeathed sense of obligation might have been imbued by his mother’s art, as in her own poem  “The Shadows at Night” cited in this book: 

“The shadows in the dark question me

Are you defeated?

I answer— Oh no! Not me!

…And you who got life instead

What will you do with the memories of that long night?”

I was most moved by Ronnie’s poetry in the 2017 prose-poem eulogy for his mother, in which he painted an evocative picture of her bravery, humor and quick-wittednes: 

“…She went with Father to demonstrations all around Houston, to churches and cinemas and theatres that confined the black (sic) population to the balconies. “Live what you believe” is the underpinning principle of a valiant religious life, along with “believe always in the dignity of people.”

…Soon thereafter - at 3 in the morning - a man who claimed to be the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Lan called. I answered the phone. He spoke, mispronouncing my father’s name, “Moshee? You Jews go back to New York where you came from.” I tried reasoning: “Why is that? Why can’t we live here?” In a huff, Mother cut in: “Who is this? What kind of man calls a family at 3:00 in the morning? Does your wife know that she’s married a coward? Let me speak to her! I would like to know who would put up with a person so weak.” He stammered and apologized: “I’m sorry, ma’am, sorry.” That was our last contact with the KKK.” 

… Father and Mother gave their worlds to each other, two orphaned children finding their most sacred love in relation and through creation…”

Ronnie himself suffered terrible personal tragedy in the summer of 2011 at the age of 57, in the form of a severe stroke that rendered him a quadrapalgic. Citing Professor Soltes, “One might say that he transformed the passage of painful experience from his mother’s generation to his own, reducing it to a unique personal level, while extending it toward experience limited by no individual or group.”

Over the next years, although Ronnie regained some of his faculties he was initially so incapacitated that he was tethered to a breathing machine and completely trapped inside of himself. But he continued to produce his art, with poems that spoke of the freedom he nonetheless felt. 

“In my mind, 

and in my dreams,

every night, 

I, Chagall-man,

float over the city.” 

His poetry often reflects his mother’s life and legacy, as well as the love and care he feels from his wife Karen. It also eloquently helps readers understand the internal world of someone in his condition.

“When my nape exploded, I entered 

another dimension; inchoate, sub-planetary, 

protozoan. Universes are opened

and closed continually. There are many when low, 

who stop growing. Last week, 

I was brought so low, but I felt the hand 

of my father around me,

and my father brought me back.”

Beyond the ways Ronnie’s experience informed his own art, it also became a subject of his daughter’s creative force. Kitra Cahana, Alice’s granddaughter and Ronnie’s daughter, has also made a name for herself with her creative talents; in her case, her photography and filmmaking.

In one of her deepest personal projects, she documented her father’s struggles from 2012 to 2020 in a work titled “Still Man,” a series of amorphous, dreamlike multiple exposures. 

As Ori Soltes interprets the portrait Transcendence (see above): 

“His edges transcend the separation between his physical body and the space around – visually concretizing the abstraction of his disconnectedness from his own physical being – as he seems to float in that space; paradoxically his very concreteness becomes abstract. ”

During Covid, Kitra expanded the documentation of her father and his care to video, shot with remote cameras and Zoom recordings. Together the father and daughter created a reflection about isolation and longing narrated by Ronnie that served as a microcosm of universal lock down. In March, 2022 the short film was featured as a New York Times Op Doc.

Over the years Kitra’s haunting work has extended far beyond her family as subject: from homeless teens journeying across the U.S.; to young Inuit dance competitors from far north Nunavat territory, which has the sad distinction of the highest suicide rate in Canada; and to those facing both mental illness and the police in NBC’s A Different Kind of Force, which is how I met her. 

Along with Co-Director Ed Ou, Kitra embedded with a specially trained Austin police unit that only deals with mental health calls. This meant she and Ed also immersed themselves into the lives of people whose mental health issues brought them in contact with this police force. With razor sharp sensitivity and empathy borne from a transgenerational connection to profound suffering, Kitra and Ed were able to capture remarkable moments with the film’s subjects, especially the family of one man whose inner demons, violent threats and shredded humanity are all a critical element of the film.

In her brief acceptance speech at the duPont-Columbia ceremony, Kitra voiced a sentiment that she certainly heard at home, one that motivates her efforts to be part of the cultural conversation: “I believe that a society is judged by how it treats those on the margins,” she said.

And that might be the most central of traits passed down through these three generations - creativity yes, but the empathy and commitment required to helping those in need. In Kitra’s case, her personal medium of photojournalism focuses her family’s tradition of moral imperative on other communities.

This publication was a powerful exploration of its title, of how Alice Lok Cahana’s immortality is reflected in the artwork that will be seen by future generations, her memories captured not just in her art but on film and in her poems, and by the future generations she herself made possible by her survival. Perhaps her granddaughter Kitra’s eulogy expresses it best: 

“Everything I am, everything I create, is owed to my safta (grandmother) Alice. She put her entire self into her children - our parents and Rina - and gave us all eyes through which to see the world…

We grew up in the shadows of her deepest joys and her deepest pain. Inheriting both. It’s our yerusha [inheritance]. We all hold the legacies of trauma that came before us. Trauma of the liberators. Of the persecuted. Of those who were silent witnesses and even the persecutors. We wear the evil and the good that we all know exists within our histories. 

But we get to choose which story to live out. That was Alices’s message and she placed it deep in the crevices of her art.”

Lisa R. Cohen is the Director of Professional Prizes administering the duPont-Columbia Awards and the John Chancellor Awards for Excellence in Journalism, after 30 plus years as a network news producer (ABC and CBS News); author; documentary filmmaker; and adjunct professor teaching reporting, video production, and long form narrative video classes. She is also currently a Masters Candidate in the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Science’s Oral History (OHMA) department.