The Cahana family: 3 generations of artists influenced by the Shoah

After Alice Lok Cahana was deported to Auschwitz, she made a promise to herself. If she survived, she swore to transform her Shoah experiences into a visual reality.

Lok did survive. After the war, she met and married Rabbi Moshe Cahana. She moved to Houston in 1959 when her husband became the rabbi at Congregation Brith Shalom.

Cahana began her formal art education at the University of Houston and then at Rice University. Her early paintings are abstract color fields, reflecting the painting style that dominated Houston in the 1950s and 1960s. Paintings in this style relied heavily on color and flat surfaces devoid of representation. In the late 1970s, after a visit to her family’s former home in Hungary, Cahana began incorporating numbers, fragments of texts and ashes into her paintings.

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

Cahana not only became an artist, she produced three offspring. Her oldest son, Ronnie, intensely responsive to his mother’s history, became a poet. Ronnie’s oldest daughter, Kitra, became a filmmaker and photographer.

The story of three generations of the Cahana family is told in “Immortality, Memory, Creativity, and Survival: The Arts of Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana and Kitra Cahana,” which was published in January. The book is published by the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, Inc., which rediscovers forgotten artists and introduces their unique artistic voices to a larger public.

Ori Z. Soltes edited the book. He is a founding co-director of the Fritz Ascher Society and is professor of Theology, History and Art History at Georgetown University. Since 1997, he is a founding director of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. A former director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, he has extensive experience in developing and executing exhibition concepts.

The book investigates the long-term effect of trauma and memory. Looking at three generations of the Cahana family and their art in the context of biological and psychological research, the book describes a complex understanding of how trauma – and especially the Holocaust experience – is remembered.

According to Soltes, survivors share a special vision of the Shoah, having experienced it directly. Their art is an attempt to convey a memory of their experience.

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

“For example, in any number of her works, there is a series of repeating numbers,” said Soltes. “They reflect her personal experience of being tattooed like cattle; the experience of the Nazi methodology of dehumanization by replacing names with a series of numbers. Those numbers cannot be rubbed off. These numbers, when they appear in Alice’s paintings serve as a metaphor for her experience and the experience of others.

“In a larger sense, every painting is a metaphor, because a metaphor tries to convey information by something else. Alice’s paintings are trying to convey her experiences, things that cannot be put into words. For example, there’s the painting that Alice presented to the Vatican. The pope pointed to a yellow, large finger smudge in the painting and asked: What was that?

Cahana answered, “Every morning I woke up to the odor of the crematoria in my nostrils. How do you paint an odor?”

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

Generalizations about children of survivors (second generation) are common in the mental health field. Some professionals claim most second gens are plagued with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, etc.

Soltes is not so sure. He believes there are characteristics that make children of survivors different from their American-Jewish peers. And, there are underlying commonalities that pervade their lives.

Soltes said, “I do not like to make generalizations. But, the children of a survivor who are aware of his parents’ experiences may be more sensitive than his or her peers to the sufferings of others. They may be more easily traumatized by relative insignificant events than their peers.

“They may be more inclined to appreciate dark humor because humor can and has been used as a defense against trauma. The children of survivors may develop that kind of humor as a defense. So, it can go in any number of directions: sometimes dark, sometimes light, sometimes both simultaneously.”

Other mental health clinicians have suggested second gens cannot separate from their parents and, thus, cannot become independent human beings who assume adult responsibilities.

Soltes vehemently disagrees with that assertion.

“Just look at the Cahanas,” he said. “The offspring had strong relationships with their parents. They also had very independent lives. There are plenty of non-Holocaust survivors who can’t separate from their parents.”

Ronnie followed in the footsteps of both his mother and father. He became an artist and a rabbi. Ronnie was a poet who worked in words, rather than visual images. In a prose-poem eulogy, written for Alice in 2017, Ronnie concluded, “Through us – and for us – she defeated Hitler.”

Soltes said, “I feel that Alice defeated Hitler on three fronts: She survived; she turned his profoundly destructive actions into creative actions; and she produced three offspring and had nine grandchildren. So, she defeated Hitler, who wished to eradicate the Jewish people, on that level, also.”

Ronnie’s eldest daughter, Kitra, became an artist – a photographer and filmmaker. Soltes said Kitra uses her photography to “re-vision reality.”

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

“Kitra’s series, ‘Still Man,’ focuses on her father after his stroke. It’s not that she isn’t portraying him, but in this case, she manipulates the media to create a softness that belies the harshness of his condition after the stroke.”

Kitra does not use common Shoah imagery, such as barbed wire, railroad tracks, mounds of bodies, in her photographs.

“But, if you look at her films, her subjects are individual and groups at risk, at disadvantage, overcoming difficulties. So, one might say her imagery is replete with Shoah-suffused sensibility; that is, an acute empathy for the suffering and complications in the life of the Other,” said Soltes.

Cahana appeared to have always kept an optimistic attitude about life. She shared her stories with children and grandchildren. In addition, she painted, wrote poetry, gave lectures about human beings’ ability to make moral choices for good. As for Cahana’s grandchildren, some have 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 as a photojournalist and filmmaker, I feel incapable of living up to the task to fulfill the purpose for which I was created.”

Soltes said, “Kitra, like many successful individuals, feels she is not as good as people say she is. More specifically, she has said that when she turned 14, she became very conscious of the fact that Alice and her family had been deported to Auschwitz. She felt the weight on her shoulders, at that age, to make something of herself. Since age 14, she’s carried the load: Am I making enough of my life? It’s one of the things that drives her.

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