Local author Jana Zimmer to speak at Friends of the Carpinteria Library annual meeting

BY JUN STARKEY

Former California Coastal Commissioner – and the featured speaker at the Friends of the Carpinteria Library’s upcoming annual meeting – Jana Zimmer published her memoir, “Chocolates from Tangier: A Holocaust replacement child’s memoir of art and transformation,” earlier this year.

Zimmer, a second-generation Holocaust survivor, combines imagery and narrative to examine her parent’s history in surviving the Holocaust, as well as the impacts their experience had on Zimmer’s life. Her memoir also confronts her status as a “Holocaust replacement child” – a phrase used to refer to children born after their parents lost a child in the Holocaust. Zimmer’s half-sister, Ritta, died in the Auschwitz concentration camp before Zimmer was born.

Zimmer will be the featured speaker at the annual Friends of the Carpinteria Library meeting scheduled for Wednesday, May 24, from 5:30–7:30 p.m. at the Carpinteria Community Church, located at 1111 Vallecito Road.

CVN: Can you provide a brief description of your memoir?

Zimmer: “Chocolates from Tangier” is a collage in text and imagery, which describes, through the use of my own writings, and visuals – some going back 50 years – poetry, journals, as well as my parents’ first-hand accounts written for me in the early 1980s describing their lives, including what was done to them and their families by the Nazis. They wrote separately because they only met after the war, each the sole survivor of their immediate families.

When did you begin working on the book?

In addition to fragments which I wrote in the 1970s, it was about my search for a voice – I was expressly forbidden to ask about the Holocaust, or my half-sister, who died in Auschwitz. I found a picture of her when I was about eight, and I obeyed my mother’s directive until well after my father died.

Can you describe your research process/ process of collecting information for this book?

The information came to me over the years through living my life. As I look back, I see that I began to be able to express my feelings in words in my twenties, but only in French, a language I knew my parents did not understand. I was afraid of hurting them by exposing their experience.

My parents’ life manuscripts, which they each hand wrote and gave me in about 1982, at my request; my own journals and poems, written in reaction to visits to the Czech Republic and the Terezin Ghetto in the in the early 1970s; and my writing about my artwork – in 2006 before I exhibited in Prague and Terezin, and in 2015, when I went to Germany to the slave labor camp where my mother had been a prisoner in the last months of the war – are all in there.

The book itself is somewhat chronological, starting with my feelings as a child, then as a young adult. Finally, in middle age, when my mother came to live with us, and brought a treasure trove of documents from Europe, I began to take art classes for the first time. I began to make art – mostly monotypes with chine colle (collage elements) and assemblages. I took the documents to donate to the Prague Jewish Museum in 2006, (mostly because I was afraid they would burn up in a fire) and the museum then invited me to exhibit my art.

The in-between chapters in the book come from reflections on the Palestine/Israeli conflict, written in 2009, an exhibit at the Santa Barbara Channels and reflections on travel in Europe and South America. I find that when I look for art on my travels, I usually end up looking at a culture through the lens of the Jewish experience.

When you’re making a piece of visual art, how do you decide what images to incorporate?

Instinct. I don’t plan ahead.

Do you only use photos or media that have a personal connection to your family?

Not always – the Sephardic experience and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have no direct connection to my family history. What made you decide to write “Chocolates from Tangier”?

It was just time to start pulling things together – I’m 76. I want to use words less – after 43 years as a lawyer – and be less literal in my artwork.

In 1981, I was a pro bono lawyer in a lawsuit where our client, an Auschwitz survivor, was attacked and challenged by Holocaust deniers. We got the court to recognize that the Holocaust was just simply a fact. I thought we had put that ugliness to bed.

I started a memoir class with Maureen Murdock in Carpinteria a few years ago, and somehow the new writing I was doing for the class as well as reviewing older writing led me to put the book together.

How does writing compare to making art?

I have to say I am quite tired of words, but I hope that the combination of words and images in the book, as well as my parents’ direct testimonies, will speak to people on an emotional level where mere recitation of historical facts does not.

There are so many books about memory and trauma now. I hope that when people read “Chocolates from Tangier” they will feel compassion, not just for what happened to the Jewish people and my family, but also will feel connected to other traumatized communities, to find common ground.

I have had some amazing comments from people – those who have been friends for decades, and some who I would call political enemies. When I started to put the pieces together – about three years ago – antisemitism was again on the rise, nationally and even here in our little paradise. It is my intention to speak about the book to other groups who should be natural allies of Jewish people, but unfortunately have rejected those historic alliances.