Child of Holocaust survivors finds art

By Linda CarmanPrint Story | Email Story
Eva Ungar Grudin (Photo By Linda Carman)
WILLIAMSTOWN — Eva Ungar Grudin, daughter of Holocaust survivors, spent much of her childhood under the dining table, and much of what she did under the table was eat — all the name-brand processed foods she saw advertised in American magazines. “I think all the children paid a dear price,” Grudin said in a recent interview. ”I firmly believe the traumas of our parents don’t end; they ramify. And we never knew what hit us.” Grudin, an art historian at Williams College, has mined her own trauma to create an autobiographical multimedia work to be presented at Amherst College’s Ko Festival July 29 through Aug. 1, at 8 p.m., with a matinee Aug. 1 at 3. Due to renovations at Amherst’s Holden Theater, the performance will be in the theater at Emily Dickinson Hall on the Hampshire College campus. Just before leaving for Amherst last week, Grudin discussed her performance piece, “Sounding to A,” which was created in collaboration with Sabrina Hamilton, artistic director of the Ko Festival, and with violist Yossi Gutmann, an Israeli who lives in Vienna. This is the 13th year for the festival, which is dedicated to original works. (Tickets: 413-559-5331; driving directions and further information: www.kofest.com.)“Mine is the only autobiographical work, a life reconstructed,” Grudin said. The work is also supported by a grant from the Center for Technology at Williams College, where Grudin has been on the faculty since the early 1970s. “I think around the time we turn 50, most of us become interested in memory,” she said. Grudin was born in the Shanghai, China, Jewish ghetto to parents who had fled Vienna. Her father, a chemist, had found less and less work available for Jews and more bigotry in Vienna, so when a friend invited them to Italy, her parents went. When Hitler and Mussolini signed their pact, her parents had to flee that country as well. “Like everyone else, they applied everywhere. South America was too expensive,” she said. “Then they found that if they paid for passage they could go to Shanghai without a visa. It was the last free port in the world.” They were among some 25,000 Jews, mainly German and Austrian, who sheltered in China while the Holocaust destroyed their families and their homeland cultures. They joined a large contingent of Sephardic Jews, Iraqi and Iranian families such as the Sassoons, who had become fabulously rich in trading with China, and who helped the desperate refugees by setting up schools and providing, for the neediest, food and shelter. Grudin’s mother, who had been training as a dentist, found work as assistant to a Japanese dentist, part of the occupation. Ironically, despite having dropped leaflets saying bombers would avoid the Jewish ghetto, the 1-mile-square area was hit days before the war ended. Grudin was just 2 when the family returned to Vienna, which she found “idyllic,” but which was unbearable for her parents, who had lost nearly all their families. In 1950, they emigrated to Cleveland, Ohio. There, Grudin said, she “grew up among a particularly damaged group of recent European immigrants.” “Our parents were of a generation that kept silent in the name of sheltering the children. Perhaps it was too painful to discuss.” But that huge and terrible event that, Grudin said, was “simply referred to as ‘The War,’ marked children as well as parents. In her program notes, she wrote, “I set out to uncover those secrets. I think I substituted a research obsession for a food obsession and consumed history books, diaries and memoirs in any language I could read. I rifled through files and cranked through microfilm reels in London, in Vienna, in Verlin, Warshaw, Dachau, Theresienstadt, New York and Washington. In the end, I believe I’ve learned far more than my parents would ever have wanted to know. But I needed to know.” Initially, Grudin set out to write a book about inheriting the Holocaust but set it aside. “It seemed an experience as layered and irrational as mine didn’t like to inhabit a mode as rational and linear as exposition,” she wrote. “With the multi-tiered possibilities of performance/video/music/sounds I’m able to convey the story without the need to always tell it. And choosing to work this way lets me create in collaboration with others, the happiest way for me to make art.” Doing the performance piece, she said, “Is the outgrowth of perspective.” “It’s a way to demonstrate the story without telling it. It’s a kind of memoir of being trapped in duck-and-cover America among a very damaged community of European immigrant Jews,” she said. She recalled with some irony that her parents and their fellow immigrants referred to themselves as “the lucky ones” because they survived. “But how can you be lucky if your parents are murdered? I always felt there were no survivors.” Coming to an America panicked about the threat of nuclear attack, where schoolchildren were told to duck under their desks and cover their heads, “I ended up living under tables,” she said. And as she overheard her family’s wartime secrets — she learned, for instance, that a grandmother starved to death — she turned to food for solace. “I became totally neurotic. I would eat. I became massively obese. I weighed over 300 pounds. My eating disorder developed in secret under that table.” She said she ate “the worst American food, Hostess Twinkies, Snoballs, a lot of marshmallows. It induced amnesia and took away the constant stress. It was more than comforting. It was an addictive, essential drug.” She noted that there was a disproportionate amount of eating disorders, “both morbid obesity and anorexia” among the children of Holocaust refugees and survivors. In the process of healing, Grudin undertook to grasp the relationship between her family’s history and the weight she carried. She lost 200 pounds. At the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., she found a book lying on a table that listed all the transports from Vienna to Theresienstadt. “I found my grandparents’ names, their numbers in line, when they were shipped east. My father’s mother was shipped from Vienna in September 1942, and transported to Auschwitz, Jan. 22, 1943. I’m sure Jan. 23 was the day she died. There were 2,000 people on that transport, of whom 22 were allowed to live, and seven were alive at the end of the war. I finally had a death date for them. That it was my birthday was a little chilling.” Grudin teaches a course in Holocaust studies, which, she said, is “not at all personal” but a seminar on Holocaust memory and memorialization. She was also senior consultant to the Williams College Museum of Art exhibition, “Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Culture and Politics in Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna, 1906-1913.” “I do think, in the end, that the story of the Holocaust is accessible in these small things, like a child’s dream of a butterfly,” she said. Grudin keeps an apartment in Vienna, where she finds life bittersweet. “I love the smells and sights, I love to be back speaking in my mother tongue, but I’m always conscious of the missing,” she said. “I walk with ghosts when I’m in Vienna.”
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Greylock Federal Awards Student Scholarships

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Greylock Federal Credit Union awarded 34 scholarships to high school seniors from every public high school in Berkshire County and Columbia County, N.Y.
 
Greylock awarded 25 $500 Greylock Community Enrichment Scholarships to students who exemplify positive community spirit and demonstrate respect and concern for their peers in everything they do, stated a press release. 
 
Applicants were required to write an essay, which demonstrated their positive involvement in the community.
 
"Our scholarship selection committee reviewed every application and essay," said Jennifer Connor-Shumsky, Greylock's Assistant Vice President, Community Support and Events, of the process which received more than 80 applications. "It was really tough to narrow it down, because there were so many incredible students doing some amazing work in the community."
 
The funds will be applied toward state-accredited or nationally accredited two or four-year colleges or universities, or a full-time technical school program.
 
"For the first time ever, we were thrilled that two of the scholarships went to students entering a technical/vocational school," said Connor-Shumsky.
 
In addition to these scholarships, Greylock offers Scholastic Achievement Awards, which are designated for children of Greylock employees who are also high school graduates. This year, Greylock awarded nine $1,000 Scholastic Achievement Awards. These awards are available to all employees.
 
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