Local author, whose parents survived the Holocaust, to sign copies of her book
Author Jan Zimmer is the only child of two Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia
Chaucer’s Books will host local author Jana Zimmer to sign her new book, “Chocolates from Tangier,” at 6 p.m. Jan. 19.
Chaucer’s is at 3321 State St., Santa Barbara.
Ms. Zimmer was born in 1946, the only child of two Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia, who fled with them as a refugee from the communists to land in Canada days after her second birthday. Ms. Zimmer became a collage/mixed media artist after her mother came to live with her in 1995. In her artwork, through text and image, she explores issues of memory, exile, and responsibility.
“A second-generation Holocaust survivor weaves together fragments of her family’s history and witness testimony in narrative and collage, using her art as transformation and remembrance.” author Wendy Holden said, discussing Ms. Zimmer’s book. “ ‘Chocolates from Tangier’ is a bold and innovative ensemble piece that comes straight from the heart. With illustrations by way of words, letters, poems and her own impressive images, artist Jana Zimmer brings her parents’ Holocaust story to life in a moving and meaningful way. Beautiful.”
Here’s a summary of the book. “Never, never ask Daddy about her.”
For 50 years, Jana Zimmer obeyed her mother’s directive, until her mother died, leaving behind a trove of family photos and documents, mostly in Czech, with just a few cryptic notes as explanation, for her only child to knit the family’s past together.
Late in her own life, Ms. Zimmer became a visual artist. The words and images in this book convey her journey to understand her parents and their experiences in the Holocaust, filtered through her own discoveries decades after returning to her birthplace, Prague, and to Terezin, where her family was first interned.
Exhibitions of Ms. Zimmer’s artwork in 2007, both in Prague and at the Terezin Ghetto Museum, were mainly inspired by her half-sister, Ritta, who perished in Auschwitz before Ms. Zimmer was born, and by her father’s grief over that loss. Ritta’s drawings made in Terezin, now in the Prague Jewish Museum’s collection of children’s artwork from the ghetto, populate Ms. Zimmer’s book as well as spare photographs and mementos that reflect Zimmer’s internal world — that of a “Holocaust replacement child.”
In 2015, an exhibition in Germany allowed Ms. Zimmer to explore her relationship to her mother’s experiences as survivor of Terezin, Auschwitz and Mauthausen, and as a Jewish slave laborer in a Nazi aircraft factory in Freiberg, Saxony, in 1944.
email: kzehnder@newspress.com
