From Ashes to Rainbow: The Work of Alice Lok Cahana and Her Descendants (Part Two)

by Ori Z Soltes

The actual gate at Auschwitz

The very materials and techniques that Cahana used are metaphors for the reality they convey. The surfaces of her works are burned and scratched with blackened patterns, scarred and stained with blood-red pigments. Blurred fragments of texts are swallowed by images that are grafted, buried, partially eaten away, echoing the fate of human beings swallowed up in the camps. One sees this in No Return, from 1979–81 (this is Thomas Wolfe’s literary masterpiece You Can’t Go Home Again squeezed through a glass darkly!), with its torn central motif—suggesting a face in profile, with a gaping mouth—and flesh and blood colors against a devouring background of black darkness.

Arbeit Macht Frei: Concert in Auschwitz

A chronological sibling, Arbeit Macht Frei: Concert in Auschwitz (1979–81) is a diptych in which an array of prison-bar-like vertical stripes punctuated by a trio of black, blurry squares are contained by an arch that links the two parts of the image together. The phrase “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes one free), which was inscribed at the entrance to that infernal camp, graces that arch, but in fragments, with the words almost blotted out. Across the upper part of the image, with its torn and singed holes, more vertical lines compete with a series of horizontals, among which one can discern some musical notes. This thus becomes a distorted musical stave, alluding to a particular aspect of Nazi perversity: forcing some inmates to play music to accompany the march of other inmates to the gas chambers.

The crucible of destruction is repeatedly symbolized by the arched form, whether open, like the gateway to Auschwitz, or closed, like the doorway to the ovens to which the nameless were consigned. In No Exit (ca. 1980), the arched oven-door form is trebled (no redemptive spiritual symbolism of Father-Son-Holy-Spirit is intended here, for redemption was not in evidence when those who prayed to a triune God gassed and cremated those who prayed to God the Father alone), and the thick blackness of the doors is an impenetrable black-hole-like darkness, sucking nearly all light into itself, and marked by

No Exit

pronounced passages of blood-red hue. It is punctuated, nonetheless, by shards of light and an infinity of numbers and letters insistently referencing those who passed through those arched openings.

Cahana was an abstractionist who survived hell. She was also a student of Jewish mysticism, aware of the Kabbalistic inquiry into how to understand the transmutation of matter into spirit—the aspiration to ascend to union with the singular God—embedded in an array of often dark, inscrutable (like her painting Kabbalah, from 1982) questions pertaining to the relationship between God and ourselves. Primary among them is how an intangible, invisible, and singular God created a universe that is tangible, visible, and endlessly multifarious. The Holocaust was the ultimate act of de-creation, in its dehumanization of its victims by their reduction to numbers and letters. Those rounded up were stamped on their arms with numbers and letters. Names, which typically connect humans to the essence of what we are, were eliminated, replaced by those narrativeless numbers and letters.

One of the noticeable features in many of Cahana’s works is the presence of numbers and letters—those from the tattooed arms of the dead, those from the calendar of counting the endless days which had lost their coherent cycle in the concentration camp, particularly when, as Alice observed, “every day . . . was an eternity!” The tortured structure of Days and Nights (1979) offers numbers arrayed as if on a calendar—as if one could count the time left till the end, with no foreknowledge of when the end might eventually arrive and what sort of end it might be—and puns on the transmutation of human names into numbers (the word “name” repeats in the lower left corner of the canvas): numbers with more meaning for the victimizers than cipher-humans in the meaningless technology of their destruction. There is irony in the rising and falling line across the middle of the canvas: it suggests the graph of some economic analysis, with its ups and downs, but going from right to left, as in Hebrew, the diagonals lead to the letter shin, suggesting a reference to Shaddai, God’s name as the ultimate source of power and protection.

In turning the numbers and letters imprinted on inmates’ arms into art and thus memorializing them, Cahana reverses the Hitlerian process of de-creation and dehumanization. In No Names (1985), railroad tracks plunge into a dark night overwhelmed not with stars but with letters and numbers (that railroad track is at the same time an ironic Jacob’s ladder connecting heaven and earth): the insistent, Kabbalistic repetitions will into memory those whom the Nazis sought to consign to oblivion.

No Names

Hovering toward the central upper part of the painting is a yellow-brown, bulbous cloud and above it the numbers 1 9 3 9. These mark the year when World War II began, sandwiched between the first six years of Hitler’s expanding, increasingly systematic prewar campaign of terror against the Jews and the following six years of an expanding, increasingly efficient Holocaust campaign embedded within the war, as German armies overran much of Europe and its diverse Jewish populations. (The end of that process is more difficult to discern on Cahana’s canvas: the numbers 1 9 4 5 hover less clearly, just to the right of 1 9 3 9.) This painting was acquired by the Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern Religious Art, and when Pope Benedict XVI asked Cahana about the large, miasmic smudge in its middle, she responded, “Every night I wake up with the smell of Auschwitz in my nostrils. How do you paint an odor?”

There are, of course, many further works that demand our attention, but I will reference only one more in this brief discussion. Raoul Wallenberg—Schutz Pass (1981) offers a monumental polyptych, whose vertical sweep is dominated by the Swedish diplomat’s name, written along the left side of the top panel. An abstract dialogue between brightness and darkness rises from the conceptual ashes—photographic images of ordinary people sent to extraordinary deaths—toward the spiritual rainbow of the hero’s own photographic image. He serves as a commanding symbol of how one person’s efforts can and did make a difference, in contrast to the active and passive collaboration in the destruction detailed in the lower horizontal sweep of visuals.

Wallenberg’s face is the ultimate metaphor of transmutation: the would-be deaths that became, instead, lives saved by his hands, by way of the Schutzpasse, (letters of protection), that he issued—including Cahana’s own father; the rescuer who vanishes; the hero who fights against the silence, which then turns against him when people fail to ask, to press, to demand: Where? Why? And fail to remember well enough not to repeat the silences—from Cambodia to Uganda, by the time this mixed-media work was made (the list of countries has grown in the decades since). The imperative to speak against the silences, even if only in yearning and hope, impels Cahana’s artistic efforts.

What in a longer essay becomes their own substantial discussions must be limited here to a lengthy epilogue. The move to Houston that yielded an extended outburst of artistic creativity also yielded a family: Alice and Moshe began to have children: Ronnie, Michael, and Rina. They were engulfing Hitler’s annihilationist intentions in a brilliant, future-looking sea of reeds. One: that the last of their three children, Rina, who was born with Down syndrome and would therefore have been among the first consigned to his slaughter, was fiercely loved and nurtured by the family into adulthood. Two: both Ronnie and Michael became prominent rabbis, and Ronnie a noteworthy poet. His poetry often focuses on his parents, his wife, and his children—and achieved an even more unique voice after he suffered a brain-stem stroke in 2011 that left him initially completely paralyzed, and able to communicate only by moving his eyelids.

The Cahana family

Three: that all of their own children became artists in varied media or rabbis (or both). Kitra, the oldest—who initially organized the group of friends who painstakingly wrote down her father’s poetry communicated through eyelid movements, letter by letter—has already, in her thirties, achieved extensive recognition as a photographer and filmmaker. Four: that Kitra’s work reflects a strong influence from her grandmother in its unceasing social messaging—resonating, in part, as she has commented, from the sense of pressure to do something with her life and her art when, turning fifteen, she thought about where Alice had been at that age. Kitra’s daughter, born in late 2024, is named for Alice’s sister, Edith. Rainbows continue to emerge from the ashes of Alice’s teen-aged experience from one generation to generation.

(Author’s note: Much of this essay is extracted from the essay in Soltes’ exhibition catalogue/book, Survival and Intimations of Immortality: the Work of Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana, published by the Fritz Ascher Society, NYC, in 2020. The exhibition is currently on view at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Studies)