arts&life

exhibit / on the cover

Memories Of Survival

A woman tells the story of her bucolic childhood and surviving the Holocaust —
in 36 fabric pictures to be exhibited at the Janice Charach Gallery.

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

ABOVE: My Childhood Home:
This is the first fabric piece
by Esther Nisenthal Krinitz,
made when she was 50.
She had no experience as
an artist but was confident
in her sewing skills — and
her daughters say she was
a wonderful storyteller. Here,
she shows her whole family,
with her at the bottom of the
picture carrying water from
the river.

Y

ear after year, Esther Nisenthal Krinitz brought her
needle up and down, up and down through the fabric,
creating images of trees bright with new fruit, happy
families with many children, cows in wide, open meadows
— and then terror, everywhere death and fear, darkness, as
though a black sky had fallen.
The Nisenthal family, including daughter Esther, lived on a
farm in Mniszek in central Poland. In October 1942, the Nazis
ordered all the Jews in the village to report for “relocation.”
Esther refused to go, however, and ran away with her sister
Mania, eventually managing to survive the war.
Her parents and three siblings did not escape.

With Esther, always, were the memories: those filled with
ordinary beauty, like how she walked on stilts to her grand-
parents’ house for Shavuot and made matzah at the home
of Mottel the shoemaker — and those of horror, like a Jewish
woman screaming, “We will never come back! We will all per-
ish!” as she set off on the road for “relocation.”
When Esther turned 50, she began sewing those memo-
ries into art, creating 36 panels that went on to become an
exhibit.
On Sunday, July 16, the Jewish Community Center of
Metropolitan Detroit’s Janice Charach Gallery will hold an
opening reception for the launch of “The Fabric of Survival:

jn

July 13 • 2017

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