Immortality, Memory, Creativity, and Survival

Pearl District

When

Jan. 26–May 25, 2025

Days Vary, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.

Cost: $0 - $10

Where

Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education

724 NW Davis St
Portland, OR 97209

The following description was submitted by the event organizer.

The exhibition explores the work of three artists representing three generations of one family: Holocaust survivor Allice Lok Cahana (1929 – 2017), her oldest son, Ronnie Cahana (born 1953), a major stroke survivor, and his daughter, Kitra Cahana (born 1987), a filmmaker and photographer. Alice Lok Cahana grew up in Sarvar, Hungary. She survived four different camps in the last year of the war, losing every member of her extended family, except for her father and including her beloved older sister, Edith—who survived, only to perish from illness immediately after liberation.

Alice swore an oath to herself while in the camps that, if she survived, she would become an artist; her oldest son Ronnie, intensely responsive to his mother’s history, became a poet and his oldest daughter, Kitra, became a filmmaker and photographer. One of Kitra’s more extraordinary bodies of work focuses on her father after a brain-stem stroke forced him into an initial bed-ridden condition, not able to breathe on his own, but still writing poetry in his mind. The family rallied around him and began to write out his poems by following his eye-blinks, one letter at a time.

This powerful story of personal survival against crushing odds is explored through the paintings of Alice, the poems of Ronnie and the photographs and films of Kitra.