Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

2/23/2013

Helga's Diary





Helga with her parents and grandmother
Queueing in front of the Kitchen at Terezin

a funeral cart loaded with bread

Helga Weiss's birthday wish 1943: a birthday cake brought from Prague

The Washroom at Terezin






































































































































































Helga Weiss is a survivor of Terezín, Auschwitz, Freiberg and Mauthausen concentration camps;  an artist, a widow and a great-grandmother and at 84 years old she just published a journal describing her years as a young prisoner of the Nazis.

"October 5 1941: In the morning I go off to school and return at noon. Meanwhile, Dad is at home, cooking. It might sound a bit strange, but almost all the Jews do that. What else should they do all day? After all, it’s three years since they lost their jobs. It’s wonderful what progress you can make in three years. Before, Dad couldn’t even make tea, and now he bakes desserts and cooks entire lunches all by himself."

"It was December 4 1941. We were sitting here and heard the knocking on the door. A German officer promised that we were going to a safe place where we would not be persecuted. It was snowing. We were transported by train to the concentration camp Terezín, three hours away. Men were separated from women, parents from children. I was put in a room with girls my age (12). I tried to see my parents each day and made a pact with my father to think of each other every evening at 7pm. Sometimes it was not possible. Soon after, I sent him a drawing of a snowman. His reaction was: 'Draw what you see.' So I did."


3/06/2012

book review: the family fang



























author's tattoo





















I just finished this very surprising, funny, and sad book about performance art, parenting, childhood, and relationships. I highly recommend it! 

From author Kevin Wilson's website: "Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief. Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist’s work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as along as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents’ madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents’ strange world.

When the lives they’ve built come crashing down, brother and sister have nowhere to go but home, where they discover that Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance—their magnum opus—whether the kids agree to participate or not. Soon, ambition breeds conflict, bringing the Fangs to face the difficult decision about what’s ultimately more important: their family or their art.Filled with Kevin Wilson’s endless creativity, vibrant prose, sharp humor, and keen sense of the complex performances that unfold in the relationships of people who love one another, The Family Fang is a masterfully executed tale that is as bizarre as it is touching."


3/29/2011

Penguin Threads






Penguin books has comissioned artist Jillian Tamaki to illustrate in embroidery the covers for the of some classic titles to be released in the fall. Beautiful!!