{"id":112716,"date":"2022-07-27T13:43:24","date_gmt":"2022-07-27T13:43:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/?p=112716"},"modified":"2022-07-27T13:43:24","modified_gmt":"2022-07-27T13:43:24","slug":"jenny-kagan-on-the-exhibition-out-of-darkness-ultimately-my-parents-survived-and-ultimately-its-a-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/2022\/07\/27\/jenny-kagan-on-the-exhibition-out-of-darkness-ultimately-my-parents-survived-and-ultimately-its-a-love-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Jenny Kagan on the Exhibition \u201cOut of Darkness\u201d: \u201cUltimately, my Parents Survived, and Ultimately, it\u2019s a Love Story.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
JennyKagan-Grazvydo-Jovaisos-nuotr.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As Margarita \u0160tromait\u0117 wrote in her memoirs, during the Second World War, the lives of her, her future husband Juozas Kaganas, who she met in the Kaunas ghetto, and his mother Mira were saved by the family of Vytautas Rinkevi\u010dius. \u201c<…> in spite of the mortal danger that threatened his entire family he built and equipped a shelter for us in the attic of the foundry. It was made in a part of the ridge separated by a false wall.\u201d It was not until twenty years after the war that Margarita met her only relative who had survived the Holocaust, her brother Alexander Shtrom. In 1965, Margarita and Juozas, already known as Joseph had a daughter, Eugenia. Or Jenny.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jenny Kagan presents the exhibition \u201cOut of Darkness\u201d in Kaunas, the European Capital of Culture, from 4 August. With sensitive artistic solutions, texts and sound, she reveals her family\u2019s poignant story, at the same time uncovering the unknown pages of Kaunas\u2019 memory. Nevertheless, it is a story about humanity and the light necessary for our survival as a civilisation. The exhibition at Gimnazijos St. 4 is part of the CityTelling Festival initiated by Kaunas 2022. The artist, who previously worked lighting designer in the theatre for many years, has agreed to tell us more about her creative journey.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOut of Darkness\u201d in Kaunas was announced a few years ago already. Did the past pandemic months influence the exhibition?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Securing a building took a lot of time \u2013 the one on Gimnazijos St. is the third one. In the first one, we couldn\u2019t negotiate a deal with the owners that would work. I had already prepared a design… I visited Lithuania during the pandemic because my aunt Irena Veisait\u0117 died. It was December 2020, and I also wanted to see the second building the team found. It wasn\u2019t anywhere near as good as the first one, but by that point, I was like, \u201cWe have to start.\u201d I went away and designed the show for there. I made a model and did it all. Then the owners withdrew\u2026 And this building came up, and last summer, we finally were certain we had it. The show is very much about the venue.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The building is close to the synagogue you worked in during the Kaunas Biennial.<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I know! My mom went to the school over the road, and my grandfather lived a few hundred yards away at one point, so it\u2019s a really great location. Its owner is an amazing person. They asked me, which bit of building I would want to use, and I asked for all of it. There is no way to get between the spaces on the ground floor of the building, and there are no stairs to go upstairs. I came up with this crazy idea to build corridors to connect the parts. We decided to build these scaffolding corridors so we\u2019ll use all three parts and you\u2019ll come out and into the car park and along a corridor and then onto the street into a corridor and then into the other building so it\u2019ll be quite an adventure. I\u2019m banking on the fact that it\u2019ll be so interesting just going to the building; it doesn\u2019t really matter if the work is not fabulous (<\/span>laughs<\/span><\/i>).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But really, it does help. When I did the show in the UK in 2016, the building was half of the atmosphere. It\u2019s just exciting to go somewhere and explore it, so you start on a win.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

How much of the content has changed since 2016? Maybe you have made some new discoveries or some new artistic work?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Loads and new loads of it have changed. It\u2019s changed much more than I ever expected it to. Some of it was because of the restraints of the building. When I did it before, I did it in an old theatre, so a lot of things were based on things hanging because there was a grid everywhere. Here, the owners said we could do anything to the building but couldn\u2019t hang anything from the ceiling.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Can you tell us more about the genesis of the show?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The show initially consisted of three central pieces. It all started with my mom, as my father had already passed away. Both my parents always used to talk about their time in the shelter, in the box. The box was the family story.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

About 12 years ago, I stopped doing theatre and did a drawing degree. I had to do a project, and I asked my mom, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we draw the box together?\u201d Because she\u2019d always told me stories of it. When I was a kid, I imagined it as a toy box, but when I got older, I went to the Anne Frank House and saw this apartment. I thought, \u201cOh, this is what a hiding place looks like.\u201d Much later, I talked to my mom a bit more and realised that it was actually closer to my first imaginings, so I said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we draw the box so we can visualise it?\u201d We started to do that, and I couldn\u2019t draw very well. She\u2019d look at these drawings and go, \u201cOh, I didn\u2019t know.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At that point, I started to make little models and bring them to her. She\u2019d say, \u201cOh, it\u2019s a bit bigger, and the bed was here,\u201d and so we did that. Then I built a mockup, and she walked in and said, \u201cThe door\u2019s on the wrong side.\u201d So, I made a replica of the box for my college project. She came to the final show and said, \u201cIt\u2019s great, but still a little bit too big.\u201d I guess I was always trying to make it bigger because I couldn\u2019t believe it was really that small.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The local museum wanted to exhibit that summer, but it wouldn\u2019t go through the door. I took another 6 inches off it. Mother came to see it and said, \u201cNow it\u2019s a perfect size.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Two years later, my mother died. I wanted to continue working with the piece, as I\u2019d never really got to grips. I\u2019d got the box size, but I didn\u2019t really understand where it was in the building and how it worked. I went back and looked through all my father\u2019s papers to see if there were any more descriptions, and I found his description of it, and in his version, it was slightly different. I thought that was really interesting, and then I built his version.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So in the show, there\u2019s his version, her version, and my memory of the toy box version. That was what the show was built around there. This and the idea of memory not being something fixed was the first foundation. The three hiding places are slightly different in Kaunas, but they\u2019re still there.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then the second linchpin was the Big Action. I was born on the 28th of October, so this was always a big thing for my mom. I always wanted to do work about Big Action. It was always about being sent to the left or the right and about getting people to feel in a very visceral way how delicate that moment is and how easy it is for it to go in either direction.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I built this maze which had three stations. There\u2019s a Jewish game, dreidel. There were dreidels that you spun, and you would go either to one side or the other through this maze of barbed wire. That piece would not work in Kaunas. I spent a long time trying to squeeze it in, and then I realised I just had to change it. It\u2019s turned into a games room, but it\u2019s the same idea. It\u2019s about that feeling of chance and that it could go either way at any time.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The third piece, central to the show, is the starscape of barbed wire, which is very beautiful. I wanted something uplifting because it\u2019s a hard story to tell. Ultimately, my parents survived, and ultimately, it\u2019s a love story. In the Kaunas version, the starscape of barbed wire is still there, but finding a space for it was really tricky. It\u2019s smaller, and I hope it will be extraordinary.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was very important for me to have something that people could enjoy. I know it sounds crazy, but all the way through, I think that if you\u2019re going to ask people to listen to this story, you need to give them a way to enjoy the experience. It\u2019s important to me to talk to young people and for them to engage with it. So the games room felt like an excellent idea.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am thinking about the legacy of Anne Frank. Recently an animated film by Israeli director Ari Folman came out, which features Anne\u2019s imaginary friend, and I believe this is the right way to connect to younger audiences. The youngest ones, which is crucial.\u202f<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes. The thing I implemented this time that I didn\u2019t do last time is talking about the Liet\u016bkis massacre because my grandfather was killed there. It doesn\u2019t mean anything in England, but here I\u2019ve been struck by how few people know about it. I met a bunch of people working on the show, who are all educated, interested people in their 30s and 40s, all living in Kaunas, and none of the three had heard about it.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Telling that story is really hard and really important. A lot of my thinking has been around how to do that. My grandfather owned a cinema called Pasaka, and we reconstructed its neon sign for the show. When I realised \u2018Pasaka\u2019 means\u2019 fairytale\u2019, I was like, \u201cWhat a gift!\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Have you been inside the cinema, which today is a gentlemen\u2019s club?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No. I go past it. I have a new piece at the end, which uses photographs. When I was a kid, my mom had a photo album with family photos, and on the back page were two photographs of Liet\u016bkis. A German paper newspaper in the \u201950s published photographs, and she got copies and put them in a family photo album.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, the other big new thing is that I\u2019m working in two languages. Anything that\u2019s a challenge produces something interesting. There\u2019s also more sound, as we now recorded pieces in both languages. There used to be too much to read in the first show, and there\u2019s still a lot! There are many books in the show that you open, and the rule is you should be able to read it all in 30 seconds because I think that\u2019s people\u2019s attention span. It\u2019s just about giving people enough context so that the pieces make sense. Some people will spend hours reading every word, and then others won\u2019t read any of it. That\u2019s fine. It\u2019s designed to work for however you engage with it.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t that where your years of experience in theatre production come in?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I would say it\u2019s like a theatre without any actors. I don\u2019t know how a Lithuanian audience will react. In England, first, we had all these suitcases you can open, and the first audiences didn\u2019t touch them. In the end, I wrote on them, \u201cOpen me.\u201d Then people went for it. It\u2019s about finding out how much I must tell people to do so; there are drawers to open and telephones to pick up. Will people pick up the phone if it rings? Will they open every drawer? That\u2019s a voyage of discovery, and I\u2019m sure I will keep changing things. Also, I\u2019m going to work quite closely with that team. Hopefully, they\u2019ll be able to encourage people to interact.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When you first started sketching the box with your mother, could you imagine that in 12 years or so, you would be opening an exhibition in her hometown? What were her feelings about Lithuania? Did she come here after the war?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My mom came regularly. I came with her. She shared an outlook on life that one can\u2019t judge. One can only judge people who commit acts, not anyone around them, and it\u2019s people, not nationalities. One of the many stories she told me and wrote down was about going to the European basketball final in 1939, for which the sports hall was built. When Lithuania beat Latvia, she writes about how horrified she was that the Lithuanian audience was booing the Latvian players. It\u2019s so her. She was 16. That\u2019s the golden diary entry for the first entry. It tells her position really clearly. There\u2019s another story about after they come out of the ghetto and the Germans were retreating. She was walking down the road with a friend, and a German soldier was sitting. They walked past him, and her friend was smoking. The German said to her friend, \u201cHave you got a cigarette, mate?\u201d Her friend looked at him like the soldier was the dirt on the bottom of his shoe. She was horrified, her entire family had been killed by the Germans, but, she said, this was one man, and all he wanted was a cigarette. That was very much her outlook. That man hadn\u2019t done anything necessarily.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you share the same outlook?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s the only way to go forward.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Have you ever thought about what would have happened if your parents had stayed in Lithuania?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I never have.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think even your name would be different.<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Actually, I\u2019m named after my grandmother Eugenia, so Jenny is an abbreviation of Eugenia. It first became Jenia, and then it became Jenny. I think it would\u2019ve been different because my parents would\u2019ve been very different. My father was extraordinarily successful in England, and I think he probably would\u2019ve been successful wherever he was. Maybe he\u2019d have been accepted more here, in Lithuania. He was always the jumped-up Jewish emigrant in England who got above his station.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He wanted to be accepted into the high echelons of British society and eventually became a Lord. You\u2019d think that was it, but he recognised it was his great sadness that no matter how much he achieved, he was never quite going to be part of that elite that he hankered after being part of.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My mom, she had never been to England. My father was already living there before the war, and his family were in England. After the war, he wanted to go back to England. Her only surviving relative was her little brother Aleksander Shtromas, who was in Lithuania. She needed to stay here. The thing that tipped her into going was that, once she found out about Liet\u016bkis. How to live in a city, where anyone walking past on the street might have killed your father? That\u2019s what encouraged her to leave.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Margarita \u0160tromait\u0117 wrote in her memoirs, during the Second World War, the lives of her, her future husband Juozas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":112652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,15,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current-issues","category-news","category-memory-office"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112717,"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112716\/revisions\/112717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaunas2022.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}