Poetica Magazine

I was raised by two very practical Holocaust Survivor parents. While my mother enjoyed the pictures I brought home from school, pinning them up in the kitchen, and the stories I wrote for her, there was never any question about pursuing any of the arts for a career. Since it was the 1960s, first you got married. My older sisters were offered a limited set of occupations to choose from: secretary, teacher, or nurse. By the time I was a teenager the world had changed and there were more options, but artist and writer was not one of them.

You can’t blame much on parents who live through the Holocaust. Mine came out of the war with an uncanny ability to concentrate on food and any occupation that would get them food the quickest. They had great survival skills, skills that saved them from starving. Everything was assessed by what its usefulness would have been during the war - to my father in Siberia and to my mother living among the Partisans in the forest. Being an artist was worse than useless; once they got to the U.S. it wouldn’t have helped either of them earn a living.

But when I think back, I see there was art all around me; I just had to look closer. There was my mother’s constant decorating, creating beauty in our tract home in Skokie; having our foyer tile done over and over until there was a swathe of interlocking tile flowers undulating in a path from the front door to the kitchen. There was one of my sisters who drew in pastels on the wall of her bedroom creating a gigantic flower garden, while the rest of us drew windows and curtains on the interior walls of an unused closet creating a tree house. And there was my father, the most practical of men, carving perfect rectangles out of the bushes under our front windows and trimming our trees carefully, until they resembled bonsai plants.

How did your family encourage or discourage creativity? How are you able to see art now from your perspective as an adult that you may not have been aware of as a child?

Welcome to JWorld Café, the new Poetica Magazine Blog.

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor