Finding Kalman Exhibit

 

Preview of the Multimedia Exhibit

A single photograph was the springboard for an exhibit that explores memory, process and presence. Kalman, the boy in the photo died in the Holocaust, but through his sister’s memories and multiple portraits done by a niece who never met him, we feel his vibrant presence.

Rent a multimedia exhibit that excavates loss, trauma and transformation through art and story. The installation weaves together sequences of photos, multiple portraits being made, and conversations between a mother and daughter. Larger-scale portraits and wall panels continue the excavation of loss, trauma and transformation.

Exhibit Details
Includes:
  • Six wall panels
  • Ten oil paintings
  • Two aluminum stands with nine video monitors and nine additional oil paintings
  • Video binloop and speakers for playing 12 minute video as well as a wired button podium for viewer-controlled on-off
  • *Requires 100-200 running feet of gallery space, medium security.  
    Click to download:  
    DOWNLOAD INSTALLATION GUIDE
    DOWNLOAD EXHIBIT LAYOUT
    DOWNLOAD PROSPECTUS

*Click here to see our corresponding lesson plan

Finding Kalman Film And Book

Finding Kalman: The Movie
A film by Roz Jacobs and Laurie Weisman

Anna Jacobs recounts tales of her younger brother Kalman, a mischievous boy who tried to escape the Warsaw ghetto with her. The film shows how four generations connect to relatives they never knew with a resiliency that provides hope for the future. Click to learn more about the award-winning film.

This project attempts to resurrect the memory of a murdered boy. Through fragments of a tale told by his sister - an American mother and grandmother today; two photos that survived; his portrait painted over and over like a mantra - digs from oblivion the frail reminiscence of a being.

“The frail reminiscence of a murdered boy is invoked through fragments of a tale told by his sister, a photo that survived the Holocaust, and his portrait painted over and over again like a mantra. Every character on the screen gives the lost boy a gift: a memory, a painting, music, tears…One destiny caught on the screen becomes specific and symbolic at once.”

Agnieszka Holland, Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Europa, Europa, In Darkness, The Secret Garden

 
Finding Kalman: A Boy in Six Million book cover

Finding Kalman: A Boy in Six Million
A book by Roz Jacobs and Anna Huberman Jacobs

“I felt like my feet were burning,” Anna Huberman Jacobs says, describing the day in 1945 that she went back to her home in Poland. Anna had survived life in the Warsaw ghetto, imprisonment at a Nazi labor camp and near starvation in post-liberation Poland. On returning home, Anna learned that she was the sole survivor of her family. Finding Kalman: A Boy In Six Million weaves Anna’s story of escape and survival with Roz’s desire to have a purposeful life, to answer destruction through the act of creating. Learn more about the book.

“Finding Kalman humanizes an aspect of the Holocaust that is infrequently visited: the kindness and tenderness of Jewish family life, the redemption from the savage brutality that the Holocaust represents...I was inspired.”

—James McBride, Author of The Color of Water, The Good Lord Bird, Deacon King Kong