Photo credit: Dan Zaitz
Immigration was already at issue in 2014 when the Jewish Museum Milwaukee mounted “Stitching History from the Holocaust.” Telling the story of a Jewish dressmaker from Prague unable to join her relatives in Milwaukee because of immigration barriers, the narrative behind the exhibition of her clothing designs had a tragic ending in the death camps. A year later Donald Trump, descending on a golden escalator, announced his candidacy for president on a platform whose strongest plank involved vilifying and prohibiting large classes of people from entering the U.S.
This summer the Jewish Museum reprises that exhibit with “Stitching Histories from the Holocaust.” The pluralization conveys the distinction. “Histories” includes contents from the 2015 exhibit and adds two other stories with ties to the Milwaukee area: the Oelsner family that fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai, where they survived World War II and made their way circuitously to Milwaukee; and Sara Spira, whose daughter and son-in-law escaped to Racine but who perished for being unable to join her family.
“We’re seeing a lot of parallels in our world,” says curator Molly Dubin. “People are still escaping violence and persecution, or to provide their families with better lives or to reunite with loved ones. We want to be part of the conversation by providing materials that help us understand the parallels between then and now.”
A problem confronting Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe was the national quota system, implemented after World War I and designed to keep America as a predominantly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant society. The quota was a sieve intended to filter out “less desirable” immigrants. Most other nations had their own walls in place. Shanghai, then a freewheeling international zone with easygoing visa requirements, became the Oelsners’ refuge. Photographs displayed in “Stitching Histories” include the Oelsners’ tiny tobacco shop; they lived in back veiled from customers by only a sheet.
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Their story ended happily. Not so for Spira, whose fate is chronicled in a sequence of postcards whose postmarks follow the steps in her deportation from Leipzig through the Polish ghettos where she was murdered. The elegant handwriting concealed the profundity of her fear and travails. Censors eager to mask the full extent of the Final Solution permitted only guarded references.
As in the 2015 exhibit, dresses fabricated by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s costume shop from the fashion designs of Prague dressmaker Hedwig Strnad are displayed on mannequins. Letters to her Milwaukee relatives, written in English and carefully phrased to avoid arousing the Nazi censors who read all mail, describe her “great interest in leaving Europe.” There is something almost eerie in those vintage dresses mounted on eyeless white mannequins like ghosts in a spectral department store. Strnad and her husband died in the death camps.
“Stitching Histories from the Holocaust” is less a fashion show or a collection of archival memorabilia than a visual meditation on loss. It’s on display through Sept. 16 at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, 1360 N. Prospect Ave. For more information, visit jewishmuseummilwaukee.org.
Openings This Week
Friday, June 8 “Occasional Artists Art Show and Sale” North Point Lighthouse 2650 N. Wahl St., 414-332-6754 northpointlighthouse.org June 8-July 21 “Homely: Part One” Portrait Society Gallery 207 E. Buffalo St., Fifth Floor portraitsocietygallery.com June 8-July 28 “Big Ideas” Gallery 224 224 E. Main St., Port Washington gallery224.com June 8-Aug. 5 “2017 Nohl Fellowship Exhibition” Haggerty Museum of Art 530 N. 13th St., 414-288-1669 marquette.edu/haggerty June 9-July 21 “Indiana Green: A Wisconsin Group Exhibition” Parts Unknown Studio 1035 S. Fifth St. fjgmke.com June 10-Aug. 5 “The Accumulation of Acts” St. Joseph Center, Alfons Gallery 1501 S. Layton Blvd. alfonsgallery.org
