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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Appassionato

December 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White
The Violinist: Clare Galambos Winter, Holocaust Survivor, by Sarah Gaitanos (Victoria University Press, 2011) 280 pp., $40.00.

‘On the morning of Sunday 19 March 1944, Klari was at an orchestra rehearsal in the Heavy Metalworkers’ Trades Hall when a man burst in with an urgent message for the conductor. Obviously shaken, the conductor informed the players that Germany had occupied Hungary, the army had entered Budapest and its tanks were rolling down the main boulevard. As the extreme left wing Trades Hall would be an early target, they must pack up their instruments and leave immediately, taking different routes. “Go, go, go!” he urged the stunned, mostly Jewish musicians.’
          ‘Klari’ is longtime Wellington resident Clare Galambos Winter, who, having lost most of her family in the Holocaust, survived to reach New Zealand in 1949 and make a new life in which music figured centrally.
           Sarah Gaitanos has read and journeyed widely in order to understand and present a complex historical context for what is also a very personal story. Nolar Millar, her first biography, about legendary Wellington theatre director the late Nola Millar, published in 2006, was similarly thorough, running to 408 packed pages. The Violinist, which like Nola Millar, contains an index, copious notes and a full bibliography, is more rather than less interesting for the many different research tracks she goes down. In addition to book and journal sources, a list of websites — such as www.jewishvirtuallibrary — gives readers an entrée into the extensive Holocaust literature, encompassing official records, photographs and oral history recorded over sixty-five postwar years.

          The main difference with The Violinist is that Gaitanos was able to develop a relationship with her living subject, Clare. This allowed the recording of invaluable oral interviews and full access to Clare’s own memoirs, letters, as well as a large collection of photographs — not only of her Hungarian relatives, but also of her ‘new family’ of New Zealand friends.
          Born in 1923, Clare Galambos Winter was descended from Jewish immigrants who became ‘passionately’ committed to Hungary, after emancipation in 1867, helping form the core of the country’s professional elite. Andor Galambos, her father, had also served in Hungary’s army on the side of Germany in World War I; like the many German Jews who fought for the Kaiser, he felt betrayed by his country when the Hungarian government brought in anti-Jewish laws.
          As Clare was growing up between the wars, it was with her mother’s extended family, ‘liberal, well-educated and non-religious’, that she most strongly identified, especially when they gathered for summer holidays. ‘With its parkland and forest,’ writes Gaitanos, ‘the family estate at Nemeskolta belongs to Clare’s dreamtime memories of an enchanted childhood’, with ‘a big annual hunt, wonderful harvest festivals, tennis parties, gypsy music, colourful costumes, dances and concerts. Klari’s father sang and everyone played the piano.’
Music was at the heart of this pre-war life. Klari’s grandmother introduced her to the classics, playing piano music of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms; her great-aunt was a student of Liszt in Vienna. Klari, who sang regularly in the synagogue choir, learnt to play the piano first, and then — what became a lifelong commitment — the violin. As a teenager, she found ‘a beautiful meshing together of people’ in a local orchestra.
          Shocking stories started to reach the fourteen-year-old Klari — of Germany’s invasion of Austria, and of ‘people they knew being arrested and not heard of again.’ (Since 1922, the Galambos family had lived in Szombathely, close to the Austrian border.) Hitler — popularly called the ‘mad dog’ — was not, however, considered a threat to ‘civilized’ Hungary. Besides, wrote Clare in her three-part memoir, ‘there seemed to be more important things to think about, such as school, music, violin, boys …’.
          Gaitanos makes a very good job of knitting together the parallel rise of fascist powers in Germany and Hungary, with legislation denying Jews’ rights to travel, trade or work other than forced labour, and finally to any kind of citizenship at all. She also describes how personal reports of atrocities in Poland were at first thought not to be credible, since they were so extreme. Elie Wiesel himself did not, she discovered, believe the deportations and slaughter described by one witness who had escaped execution in 1942.
          In that year Klari was studying violin, music history, theory and orchestral practice in Budapest at the Fodor, a private music academy. Athough the rumours in her girls’ hostel were ‘terrifying’, few knew of the Nazis’ Wannsee meeting of January 1942, in which agreement was reached on the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. In 1943, even when informed of the many death camps in full operation, Hungary’s Jewish leaders shut their ears and ignored the implications. The subsequent German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 stunned them, along with the whole country.
          Gaitanos could not have invented a more shocking and dramatic turning-point to her story. Klari hurriedly prepares to return home to her family, but at the station — wearing a ‘very smart’ blue coat with yellow fox-fur and carrying violin, handbag and hatbox — she is shoved into a concrete room to stand for three nights, crammed in tightly with thirty other women whose only crime is that they’re Jews. In a matter of weeks the recently built ghetto in her town is being emptied out by the first transports of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, in ‘the largest and fastest deportation operation of the Holocaust’.
          Maps, diagrams and photos of the complex and of the inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau help make real an experience that Clare can only dimly recall: ‘I stepped out of myself and anything that happened there … was so far from what I was. I never even thought of my violin. I never thought of anything.’ The chance of surviving was, however, greater ‘if you had someone’, and for Klari that was her aunt Rozsi, who ‘slept, sat, stood to be counted, queued for food, cared for’ her through five weeks at Birkenau and seven months at Allendorf, where the pair worked at a munitions factory over a winter that was ‘exceptionally harsh’.
          After liberation in 1945, aunt and niece returned home, expecting to be re-united with family members — a hope that proved hollow. Only one cousin remained to welcome them; Clare wrote in her memoir: ‘It was beyond ordinary grief. It was utter nihil.’ There was another cousin, though, who had gone to New Zealand before the war, who offered to help them emigrate here. After two years of intense difficulty in an environment ‘morally, socially, politically and economically bankrupt’, Klari and Rozsi left Europe on a steamship from Marseilles.
          At this point (Chapter 7), a second biography begins: the life of 25-year-old violinist Clare, living with her Aunt Rosie in a two-storey art-deco house in Lower Hutt, and artistically ‘adopted’ by a Wellington family, the McKenzies. Because the cousin’s family who helped their immigration did not want to publish their own Jewishness, Clare was at first cut off from Wellington’s Hungarian community, who were mostly Jews. Clare found another community among Wellington’s musicians, when she auditioned for an orchestra within weeks of arrival. There were Jews in this community too, among refugee musicians of the pre-war diaspora, and later among the many distinguished musical visitors to the city.
          The book’s final four chapters, or ‘movements’ – Appassionato, Resoluto, Doloroso, Grazioso – follow Clare’s 32-year career with the National Orchestra under different conductors and names, rehearsing, travelling and performing all over the country — and overseas; her ‘joyous and bohemian’ life with Swedish cellist and bandsman Karl Kallhagen, whom she later married; her learning to become a New Zealander, taking citizenship in 1955 and buying a house in Mt Victoria; Rosie’s death in 1965 and Karl’s in 1977; her close friendship with Carol McKenzie and Carol’s illness and death; love and marriage with her doctor, Otto Winter, with whom she returned to the synagogue, and his death in 1990.
Many lives, indeed: not just one, even in two halves.
          Music was always important to Clare as representing, beyond language and circumstance, a shared humanity. It was her solace in Allendorf when the officers gave her a violin to play so that they could dance; later, in Wellington, when events like the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann ‘stirred the pot’ uncomfortably, she took to the music with a passion that blew away everything but the playing. It may be said that the Holocaust ‘defined her’; then again it was music which both recalled her suffering, says Gaitanos, and transcended it. Clare herself describes the ‘shattering’ music of Shostakovich as ‘like flying into some absolutely rarefied air’.
          This, however, is a biography which is essentially down-to-earth and faithful in the telling of a life-story. However, just as the Nola Millar biography gave a detailed sense of Wellington’s interconnected theatre life in the 1950s and 1960s, and of the development of Toi Whakaari, the New Zealand Drama School, so The Violinist: Clare Galambos Winter, Holocaust Survivor offers, together with its many other strands, a richly interesting take on the development of classical music performance locally, along with an account of the rise of what has become a world-class musical institution: the National Orchestra — now known as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.



HELEN WATSON WHITE has degrees in English and theology from the University of Otago, and for five years was sole editor at University of Otago Press. She is a freelance editor, writer and arts reviewer.

-45.8787605170.5027976

Filed Under: biography, history

Worlds Within

June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Jamie Hanton
A Micronaut in the Wide World: the Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, by Gregory O’Brien, (Auckland University Press, 2011), 182 pp., $59.99.

Back and Beyond: New Zealand Painting for the Young and Curious, by Gregory O’Brien, (Auckland University Press, 2008), 104 pp., $34.99

Imagination, and all its mighty power, is at the centre of both of these recent Gregory O’Brien publications. It is no coincidence that both titles have the eyes and minds of children at their core, yet in both cases O’Brien’s writing elevates imagination beyond its usual youthful collocation. Back and Beyond is written, as the title suggests, for more innocent art readers, while Micronaut is a biography of New Zealand expatriate artist and children’s illustrator Graham Percy.
            The challenges inherent in writing art books for children are manifold. It’s easy to patronise, and just as easy to aim too low and miss anything worth saying. O’Brien addresses this problem in both the structure and style of Back and Beyond. Using the first person, O’Brien adopts a considered conversational tone to describe many of the paintings. While shunned in some circles, there is something to be said for the well-timed invocation of the personal in art historical discourse. If gallery wall texts were written from the point of view of an individual and situated as but one voice in a multitude of voices there would necessarily be more room for disagreement and for the initiation of conversations so vital in any pedagogic scenario.
            Similarly, by presenting a collection of painters’ profiles and selected works under loosely thematic titles, each of which takes up two pages, Back and Beyond remains open for narrative interpretation. The focus on individual painters operating within particular social and historical contexts presents a personal, and therefore accessible, account of painting in New Zealand. This structure allows the book to be dipped into and threaded together in its varying ways rather than read through and unconsciously digested.
            The scattered format also ties in with O’Brien’s framing of New Zealand painting as being characterised by ‘poozling’ and journeying. ‘Poozling’ – according to O’Brien – is a slang word native to Aotearoa that means the salvaging and collecting of things to use in other places – seems to be a child-friendly version of appropriation. Raising this idea early in the book, O’Brien cleverly introduces painting’s often self-referential nature, as well as establishing a framework for negotiating cultural overlaps and intersections. He touches on colonial and post-colonial politics, but in the main explores the folksier side of New Zealand painting, focusing on narrative veins of Maori myth and on the arrival and consequent development of European representational and figurative painting. Back and Beyond is not a history of New Zealand painting, and it does not claim to be; but more attention to abstraction and its proponents would have been, rewarding strategy for broadening understanding.
            However, its rigour as an instructive text is confirmed by the inclusion of a comprehensive biographical section, along with a recommended reading list for many of the artists featured. An engaging activity page is also included; this challenges children to create their own version of Frances Hodgkins’ ‘Cherished Things’ — all part of O’Brien’s worthwhile attempt to coax the imaginative faculty forth in his readers with the hope of altering their aesthetic approach to the everyday, and thus cultivating a more alert way of seeing amongst the young and curious.
            The act of drawing as a method for perceiving one world and creating entire other worlds is the basis for O’Brien’s biography of Graham Percy. Percy attended Elam and after graduating was a constant and exceptional contributor to the New Zealand School Journal, as well as an accomplished graphic designer who worked on book designs with writer Bruce Mason and on exhibition catalogues for Colin McCahon and the Ikon gallery artists. In 1964, Percy moved to London to take up a Queen Elizabeth scholarship at the Royal College of Art.
            In A Micronaut in the Wide World O’Brien uses Percy’s Le Corbusier-esque townhouse in Wimbledon and its contents as a metaphor for Percy’s immersive love of building worlds within worlds, of exploring life’s minute details. O’Brien wrote the book in Percy’s home in the months immediately following his death in 2008, surrounded by the objects and art that Percy and wife Mari Mahr cherished. The loosely chronological account is heavily influenced by O’Brien’s interactions with Percy’s drawings and paraphernalia – as if O’Brien is conversing with Percy via these items. The book, divided into mini-chapters, takes the form of a modernist work of literature, which one feels Percy, a lover of the gently surreal, would have appreciated.
            Approximately half of the book is devoted to Percy’s independent work created after the millennium, a decision that allows greater exploration of his formative experiences and unique inclinations as an artist. Rather than dwelling on Percy as a commissions-based illustrator, O’Brien argues an extremely convincing case for greater attention to be paid towards later bodies of work that include: ‘Arthouse’, ‘Imagined Histories’, ‘the Kiwi’, and ‘Alchemical Allotment’. These nuanced and intelligent series form the majority of the current touring exhibition curated by O’Brien. The inclusion of most of the plates means the book can easily stand alone as a comprehensive visual record of Percy’s career.
            More than an article of pure documentation, A Micronaut in the Wide World is steeped in genuine humour. O’Brien’s light touch reflects the artist’s sanguine nature, infusing many of Percy’s life’s moments with an optimistic levity: beginning with his upbringing in the town of Stratford – complete with its surreal Shakespearean aspirations – his work within the Hungarian animated film industry and even in the recollection of Percy’s manner of dealing with the medical problems that affected him — first his colour blindness, then his series of strokes later in life. The book is an affirmation of the value of drawing, of travel, and of course of the imagination. O’Brien’s description of Percy and Mahr’s art as a type that ‘has a rare capacity to accommodate innocence and wonder without excluding knowledge, history and intelligence’ could equally be applied to both Back and Beyond and A Micronaut in the Wide World. 

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JAMIE HANTON is a visual arts writer and curator hailing from Christchurch. He is currently the Director of The Blue Oyster Art Project Space in Dunedin.

Filed Under: art and photography, arts and culture, biography

Painted Words

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton 
Towards a Promised Land: On the life and art of Colin McCahon, by Gordon H. Brown (Auckland University Press, 2010) hardback, colour plates and illustrations, 216 pp., $79.99


Evangelism takes strange forms. Arthur Stace, a former alcoholic who became a Christian, spent thirty-seven years chalking the word ‘Eternity’ in beautiful copperplate onto the pavements of Sydney before his death in 1967. Toss Woollaston’s uncle, Frank, was another eccentric evangelist. One of the illustrations in Gordon H. Brown’s

Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon is of Colin McCahon’s ‘A Painting for Uncle Frank’, a late work (1980) containing (written in white paint over a black background) a quotation from the New English Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes, which includes the words ‘Those who refuse to hear the oracle speaking on earth find no escape.’ McCahon met Uncle Frank a number of times during the late 1930s and early 1940s at Toss Woollaston’s house in Motueka, and was fascinated by Uncle Frank’s ‘teaching aids’: his naïve paintings of simple Christian symbols, part of his itinerant preaching paraphernalia which he insisted on pinning to the walls of Toss Woollaston’s home whenever he was visiting, much to his nephew’s irritation.

            Uncle Frank’s visual texts, as Brown outlines, were just one influence on McCahon’s complex build-up to the 1954 creation of his first distinctive all-word paintings. There was also the example of speech balloons in cartoons, comics and advertising (most famously the lettering encased in a bubble shape on the Rinso soap flakes packet). And Brown quotes McCahon’s childhood visual epiphany of a commercial signwriter at work on the words HAIRDRESSER & TOBACCONIST on a shop window: ‘Painted gold and black on a stippled red ground, the lettering large and bold with shadows … I watched the work being done, and fell in love with signwriting.’
[Read more…]

Filed Under: art and photography, arts and culture, biography

Renaissance Man

April 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul Wood
Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann, Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, 2011), 232 pp., $75.00

If you could physically sense an author’s passion and thoroughness, Peter Simpson’s books would glow like fresh bread. His timely and lavishly illustrated Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann positively radiates, and yet again shows Auckland University Press to be New Zealand’s pre-eminent art book publisher.

            Artist and illustrator Bensemann was the descendent of North German immigrants from Bruchhausen-Vilsen south of Bremen, settling at Moutere, and was born in Takaka in 1912. His family moved to Nelson in the early 1920s, and that dramatic karst landscape was to become a reoccurring feature in his rich oeuvre. The German influence was also strong, manifesting in a rich vein of Romanticism in his work, embracing Holbein and Dürer, and various Medieval, folk, and expressionist sources, to complement the vivid orientalism of his drawings and landscapes.

            Outside of Canterbury Bensemann has not been well known beyond the influential Ilam mafia and the occasional reproduction in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, though his portraits were reproduced annually in the New Zealand Arts Year Books from 1946 until 1949, and during his lifetime one article in Landfall in 1953, and a memorial in Art New Zealand shortly after his death in 1986. Since then, there have been two publications by Bensemann’s daughter Caroline Otto and at least two significant exhibitions curated by Simpson.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: art and photography, arts and culture, biography

Not Doing Reverence

March 1, 2011 1 Comment

South-West of Eden, A Memoir 1932–1956Philip Temple
South-West of Eden, A Memoir 1932–1956, C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, 2010), 345 pp., $45.00

For someone described by his publisher as a ‘towering figure in New Zealand literature’ – a description the author would probably endorse – one approaches the memoir of his youth with expectations of discovering the magical springs of his inspiration or, to the contrary, a story of childhood deprivation and loss that fuelled his high ambition and achievement.

The surprise is that C.K. ‘Karl’ Stead’s youth was rooted so firmly in the conventional and prosaic, within such a limited familial and environmental reach, that its narration, at times, becomes simply mundane. We must wait until Stead reaches university before the narrative becomes truly engaging; and therein lies the tale.

Stead lived all his childhood at 63 Kensington Avenue, Mount Eden, and went to nearby Mangawhau School before progressing to Mount Albert Grammar. For the first seventeen years of his life ‘there were five of us’ – ‘the grandmother’, mother Olive, father Jim and older sister Norma who, with Stead, formed a group ‘at intervals turbulent, sad, combative, hysterical; but … also full of jokes, music, good talk, caring and love.’ Stead was named for his Swedish master-mariner grandfather, Christian Karlson, a looming figure of romance and myth who, though dead before Stead was born, he felt to be ‘a sixth family member’ who ‘subtly, invisibly, ruled the roost.’ Karlson had built 63 Kensington Avenue over two quarter-acre sections in the early 1920s and, after his death, the most economic arrangement was for only child Olive and family to move in with her mother. For Stead’s father this seemed a ‘trap from which there was no escape; yet he loved the house and the garden, and made them (almost, but not quite) his own.’ [Read more…]

Filed Under: biography

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