PROJECT STATEMENT:

Yossele: Holocaust Series

Yossele, the very young child of a Holocaust survivor, died in the crematorium in Auchwitz along with his grandmother, uncle, and cousins. Upon liberation from the death camps, Yossele’s mother began life anew in Holland and America. She started a new family, and kept the secret of Yossele from her new children. a secret that was only revealed many years later upon her death.

This photographic project seeks to explore how a deceased child continues to be a presence in the world of his surviving mother. It is my premise that the child, his life, and his manner of death could never be banished from her mind, despite and also because of her decision never to speak of him to her new family. Her son was nowhere and everywhere at the same time, a presence both denied and remembered. Like ghosts in the nursery that she tries to ignore, efforts to forget fail and, instead, remembering intrudes upon daily encounters with her living children and their objects of play. It is this remembering that I hope to convey in these images.