Appella’s book unlocks a family’s hidden Jewish past

Gallery owner Laura Russell led fund-raising drive

By PAUL HAIST

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A Portland art gallery owner has succeeded in raising the funds necessary to acquire and then donate to the Oregon Jewish Museum a limited-edition, large-format, handmade artist book. Artist books are works of art realized in the form of a book.

“The Janos Book” by Alex Appella recounts in word and 29 color collages the saga of a Hungarian Jewish family some members of whom made their way to the Americas, including the United States, where today they have descendants in Oregon.

Laura Russell, who operates the 23 Sandy Gallery in Northeast Portland and who is herself a book artist, said six donors were needed to acquire the work of art, which Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett previously described in the Jewish Review as “collage and text that peels away 70 years of family secrets and Jewish survival, a work so alive that it is hard to believe it is made of paper.”

Appella is an Oregon native who lives today in Argentina. She is the grand niece of the man referenced in the book’s title, the late Janos Szenti, which is a pseudonym, used at his request.

Only 50 copies of Appella’s meticulously and lovingly crafted 8½ x 25-inch book have been printed. Copy No. 24—modestly and elegantly encased in a long black box—was presented to the Oregon Jewish Museum July 20 by Russell, who was accompanied by the artist’s mother, Judith Havas, and aunt, Eve Havas-Slinker, both of Salem. Havas is the administrator at Temple Beth Sholom.

Prior to the events that led to the creation of “The Janos Book” the contemporary descendants of the family whose story is told in the book “did not know we had any Jewish heritage,” said Havas.

Szenti lived in Argentina where he had arrived from Transylvania in 1949 and where Appella traveled in 1994 at age 20 to interview him and learn the history of her family. It was a revelatory Jewish history that her Uncle Janos, like her grandfather, had previously kept secret.

Janos was a reluctant subject, having brusquely dismissed an earlier attempt to uncover the family history in 1983. But this time he took Appella into his confidence, and what had been planned as a six-month interview was carried out almost daily over the ensuing two years.

Early in the book Appella quotes her great uncle:

One has to cry for the disintegration of our family. One has to cry, because what happened to us has happened to millions of families all over the world. Since my childhood, it’s like a bomb exploded among us, and we were scattered apart. An eye in Cuba, a bone in Argentina, a hand in California, a foot in Connecticut, and still more in Israel and Canada and Switzerland, all over the world. Conversations like what you and I have, Alex, at one time were common among family members. I’m passing on what I know of our family, to add meat and flesh to the pieces that have been scattered all over the world.

During the presentation of the book at the OJM the artist’s mother commented on the book as a volume of history.

“The war took people apart and this book brought them back together,” said Havas. As a history book, she added, “It is both personal and universal.”

OJM Executive Director Judith Margles, who accepted the book on behalf of the museum, said, “That’s why it’s so important to have this book.”

Margles thought the book would be placed on display sometime this fall.

Appella said of the process of creating the book that it was “a journey” for her, “an odyssey that was mine to complete.”

It was a journey that lasted 12 years from start to finish.

At first the family history evolved as two-year “ethnographic project” that included genealogical trees, timelines and chronological accounts.

Then Appella recreated the story as a novel, another two-year project.

“Fortunately, I wrote a very bad novel,” she has said. “I took a break until I could find an adequate way to tell our story.”

Not only did she have her notes from her conversations with Janos, Appella also had a treasure trove of original memorabilia including letters, photographs, maps and drawings.

“All of this visual material became the obvious channel for portraying our history,” wrote Appella. It was then she turned to collage (“my preferred form of expression”) to record and share her family history.

Thus was “The Janos Book” born.

Since its publication, “The Janos Book,” which won the 2008 Purchase Prize of the Secrets and Lies National Juried Artist Book Exhibition at 23 Gallery, has been acquired by several distinguished collections including the University of Oregon Architecture and Allied Arts Library; Harold and Arlene Schnitzer; Stanford University, Judaic Collections; University of California, Irvine; University of California, Santa Barbara; The Phoenix, Ariz., Public Library; Yale University; Smith College; Texas Tech University; Wesleyan College and Williams College.

Appella lives in Córdoba, Argentina, today where she continues to work in collage, bookbinding and writing. Other of her art books are included in the permanent collections of The Getty Museum in Los Angeles and more than a dozen universities across the United States.

Learn more about “The Janos Book” and the artist at Appella’s Web site, transientbooks.com and at the 23 Sandy Gallery Web site, 23sandy.com.