Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Thursday, September 16, 1999
Holocaust gives wing to artist’s passion
JON HAHN
Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.
Note by A. K. Segan,, March 31, 2021: Jon Hahn retired some years ago and I wish him well in his senior years.
He draws and paints people… with wings. So that our imaginations might take flight and cross to a world we never knew. The wings are drawn from real wings in the collection of the Burke Museum, where he spent countless hours drawing the intricate structures and feather patterns and textures.
The people are drawn from old photographs, such as the one taken by a German soldier of two women who were executed not long after the photo was taken for their resistance fighting in the spring 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Kenneth Akiva Segan is about my age, pre-baby boomer* and couldn’t have known the European Jews who people his paintings and drawings. But as he grew to learn that some of his father’s family were among the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, Akiva’s art took on a new dimension.
And for the past nine years, while working at the Magnolia library and living with his pet cockatiels in a cramped art studio below the Pike Place Market, Akiva – who prefers his Hebrew name – has created a substantial body of art dealing with Holocaust victims.
Next month, he will present slides of his works, “Under the Wings of G-d: Holocaust Education Through Art,” at the second annual International Conference on the Holocaust and Education at the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem. Akiva’s slide-illustrated presentation will be in conjunction with the paintings of Israel Bernbaum, a Warsaw Ghetto survivor and noted author and artist.
So why would a nice young Jewish guy from Seattle, with a great sense of humor and an abiding love of life and things beautiful, spend most of his waking and working hours on something like Holocaust education?
“I don’t want to sound trite,” he said, “but if I don’t do it, who will?! I cannot see how artists can avoid dealing with the Holocaust, any more than Picasso could avoid dealing with Guernica.”
And to that end, Akiva has almost from the start of this quest taken his art into local schools. “Ninety-eight percent positive response. Adults appreciate it, but if this reaches kids early enough, it allows them to think and helps break down stereotypes of ethnic, national, and religious groups,” he said.
“I can’t speak enough for the need for educating youngsters about stereotyping, especially now, when there’s a proliferation of ‘hate sites’ on the Internet and we keep hearing or reading about the likes of the so-called Reverend Butler,” referring to a recent P-I front page story about the founder of the Aryan Nations in Idaho.
It was from one of his classroom presentations that Akiva mined a nugget from Andre Berkbigler, a local teacher: “You have given me a way to present the inhumanity of the Holocaust in a way that does not demean the victims. In addition to giving back the victims’ individuality, you also gide them dignity, while not denying how they died.”
Akiva concedes that much of the Holocaust was abstract information to him until he visited Poland during an overseas teaching and traveling stint. Since his forebears were from Europe – some never heard from, or of, after World War II – he made a point of visiting their villages, or shtetls.
“The vestiges, the remains of Jewish community life, were everywhere in Poland,” he recalled. “And sometimes, too evident…in the death camps, there are still uones, human bones….coming out of the ground. I saw things that made me want to weep, to shudder, to scream!”
Some of the people in his paintings-from-photographs have names – names and lives remembered by their friends and family who were lucky enough to survive. Some, such as Lejzor Lederman of Ostrovitz, Poland, and Josef, his youngest son, shown together, are thought to have died together. Then was then, you might say, but what about now? For starters, you have to believe that Akiva’s passion about Holocaust education is one of those “lest we forget” things. And there is much about today that echoes and reflects the stereotyping and intolerances of yesterday.
“I get particularly angry over the campaigns by Christian groups to ‘convert’ Jews…the Southern Baptist Convention, Promise Keepers and others,” Akiva said. “And I’m equally concerned about groups like Jews for Jesus, which also is mounting ‘conversion’ campaigns,” he said.
Before going to Jerusalem, Akiva will stop in Vienna to visit former Magnolia resident and retired Seattle businessman Alex Schwarz. “Alex and his late wife Trudi, were friends as well as patrons at the Magnolia library where I work,” Akiva said. “They both were refugees from Hitler’s Nazi regime. After Trudi died, Alex returned to his native Vienna to be with family. I’m hoping he might help me visit his old high school classmates, Simon Wiesenthal and Teddy Kollek, the former longtime mayor (of Jerusalem),” Akiva said.
While in Jerusalem for the weeklong conference, he might seek opportunities to give his presentation to resident Palestinian students and their teachers, much as he does here, Akiva said.
And before returning, he’s scheduled for more presentations at the University of Sussex, Centre for German Jewish Studies, at Brighton, England.
Life as an artist is hardly the kind of thing you go into for financial gain and security. And devoting virtually all your work to one subject further narrows any opportunities for artistic recognition.
But as Akiva reflects: “I’ve got works in collections internationally, but I’ve never made a lot of money. If that were my priority, I certainly wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now. I still do works reflecting Judaica, and I love doing landscapes. But this is what I must do. This work must be done….by someone.
“And if, as some have suggested, I am driven by it? So what!”
~
* P.S. A note by A.K. Segan, March 31, 2021: Jon was close in stating I am pre-boomer but we are ten years apart, age wise. He’s closer in age to several of my cousins who were born between 1940 and the mid 1940’s; I was born 1950]