Tanya Josefowitz
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tanya Josefowitz née Kagan was born in Worms on the Rhine on 17th May 1929. Her father Ilya is a self-employed cabinet-maker and designer who remains in Germany after World War One, retaining his Russian passport. One day, he meets Hildi Wallach from Munich at her aunt’s place in Worms. It is love at first sight. They marry soon after. Her father was one of the three brothers Wallach from Bielefeld and environs who founded and ran the Volkskunsthaus Wallach, a highly successful enterprise before and after World War One. It was owing to their initiative that what had been working clothes worn by women and men in remote Alpine valleys – Dirndl and Lederhosen, that is – were turned into leitmotifs of a certain fashion trend.
In early 1938, the Kagan family is served the expulsion note. Soon, father Ilya leaves with a visitor’s visa provided by his American relatives. His family follows suit. A few weeks on, they are in New York, a new life begins. Her Munich relatives, however, are not so lucky. Her grandfather Julius Wallach and his second wife eventually make it to the USA, while many others, among whom Melitta and Max Wallach are deported and exterminated. Emma Wallach née Koschland, the first wife of Julius Wallach who is alos mentioned by name in her book «I Remember», was deported to Kaunas on 20 November 1941 to be shot dead by SS troops six days later – as is recorded on a memory sign at her former home in Munich since 6 October 2021.
Tanya marries David Josefowitz in 1949. They have three daughters. It is no surprise in a family so attached to arts and crafts that Tanya wants to design fashion before becoming an artist. In 1999, she writes «I Remember». By then, she had been living in London and Geneva for a long time. In 2009, the catalogue of her artistic works is published in a private and numbered edition. In 2016, stepping-stones are laid for the Kagan family in Worms. In 2021, her memoir is issued in a revised and corrected version as a bilingual E-book after a hardcover and softcover edition dating from 2019.
In fact, she had written another book entitled «Capinero. A Bird», published privately in a limited and numbered edition with the author’s illustrations and black and white photographs in Geneva in 1992. This book was only discovered by the editor on the occasion of an exhibition held at Ulrichsgymnasium Norden in May 2019.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In «Capinero. A Bird», Tanya Josefowitz tells the very simple albeit extremely moving story of the special relationship she had with a little bird, his life, struggle for survival and death. Both her memoirs are now also available as bilingual E- and audio-books.