Sarith Leila Haas, Artist and Poet

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As an only child of Holocaust survivor parents, the struggles my parents faced greatly influenced my life in all areas. I grew up in a home where the war never ended, and the dead were present alongside the living. The emotional deprivation and orphanhood I felt as a child, led me to a total identification with my surviving mother (who in her distant past was a mezzo-soprano singer and had to abandon the world of music, due to her life circumstances). Intergenerational transmission and low self-esteem are the result of high sensitivity and the post-trauma experience.

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In my work, I often deal with personal and collective content. I draw and paint using various materials from different worlds, such as photo prints, engravings, drawings, and collages, mostly with papers of different sizes and unstretched canvases. 

 

I often draw myself as a girl alone and sometimes another figure appears, perhaps the mother or my daughter, depicted as either a child or a doll. My sources of inspiration are photographs from family albums and anonymous photographs of girls who perished in the Holocaust or after trauma.

 

​The paintings are sometimes large and brightly colored, but the figures are vulnerable, lacking facial features and defined identity, with lips red as a wound. They are immersed in their inner world and are not anchored in any specific time or place. The figures seem to be taken from the theater of the soul; kings, queens, clowns, dancers, and animals. Sometimes I also incorporate letters and single words.