Homage to Ancestry and Clay

Karen Koblitz is a Los Angeles-based artist and Associate Professor Emerita from University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art & Design.

Over her long and illustrious career, Karen's ceramic works have been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and around the world. She has works in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Check out Orvieto Red Rooster Lunette on the Renwick Gallery site and, on the LACMA site, see these two works: a decorative ceramic plate and Still Life with Pitcher and Hedge Apple.

In this wide-ranging interview recorded in early spring 2022, Karen talks about her beginnings as an artist, as well as her love for both working in clay and for teaching; her Czech family roots, including family members lost in the Holocaust; her involvement in the restoration of a Czech synagogue in the Southern Bohemian town of Pacov, where her great-great-grandparents were married in 1860; a documentary about that restoration project; her participation, in 2002, in Art in Embassies, a U.S. Department of State program (see her profile on the Art in Embassies website); and her recently discovered passion for knitting.

There are two additional pieces of information of note:

Around the 23-minute mark, Karen talks about a book, The White Road, which chronicles the history of porcelain. The name of the author is Edmund de Waal.

Toward the end of the episode, around 49:30, Karen talks about the Czech Torah scrolls. The Westminster Synagogue in London oversees the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust.

Hope you enjoy the episode with this amazing artist. To hear specific topics, please check out the chapters.

This is Kate Jones. Thank you for listening to The Gale Hill Radio Hour!

The show is available in Apple and Google Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast directories. Also on Substack and YouTube;  Facebook, Instagram  and LinkedIn.

Transcript

00:00:13:09 - 00:00:36:12
Kate: Hello and welcome to The Gale Hill Radio Hour. I'm your host Kate Jones, having a conversation with Los Angeles-based artist and educator Karen Koblitz.

Karen, it is so good to have you on the show.

00:00:37:19 - 00:00:43:11
Karen: Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to speak to you and your listeners.

00:00:43:12 - 00:01:17:09
Kate: Okay, well, here we go! When we talked on the phone a while ago in preparation for this interview, we covered a lot of territory. For example: your Bohemian ancestry; your passion for teaching and how college football players proved adept at working with clay; your latest artistic endeavor — knitting; your teaching in general; and, of course, your long and illustrious career as a ceramic artist.

So how about starting our conversation with your career as an artist and then we can go from there?

00:01:26:17 - 00:01:44:03
Karen: I would say that my interest in art began as a small child. I remember sitting in front of the TV and drawing figures and costumes. I really wanted to be Edith Head. She was the costume designer of my childhood, and I really admired her designs. My parents were very supportive of my interest in art. And so when I was, I don't know, about 10 or 11, I went to this woman's artist studio in West Hollywood, California, and she had all these different media. And one week I could work in mosaics; the next week, I could draw. And it was an amazing experience because she wasn't limiting what I could do. She was just allowing me to experiment with all these different materials. And then also, I remember when I got older, taking courses in the summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

00:02:44:16 - 00:02:48:23
Kate: A good grounding in art.

00:02:49:14 - 00:03:20:05
Karen: And my mother, even for a while, was a docent at LACMA, as we call it here. And when I entered college, you know, I'd taken a lot of art courses in high school. I wasn't the best student in high school. I'm glad I kind of was wild then, because when I got to college, I really was serious about studying. And I decided to enter college as a painting major and attended a local college in the San Fernando Valley, one of our Cal State colleges today, they're known as.

I started as a painting major, and then my sophomore year in the fall, I decided to take a class in ceramics. It was a class that was throwing on the wheel, but as soon as my hands touched the clay, I knew that this was the material I would work in for the rest of my life.

00:03:43:02 - 00:03:49:15
Kate: How about that! That kind of gives me chills, you know, how you can connect with something like that.

00:03:50:04 - 00:04:05:19
Karen: Yeah, it was amazing. And I tell this story over and over again, especially as a teacher I would share this with students. I was very fortunate to have this kind of experience with something that ended up being my life's work.

00:04:06:01 - 00:04:16:17
Kate: So you hold bachelor and master's degrees in fine arts, both with an emphasis in ceramics. And you also studied in Japan and Italy.

00:04:18:00 - 00:04:51:07
Karen: Yes. I spent my undergraduate first two years studying art at the state college in Los Angeles. And then I had the opportunity to do a junior year abroad, and I selected Italy as the country to attend school in. And they had a wonderful program in Florence, Italy. So we lived in this old Bedia, a former monastery, and we took classes within the walls of the monastery.

We also took classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence itself.  And there was an art studio that the state colleges had downtown. So it was a wonderful experience. And the best part was studying art history and going into the museums. No books. You went into the museums and on a cold winter's day, you were the only one in the Botticelli room at the Uffizi. And we studied the artwork by looking at the original pieces.

It was an amazing experience. I have always recommended all my students, no matter what their area of study is in college, to do a junior year abroad or now it's a junior semester.

Our own daughter did that and was studying Spanish and spent a semester in 2016 in Madrid. And I have to say one of the proudest moments of my life was the day after my husband arrived and I arrived in Madrid in May of 2016, and we spent the entire day, like about seven hours, at the Prado Museum.  And Gina, our daughter, had taken a class in Spanish painting and they had gone through every room and sculpture, every room in the Prado, looking at the artwork and she gave us this one-on-one tour that was just amazing.

Kate: Geez, that is terrific. So how did your combination of domestic and international studies influence your work?

00:06:34:02 - 00:07:11:06
Karen: I would say that, you know, I'm a native Angelino and I lived here up until my junior year of college when I traveled to Italy. My father liked to travel. My mother was from New York. We'd go to New York. So after my year abroad, I found this amazing wanderlust for travel. And through my art practice and my teaching, I was able to travel throughout the United States and Canada and also to Europe to exhibit my work, to give workshops.

And also my husband and I, before our daughter was born and after, would do a lot of traveling together, which is great as our daughter now is a traveler spending her time while a student and a graduate student in Israel and Spain and India.  I think that's great because you get to learn so much about different people and find yourself being more accepting and understanding when you get to be a guest in someone else's country.

00:07:45:16 - 00:07:59:02
Kate: Absolutely. You had a fellowship when you were still in school to study ceramics and you spent the summer of 1973 in Japan.

00:07:59:23 - 00:08:39:09
Karen: Yes. I graduated from California College of Arts and Crafts, which is now California College of the Arts in Oakland, California, in 1973, and they gave a scholarship for a summer trip that involved a consortium of art schools and students from these schools. And we went to Japan and we attended classes at Osaka University of Arts and we also did some traveling through the country. It was a wonderful experience because the Japanese people were so welcoming and warm.

And of course the history of ceramics in Japan is very recognized. And to be able to watch people work and to visit museums and see the collections of ancient works and contemporary artists was very, very exciting.

00:09:00:18 - 00:09:08:11
Kate: Then you went on to get a master's of fine art in ceramics, and you went to Wisconsin. Is that right?

00:09:09:12 - 00:09:38:13
Karen: I chose Wisconsin because my father, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, got his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin and would talk about it very with fond memories. And so I decided that I would apply to Madison because it had and still has an excellent reputation as having an art department within the university.

00:09:39:01 - 00:09:49:13
Kate: You went where you were supposed to be. That's excellent. And then you taught in different places. You taught in Kansas, South Carolina, and eventually back in L.A.

00:09:50:14 - 00:10:23:06
Karen: Yes. I began teaching after I graduated. I moved back from Wisconsin to the Bay Area because I loved living in San Francisco area. It was very challenging to find teaching positions, but I found myself a job teaching beginning design at San Jose Community College.

And then I got a call from a small liberal arts university in northeastern Kansas called Baker University. A friend of mine had been teaching there, and she only lasted a year. And instead of doing this humongous search, they decided to ask her to, you know, recommend a few artists who could possibly take the position. And I flew to Kansas, got on this airplane with all these people, cowboy hats and everything. I'd never been to Kansas before and arrived in Kansas City. The chairman of the department picked me up and said, "Where do you want to go?" And I go, "Hmm. 12th Street and Vine. Because we all know that famous song about going to Kansas City. The chairman thought that was the funniest thing ever. We hit it off, and I ended up living there for five years and teaching at Baker University.

00:11:08:16 - 00:11:11:06
Kate: What was it like? So you enjoyed it?

00:11:11:22 - 00:11:23:08
Karen: I loved living in Kansas. The people were so nice. I had a garden and I planted this big, extensive garden. And then I realized when the tree filled out in the spring, the garden was in the shade. So I learned a lot.

You know, it was so different from Los Angeles. And, of course, Kansas City is a great city. And I love baseball. I grew up loving the Dodgers. And in Kansas City, I became a huge fan of the Kansas City Royals.

00:11:40:01 - 00:11:49:07
Kate: All right! So do you want to talk about South Carolina at all or or just go on to where your work is exhibited?

00:11:50:02 - 00:12:17:14
Karen: I taught in South Carolina for a couple of years as head of the Department of Ceramics there. And, you know, it's beautiful, especially when you go to Charleston, but I was really missing California and New York. And I decided after two years in South Carolina to make a move. And I decided in the end to move back to Los Angeles and work as an artist.

This is in the '80s, the mid-'80s, when our economy was booming. And I was making a good living selling artwork. So I decided to move to Los Angeles over New York because I had family there and a support system. And so I moved back to Los Angeles in 1984 and have been living here ever since.

00:12:36:07 - 00:12:51:21
Kate: And you really have done well. You have work exhibited across the U.S. and in many countries. Would you talk about some of those countries where your work is exhibited?

00:12:53:06 - 00:13:37:06
Karen: We had a program, I don't know if it still exists, but it was called Art in Embassies. It was started by Lyndon Johnson. And he decided that American ambassadors living abroad in the American ambassadors' residences, that there should be art and that there should be a program that invited American artists from all the arts, from music to theater to dance to fine arts, as guests in these countries and to start one-on-one diplomacy and relationships between like people in the countries.

And so I was invited in 2002 to go to Moscow. Now, I had been to Moscow when I was living in Italy in 1970 over the Christmas break. There was an Eastern European tour and my grandparents both come from Belarus. So I've always been interested in Russia. I went to Moscow.

I wrote to the ambassador and his wife who had selected my work to be in their home during their tenure in Moscow. I told them I was the artist they had selected to come and be an art ambassador to the U.S. Department of State's Arts and Embassy Program.

The ambassador was Alexander Vershbow and his wife, Lisa, was a very talented jeweler. I wrote to them: "Oh, I love Russia. I'm so interested in it. My family's from Belarus." 

I got to stay in the house of the ambassador and have meals with them. I was there for about two and a half weeks. And I had a very full schedule meeting with people, curators and directors of museum, other artists taking tours of art schools, and out of this visit, I was invited to have a solo show in the summer of 2004 at the All-Russian Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Arts.

Russia has a fabulous history of ceramics. And so this was just so exciting for me. And it makes me sad what's happening today because I probably will not get back to Russia in my lifetime. And I do have friends there and they are struggling. It's really heartbreaking and, of course, it's heartbreaking for Ukraine. But I don't want to dwell on that.

After I did my time in Russia, I've been to Russia now about five times. I started studying Russian but have ceased it. I was invited by the ambassador of Azerbaijan to come and spend a few weeks in Baku. And I had a wonderful experience there also, meeting artists and students.

I was part of an international ceramics conference in 2010 in what was called Umm al-Fahm, the largest Arab city in Israel. And I had the opportunity to invite three artists from Asia to join me in Israel, and I was very impressed with them. One had been a student. One was a very established artist, an older gentleman, and the other one was this woman who was crazy about Michael Jackson. She made beautiful pieces, but she had this whole series on Michael Jackson. She was such a character. I'm still in touch with her on Facebook.

So, I mean, these experiences joined people together. I shared my culture and the history of ceramics in America with them, and they shared their history with me. It's just a wonderful way to involve people one on one in the world.

00:17:17:17 - 00:17:33:17
Kate: What a program that Art in Embassies program is, and also your experiences, as you say, connecting with people. Just incredible.

00:17:35:01 - 00:17:39:21
Karen: Absolutely. I feel so fortunate because of this.

00:17:41:05 - 00:18:04:08
Kate: And so you've worked in ceramics since 1968. And I know you learned early on in your life that you were drawn to using and manipulating clay. But what is it about this material that is so appealing to you?

00:18:06:12 - 00:18:34:19
Karen: When your hands touch clay, there's such a warmth. And such enjoyment for me personally. I think it starts with kids. You know, you give kids a lump of clay and they just can go to town enjoying themselves. And it's just a material that's so enjoyable to manipulate in your hands and it's so soft and malleable and you can build any shape you want out of it.

There are different types of clay for small things, for large things. It's a material that starts out as soft. And then when it's introduced to the fire, it becomes hardened and it cannot return back to the its wet, malleable state.

00:18:57:03 - 00:18:58:14
Kate: It's transformed.

00:18:58:21 - 00:19:34:14
Karen: It transforms. And, you know, when you go to a museum, and you look at the history of man and all over the world, a lot of the history is documented through ceramic pieces. Be they pieces used in cooking or drinking or ritual objects. Ceramics is used in architecture. We have adobe. We have architectural embellishments on the exterior of buildings. And tiles can be used inside and outside.

It's something we use in our daily life when we cook and when we eat and when we drink. And there's a whole world of figurative sculpture, a whole world of abstract works in clay. And it's just this amazing material that differs from any other material on Earth.

00:20:03:02 - 00:20:17:07
Kate: And I love what you said to me one time how easy it is. It's ancient and it's easy to harvest, and it's inexpensive and it's available all over the world.

00:20:17:17 - 00:20:58:08
Karen: Right, it's available all over the world. And so you find in studying the history of ceramics, you find similarities between cultures. One time I was in the Denver Art Museum and went into this room with large vessels, and I went, "Oh, these are from Mexico." And then I looked, and no, they were Chinese. So, you know, with trade and travel, and just human creativity and invention, there are certain things that go through different societies that you see in shapes and decoration and all of that. It's it's just such an intriguing area.

00:21:01:15 - 00:21:23:18
Kate: Yes, and it does speak to so much of what we have in common. We need these utensils and we make art, and people all over the globe do this. They all use this material, the same material. We have this amazing connection with each other through clay.

00:21:24:08 - 00:21:55:07
Karen: Absolutely. We have very active organizations in the United States and internationally where artists come together from all over the world to exhibit, to lecture, to demonstrate. It's very exciting. I once went to an international festival in Aberystwyth, which is in Wales in the United Kingdom, and met an artist from Korea, from South Korea. And we're still friends today.

00:21:56:07 - 00:22:26:22
Kate: So you really have had an amazing career and you've you've done commissions and you've had your work featured in in solo exhibitions and group exhibitions. You're in permanent collections of several museums, including the Renwick Gallery of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in D.C. and the Los Angeles County Museum Museum of Art. What specific works would you like to talk about?

00:22:28:14 - 00:22:40:17
Karen: Well, I call myself an Italophile, but I guess now I'm more into the Czech Republic. But anyway, for years, it was Italy, Italy, Italy, and it's still my favorite place on earth, Italy.

00:22:41:06 - 00:22:46:19
Kate: There are worse places to be, aren't there? Florence is a beautiful city.

00:22:47:04 - 00:23:31:21
Karen: Florence is beautiful. In the late '80s, I met a gentleman traveling through the United States who owned a majolica factory in Umbria in central Italy. Majolica is a technique that was employed in the early renaissance by the Europeans. It's called majolica in Italy and in Germany. It's called faience in France; it's called delft in the Netherlands, and in England. There's a wonderful book about it called "The White Road: Journey into an Obsession" by Edmund de Waal.  He traced the history of porcelain. At one time in the 17th century, the porcelain was more valuable than gold. You had a king of Saxony who traded soldiers for porcelain vessels from China.

00:23:57:17 - 00:23:58:17
Kate: My goodness.

00:23:58:22 - 00:24:37:10
Karen: It's just so interesting. So in looking for the history of of porcelain in Europe, they felt they didn't have the right materials. So what they did is they experimented in trying to create porcelain, they took their low-fire red clay, and they fired it and they just fired it. And then when it came out of the bisque firing, they covered it with the white, white, opaque glaze.

And on that white opaque glaze, before submitting it to the fire, again, they painted colorants. So that gave them this nice white base, like the porcelain. And so majolica became it. It came in from southern Spain because you have this migration of Middle Eastern artists or craftsmen from the area of Iran and Iraq who came through Africa, up into Spain.

And they brought with them their shapes, their techniques and their patterns, and that was disseminated into Europe. And that's how this technique took fire. And I always say that our lives would be so different if it wasn't for the Islamic world, because the Islamic world has given us so much, including this history of ceramics, and including they were the first people to navigate the seas.

They were in the area where Persia was. They went out on boats and they ended up in China and they brought with them cobalt, which is an oxide that gives us blue in ceramics. And they brought the oxide into China and then China used it in their ceramics, their famous porcelain blue on white ware. Then these pieces were exported back to this area of Persia, and the blue became part of their vocabulary.

There's so much exchange. It's just so interesting. I find that the movement of ceramic techniques and designs around the world to be absolutely fascinating.

00:26:36:17 - 00:26:39:09
Kate: Yes, it is interesting how it traveled.

00:26:40:13 - 00:27:22:01
Karen: So anyway, I worked in this majolica factory where they took the indigenous red clay and did the preliminary base firing, then covered it with a white glaze, and then painted designs on it. And I worked for this factory from 1989 through 2003, visiting once a year or once every few years and designing shapes and decoration and all of this. So with all these frequent trips and then also my basis and our history from living in Florence, I became very engaged and interested in the beautiful works of the Della Robbia family.

The Della Robbia family were the first group of people to mass produce ceramics during the Renaissance, and they were based in Tuscany and around Florence. And so they created pieces that are known for lots of color, and they are architectural. You have tondos, round pieces, or lunettes, half-moon pieces, that are bordered by foliage and flowers and fruit.

And in the middle they placed religious figures like Baby Jesus or Mary, and then these were inserted in the exterior/interiors of buildings. And so I decided to start a series, a Della Robbia series, in which I emulated this half-moon shape. They're about, I don't know, 42 inches by 23 inches in height. And I used foliage in and around the edges and then in the inside instead of using religious items.

I've always used the vessel in my artwork. I made still-life vignettes and they were in high relief. So I did this big series of lunette pieces that I really, still to this day, love. All the color and patterns.

00:28:55:03 - 00:28:57:10
Kate: And what became of them, the series?

00:28:58:07 - 00:29:30:10
Karen: I have only one left, and most of them were bought. One of them is in the Renwick Gallery. Okay. So in Washington, D.C., and they had a show, I'm thinking around 2000, and they used my lunette piece on the advertisement. So I went into the Metro in Washington, D.C. and there was my piece on this, you know, signage and I was just going crazy. "Oh my God, that's my work!" And all these people were like walking away from me like, "Oh, she's really crazy." But it was really wonderful to have my work displayed like that for the show.

00:29:42:16 - 00:29:49:23
Kate: What a thrill that would be, especially when you aren't expecting it and you come across it like that.

00:29:50:09 - 00:30:16:11
Karen: Absolutely. So, you know, and I still I haven't been back to Italy in a long time, and it's not the rage anymore because in the '90s into the early 2000 there, everyone was buying my old pottery here in America. And it's kind of gone out of favor now. But I do hope it comes back because, you know, there's a lot of centers.

DeRuta is the center that I worked in in Italy. That was where Ubaldo Grazia, the owner of the Grazia factory who invited me to come and design for him, was. He had this great idea as he was selling most of his work in America that it would be a good idea to invite American artists into the factory to do designs.

00:30:41:05 - 00:30:54:03
Kate: You did another very interesting series called "Objects of Memory." Would you talk about that?

00:30:54:16 - 00:31:05:13
Karen: Yes. That is one of my most recent series in 2015. My mother made the decision to move into a retirement home, and she's still living at 94.

00:31:06:04 - 00:31:10:16
Kate: Good for her. I just want to do a little shout-out to your mom.

00:31:12:11 - 00:31:54:20
Karen: So in moving into the retirement home, her condo was the last place she had lived for the last, you know, 10 years, and it needed packing up. And so my sister came from Colorado and we went through the apartment, packed things up to give to charity and kept some of it. And it was very emotional and very hard. And I think the experience that most people have when they help their parents kind of close a home, whether their parents move or there's a death in the family, you go there and all these things that you grew up with that are so familiar to you, you know, I grew up with them.

And then as an adult, I lived in Los Angeles again in '84 and saw my parents quite often because I lived very close to where they lived. And so it was sort of taken for granted that this interior space would be part of my life forever. But my mom moved and she could take very, very little with her.

And so we started packing things up, and my sister said to me, "Oh, I remember having ice cream out of these bowls." And then it's just an epiphany. I said, "You know, I'm going to create a series that kind of documents and memorializes the act of packing up things that are familiar to you for your whole life. You know, packing up your parents' home." And so I called it Objects of Memory. And what I did was I recreated it. I had given all this stuff away, and I recreated it again out of clay, out of porcelain. And the porcelain I selected is a porcelain that fires kind of a very, very light gray. And I decided to keep these objects gray because to me, they're a memory.

They're fleeting memory. And it is kind of the ephemeral quality of gray, just as you move your eyes and not focus on anything. So I kept them gray. And then I decided, "How am I going to exhibit them?" And I was talking to a friend who's in the art world, and he was saying, "You know, it would be kind of interesting to do little vignettes." And I go, you know, "That would be great. Kind of recreate little areas of my parents' home with these objects sitting on them."

So I designed furniture, and I had an artist create the furniture for me, and I ended up staining all the pieces of gray and then placing these objects on top of them, creating little, you know, portions of rooms, from a living room to a bedroom to a den.

And I was able to exhibit these works — because they take up a lot of space — in a solo show that I had in 2018 at a community college in the Los Angeles area called El Camino. And it was really wonderful to be able to assemble these works there. And actually my mother came to see the show and it touched her very deeply to see that I had recreated our living space.

00:34:43:10 - 00:34:49:10
Kate: Wow.  You had given the pieces away. Did you do them from memory or photos?

00:34:50:06 - 00:34:58:20
Karen: I had photos and I also sketched them. So I have a nice public storage space full of ceramics.

00:34:59:07 - 00:35:16:23
Kate: Oh, my goodness. That is so interesting. So it's about memory. And that's another thing we all have. You know, we have this identity and these moments of memory that just kind of wash over us. That's very cool.

00:35:17:07 - 00:35:29:17
Karen: Yeah. I had created an interior study that was an investigation of the roots of my identity. And, again, viewed as fleeting moments.

00:35:29:20 - 00:35:41:01
Kate: Yes. So one of the things that you said to me when we talked earlier is that clay is in your blood. What did you mean by that?

00:35:42:12 - 00:36:15:21
Karen: This is an amazing story. I remember my grandfather passed in 1967. So in '67, when I was like 16. I remember him telling me when I was younger that one of the jobs he had in his lifetime was he worked in a brick factory in Cleveland, and they knew when the bricks were done because they measured the shrinkage of the clay.

And so I've always been the family genealogist and I've started a quest into my surname, the Koblitz family. They come from Southern Bohemia and my family came from Southern Bohemia to Cleveland in 1873 And my great-grandfather was 19. Then he came with his father and stepmother and maybe six siblings, and one was married and had a child.

00:36:51:07 - 00:37:25:09
Karen
So a whole group of collaborators landed in Cleveland, and they weren't the first, but they joined other relatives that had come to Cleveland from Southern Bohemia. And when my grandfather was a young adult, he his father and his uncle started a brick company called the American Brick Building Company. And I've been able to find information about it by going to Cleveland and looking in records.

00:37:25:16 - 00:37:39:22
Karen
And there was a gentleman -- he sadly passed away in the last few years -- who collected bricks. And he knew everything about bricks in Cleveland. And I have four bricks from the American Brick Building Company.

00:37:39:22 - 00:37:41:09
Kate: That is wonderful.

00:37:42:06 - 00:38:06:17
Karen
So, you know, they worked in clay. They were in construction. My great-great-great- grandfather was a peddler of products, and they came to America. I'm sure he never learned English and they ended up all of them being successful in construction and real estate, which is so interesting.

00:38:06:20 - 00:38:15:05
Kate
Yes. So how has your Bohemian ancestry influenced you in other ways? And this brings us to knitting.

00:38:15:20 - 00:38:46:05
Karen: So what I've been doing since 2018 is knitting, not a lot of clay. And every day I say I'm going to get back in my clay studio and I will, but I've just fallen into the knitting well and working with yarn. So in 2014 my husband and I took a trip to Prague and I knew my family came from Czechoslovakia and Bohemia before that, but I didn't know much about where they came from.

And someone connected me with a genealogist who does Jewish familial lines of families that have left the Czech Republic, today's Czech Republic, and, and settled all over the world. And I met him in Prague and Alan and I thought we'd sit there like that TV show, Finding Your Roots. You know, he will turn the page of the book.

00:39:12:13 - 00:39:38:13
Karen
You know, this is what I found because Julius Mueller is his name. And he is very good and knows a lot of people at national and local archives. And that's how he finds his family histories. So he we went to meet him and he said, get in the car. And we drove an hour and a half to southern Bohemia to where my family came from.

00:39:39:09 - 00:39:54:21
Karen
And he goes, Okay, this is where the Koblitz family lived in, you know, the turn of the 19th Century and all this stuff. So he took us on a physical tour around the area, showing us all the buildings that my family lived in.

00:39:55:03 - 00:39:56:20
Kate
That's wonderful. I love that.

00:39:57:23 - 00:40:22:04
Karen
And so my great-great-grandfather, Moses Koblitz, who was the one at 56 years old who brought his family and his second wife because his first wife had passed to America. You know, he really is the parting of the seas. I mean, he saved our lives and he was a peddler. But I like to call him an agricultural trader because that sounds better.

00:40:22:15 - 00:41:05:02
Karen
And so he lived on farms and he walked the countryside. I'm not sure he had a cart or a horse. He walked the countryside and he sold hides, wool and feathers, among other things. And so he decided to look into not only knitting, because I wanted to at that point. Also on that trip, I had visited a a area in the Jewish quarter of Prague, and that's the area with all the synagogues in the old town and had visited a synagogue.

00:41:05:05 - 00:41:44:08
Karen
The Pinkas synagogue on the walls of the Pinkas synagogue are painted the names of the 77,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis. And I thought my whole family came to America. So I'm looking at these walls and I'm finding they're listed by town and I'm finding Koblitz, Koblitz, Koblitz, which has led me in subsequent trips to the Czech Republic to start connecting these people who stayed in Bohemia and Czechoslovakia and who were murdered by the Nazis.

00:41:45:01 - 00:42:17:14
Karen
And so I decided that I wanted to make something about these people rather than all, you know, 6 million Jews were murdered and other people also that I wanted to make them individual people and recognize them as individual people. So the first thing I decided to do was to get that Czech wool and to knit objects like socks and gloves and hats, things of comfort that they didn't have when they were in the camps.

00:42:18:18 - 00:43:10:17
Karen
And upon each of these items, I knit them in and raw wool, not dyed or anything, and they were white and I, I embroidered each one. If it was for a man I embroidered it with and I in red embroidery thread. And if it wasn't a thing clothing for a woman, I embroidered an s in red. And the reason why I use those two monograms or initials was because when the Nazis were creating identification papers on all the Jews, they would give every male Jew on the document the middle name Israel and the woman the middle name Sarah Moore.

00:43:11:00 - 00:43:12:05
Kate
Dehumanizing.

00:43:12:13 - 00:43:54:22
Karen
Yeah. So yes. So these were the the letters of their names. Yeah. And so I also created an embroidery that has the names of many of my family members that died in the Holocaust. I kind of mimicked it after the wall in which the city was painted in gold. The surname was painted in red. And then each family's unit, the first names were painted in black with the year of their birth.

00:43:56:01 - 00:44:34:14
Karen
And the year the last year known of their life on this earth. And so I created this embroidery thinking about, Oh, people embroider home sweet home. And these little things are put on the wall to remember your home. But these people didn't have that. They were taken, forcibly taken from their homes and brought in to camps and murdered Yeah, I have relatives from 11 years old up until 83 years of age that were murdered by the Nazis in various concentration camps.

00:44:35:17 - 00:44:39:05
Kate
Boy, it's so sobering.

00:44:40:00 - 00:44:54:04
Karen:
It's very sobering. It's very sobering. And then we look at what's happening in today's world. I thought, never again. But yeah, but anyway, I also.

00:44:54:05 - 00:45:09:10
Kate
Yeah, this is, this is also a really interesting thing that you're active in the restoration in memory of the Czech Jews lost in the Holocaust by being the vice chair of -- how do you pronounce it, the nonprofit?

00:45:10:06 - 00:46:01:04
Karen
Tikkun Pacov. Tikkun is a Hebrew word for repair, and Pacov is the name of the city where my great great grandfather Moses married his second wife in the synagogue and part off and after the after World War II. After World War II, the synagogue, of course, had been stripped of all its its torahs and liturgy objects, and it became a storage, a building for storage where it remained a storage space in 2014.

00:46:01:04 - 00:46:24:14
Karen
When I went around southern Bohemia with Julius Muller, the genealogist, we stopped in parts off and he said, This is where your great great grandfather married his second wife. And so I asked what the building was. It was so sad, it's so beautiful and it's just so sad. To see it in disrepair. And he says, Oh, I think they, somebody owns it.

00:46:24:15 - 00:46:53:11
Karen
They store their cars in it and within a year of 2014 I was introduced to a gentleman who is not Jewish and he grew up and spending summers with his family outside of pots off with his grandparents, and he became very interested in the Jews that don't exist anymore. So we came together and we founded this nonprofit, Tikkun Pacov and we have many members of the board. 

00:46:53:11 - 00:47:19:00
Karen
They are descendants of Jews from the area that live elsewhere in Europe. And our intention is to restore it was at this time to buy the synagogue, restore it and use it as a museum to not only remember the Jews that lost their lives and have images of families that had lived there and information about them and letters but also as a place of learning.

00:47:19:00 - 00:47:48:17
Karen
It's a part of the city of 5000 people. Everyone who lives there is Czech. They're all white and they're all Christian. And so it's a perfect spot to have a place where people can be educated about others. Yes, and that's how we break ignorance and intolerance. So this is what we plan to do. We have bought we bought the synagogue in 2018 and 2019.

00:47:48:17 - 00:48:20:16
Karen
It became a cultural heritage site. We last summer we, we did this the roof on the exterior. We removed a floor that had been built across the interior. And so now we're trying to raise money to finish the interior and the they had tall, tall windows that were bricked up to put a second storey inside the building. And we've had programing over the years to and we've gotten a lot of interest from local people in the synagogue.

00:48:21:11 - 00:48:57:10
Karen
And this November, November of 2022 we are having an a memorial event called 1942, 20, 22. It's the 80th anniversary of the transport of the Jews of parts off and the Visa China region in southern Bohemia of the Czech Republic. It's they were all transported to Terezin and then on to other death camps. And so we are having an event that we're, we want to keep the memory of the Jews in the minds of the people of Pacov

00:48:57:22 - 00:49:09:16
Karen
Yes. And so that's why we're having this event. And the thing that I am trying to do is I just found out a week ago that I received a grant by the American Embassy in Prague.

00:49:14:16 - 00:49:42:14
Karen
Yes, I got a partial, partial little less than half of the money I asked for, but still have what I have. And some of this money will go towards making of a film. Because when I talked before about the objects being removed from the synagogues during the Second World War, even before when the Nazis through the Munich Munich pact were given Sudetenland land around the rim of Czechoslovakia that boarded Germany.

00:49:42:19 - 00:50:18:11
Karen
And then they came in and occupied the Czech Czechoslovakia. They raided and burned and did horrible things to synagogues. So people were very clever and smart, and they took objects, including Torahs, into Prague and stored them. And after the war ended, they remained in storage until the sixties when an English gentleman visited Prague and a Soviet soldier was taking him around because he was looking for art to buy and bring back and sell in England.

00:50:18:21 - 00:50:28:04
Karen
And the soldier said, Come here, I'm going to show you this building. And the building was full of these bags, and they were all Torah scrolls. There were 600 Torah scrolls. Oh, my.

00:50:28:04 - 00:50:28:21
Kate
Goodness.

00:50:29:06 - 00:51:25:08
Karen
Hello. This art dealer went back to London got in touch with a synagogue in in the city and a philanthropist, and they bought all of the scrolls in, in 1960 83 trucks, transported all these Torah scrolls to London. And in the meantime they, many of them have been repaired about little over 1400 have been repaired. There are still many that have, are too far destroyed to use, but the Memorial Torah Scrolls Trust was founded through the synagogue in London and these Torah scrolls are on permanent loan with Jewish congregations throughout the world and seven of the Torah scrolls are attributed to parts of five of these scrolls are in the United States and two in the

00:51:25:08 - 00:51:55:09
Karen
United Kingdom. So I want to make a film in which all of the congregations with these scrolls talk. We visit myself in this great filmmaker jail blooms bloomed. Blue Stein, who is a Jewish documentary filmmaker. We will visit these synagogues and record the congregations with their scrolls, talk a little bit about their congregations who they are, what the scroll means to have the scroll.

00:51:55:09 - 00:52:07:16
Karen
That was once part of an active community in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, and then screen this film at the event in November of 2022.

00:52:08:03 - 00:52:11:09
Kate
What a project that is absolutely terrific.

00:52:12:09 - 00:52:14:02
Karen
Yeah, I'm very excited about it.

00:52:14:19 - 00:52:17:23
Kate
That's not a lot of time to get that done though.

00:52:18:22 - 00:52:19:06
Karen
No.

00:52:19:15 - 00:52:21:08
Kate
No, it is. So good luck with that.

00:52:22:01 - 00:52:22:11
Karen
Yeah.

00:52:23:01 - 00:52:36:12
Kate
But it sounds, it sounds amazing and to so you know, to go with the filmmaker. Does the documentary documentary filmmaker with him and be part of that is just incredible.

00:52:37:16 - 00:52:42:16
Karen
Yes, I'm really excited about it. We would, we would start working on it this summer.

00:52:43:03 - 00:53:02:17
Kate
Yes. So quickly because we've really talked for a while here but I really want to get to your teaching at the university of Southern California and other places. You were on the faculty of USC for over 20 years. What is it about teaching that you loved so much.

00:53:04:13 - 00:53:41:15
Karen
You know, when you work with young people, it keeps you young. They also give you ideas and inspire you. And you know, it also intersected with my art practice because I had to articulate maybe creative thoughts in my process or articulating techniques. And that's what teaching did for my my self, my soul and my ceramic work. And I taught for over 30 years the last 23 at the University of Southern California.

00:53:42:07 - 00:54:11:07
Karen
And what I enjoyed about USC, we have lots of bad names, University of Second Choice and University of Spoiled Children, but we're not that anymore. I mean, USC has come a long way from when I grew up in Southern California. It's very inclusive. It has more foreign students than any other university in America. And the caliber of students I started teaching there in 19 for 94, the caliber of students has risen so high.

00:54:11:08 - 00:54:39:16
Karen
In the time I was there, I retired in 20, 17. So to go into a classroom with, you know, 18, 15 to 22 students and to teach them ceramics and get them excited about ceramics was something I really enjoyed doing. I really enjoyed doing that and I had what I liked about USC is you didn't have to be an art major to take ceramics.

00:54:39:23 - 00:55:06:02
Karen
And I'm talking about I mainly taught the hand building classes. I did have a throwing class, but I was much more interested in introducing them to hand building techniques and I allowed them the freedom to look into themselves, to use their major and interests in the college, in creating projects to use their ethnicity and cultural backgrounds and creating things.

00:55:06:09 - 00:55:17:05
Karen
And it was really exciting when we had critiques to have students talk about their process and how they came to make this work and what inspired them.

00:55:18:01 - 00:55:27:21
Kate
That's really cool. And you had you you had USC athletes come find their way to your ceramic art classes. How did that happen?

00:55:29:04 - 00:55:45:11
Karen
I had all kinds of students, of course. And, you know, interesting enough, I'm just going to put a plug in for my students in biology and medicine. I had a number of students that went on to medical school and dentistry school and they use their portfolios these days to get in.

00:55:45:13 - 00:55:48:03
Kate
Sure. I'm sure they do. Well.

00:55:48:10 - 00:56:24:21
Karen
I think someone in the athletic department thought at ceramics was an easy class and it wasn't. No, we you know, they ended up making self-portraits, self portrait busts, they had to go out and look at galleries and write critiques about ceramics because at the very least, a student that left my class I wanted them to have a voice to be able to look at a piece of art, whether it's out of clay, a painting on the wall, a sculpture to look at that art and to tell us what they feel about it.

00:56:26:06 - 00:56:56:16
Karen
And all the football players came in, and I remember calling 8611 semester, calling the athletic department and screaming at them for giving me six students. One of them I'm still in touch with. He was in the NFL, and he's just amazing young man. But I found of all the athletes, these football players, if they engaged with ceramics and work and Clay made the most interesting work, not the best work of all my students, but they made such interesting work.

00:56:56:21 - 00:57:20:22
Karen
And I always wondered why. What was the correlation between football and ceramics? It didn't happen with basketball. It's certainly the worst. And I can say this because my husband was hoping to be a Dodger and a pitcher in his life. My pitchers were the worst. I don't know. There was one that was good, but these football players made some amazing work.

00:57:21:01 - 00:57:39:08
Karen
You know, they were really smart. You know, people say, Oh, they're so stupid. They're not stupid. You know, to get into USC, even no matter how talented they are in athletics, they still have to be able to have some smarts. And they did. Yes. And you engage them in conversation, man. It was amazing.

00:57:39:17 - 00:57:59:13
Kate
And and you have said that art and sports both require training and focus physicality in practice. So there you go. You know, that's you know, think as you you know, as you referenced if they engage with the with the clay, you know, they can they can turn their focus to to doing some good work.

00:58:00:10 - 00:58:29:08
Karen
Absolutely. And then I started a out of the visit to the athletic department. I started a show called Art Lenox. And you could be an inner collegiate athlete in any sport. And if you took a class in the Rocky School of Art and Design, you could enter that work in a jury show that would be mounted in the basketball arena in February during basketball season.

00:58:29:11 - 00:58:52:04
Karen
So you had all these people it was a lot of work. I didn't get any extra money for it. I just love doing it. I get people to jury the work. I'd really work on the students and my fellow faculty to get them to enter the work in the show. And then people came to a basketball game and they could see the work of our athletes and know they had more dimension to them than their athletic ability.

00:58:52:04 - 00:59:00:17
Karen
I would have their name on it, their major, their year in school, you know, I thought it was really a brilliant thing and it lasted nine years.

00:59:00:22 - 00:59:15:02
Kate
That is terrific. I really like that. And you are still a mentor with certain programs and you and you work with the Caldwell Scholars. Would you explain that briefly?

00:59:16:05 - 00:59:35:03
Karen
When I retired, I had a few friends on the retired faculty, and they recruited me to join the retired faculty. And I thought, you know, why not? You know, I enjoy being around young people. Maybe we can do some programs with international students and that I didn't know what I would be doing. And I came to learn that.

00:59:35:03 - 01:00:06:20
Karen
In 1968 a scholarship was formed at the University of Southern California by a history professor named Russell Caldwell, who lived in the neighborhood, and he and some other professors he decided to start the scholarship because Professor Caldwell looked around and he said Nobody that lives near USC goes to USC why is this? Well, of course USC is in one of the poorer inner city neighborhoods of our city.

01:00:07:10 - 01:00:43:00
Karen
And so this scholarship was started, so that money could be given to the kids in the local high schools in the area to pay for USC. USC is a very expensive private college so this scholarship was named after Professor Caldwell after he passed and it is still maintained by the retired Faculty Association. So I took over the leadership filling big shoes of the former head and we have two students that are that enter every year from local high schools.

01:00:43:15 - 01:01:25:02
Karen
They're usually first in their families to go to college and they are amazing young people and they're just so smart and they there's eight of them total at USC. I keep in touch with them all year round. I think I bothered them like this mother hen sending them emails. How's it going? You know, because we it's not a lot of money and I feel that my part in it is if they have any challenges or things that are difficult or need advice I'm there to to show them the resources because USC has tremendous resources on the campus.

01:01:25:09 - 01:01:51:04
Karen
And also I want to know they amazing things that they're doing to share with others so we can keep the scholarship going and keep money coming in for it. So right now I'm getting the scholars to update me on what they've been doing this year. The last two years have been very, very trying for them with COVID and and freshmen starting from home, seniors graduating, taking classes at home.

01:01:51:06 - 01:01:51:18
Karen
Sure.

01:01:52:19 - 01:01:53:06
Kate
Yes.

01:01:53:13 - 01:01:56:16
Karen
So I really, really enjoy working with these students.

01:01:57:05 - 01:02:03:11
Kate
That's terrific. And they and you you hear their stories and they're powerful.

01:02:04:08 - 01:02:32:23
Karen
One of them Carlos, is now finishing this semester his master's program, an astronomical engineering. Oh, my goodness. Starting at USC. And he I had him write about himself for our maritime newsletter, and he wrote about how as a kid, he was always so interested in putting things together. He was interested in space. And then he got into USC, a very bright kid.

01:02:33:11 - 01:02:43:08
Karen
His parents came from another country with all they could carry. And here he is now in the second year of a master's program in astronomical engineering.

01:02:43:21 - 01:02:48:23
Kate
Oh, that's that is so marvelous. What a great what a wonderful thing.

01:02:49:14 - 01:03:04:16
Karen
Each one of these students also tutors and works with other students while they're at USC. So they hold this huge academic workload and then they give back. Wow. And they leaders it's just really inspiring.

01:03:04:21 - 01:03:22:05
Kate
Yes, it is. And on that inspiring note, I, I would like to end there because that is so cool and so wonderful to, to think of these young people doing so well and doing their part. Thank you for that story.

01:03:23:11 - 01:03:25:16
Karen
You are welcome And Karen.

01:03:25:22 - 01:03:34:04
Kate
It was such a pleasure talking with you. I so appreciate your time today. I don't want to take too much of it. And I just want to say again, thank you.

01:03:35:04 - 01:03:37:19
Karen
And I thank you for giving me this opportunity.

01:03:38:00 - 01:03:50:15
Kate
It's been terrific. This is Kate Jones with the Gail Hill Radio Hour. Until next time. Thanks for joining us. Please remember to subscribe like and share. It's greatly appreciated. Thank you.