current SHOW

                                    NINA LIPKOWITZ: "BATTLE FATIGUE"     
                                     NOVEMBER 2 - NOVEMBER 25, 2018
                    OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3,  2 - 6 pm

Nina Lipkowitz readily admits that her father was a difficult man.  Eleven years after he died, her mother said, “How come nobody ever talks about Daddy?” The truth was that she didn’t know what to say about him.  His anger was frightening and his criticisms were searing.  At 15 she painted her first painting and he suggested that she paint over with white, start again and not waste the canvas.
 
A lawyer in his 30s, married with a one-year old child, he went off to fight in a war that, as a Jew, he knew was absolutely necessary.  In August of 1944, he found himself in newly liberated Paris and attended the first Rosh Hashanah services at the synagogue Victoire.  He fought in five European battles including the Battle of the Bulge spending the winter in the Ardennes Forest.  In April 1945 he helped to liberate the concentration camp Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald and later won a Bronze Star ending his war career as a Captain.
 
Returning home, he went directly into Mason General Hospital, a psychiatric facility opened to treat returning GIs.  In WW I it was called shell shock, in WW II battle fatigue and, today, we refer to it as PTSD or Combat Stress Reaction.
 
Working from a scrapbook containing photos and memorabilia from these years, Lipkowitz, now the age of her father when he died, felt it was finally time to talk about Daddy.  This she has done with heart and hand using original material from the scrapbook to tell her father’s story.
 
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