Saturday evening the Chasing Portraits team had a really lovely dinner with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett at Freta 33, this completely cute and delightful restaurant serving fresh, organic, lovingly prepared food. The owner lived in California for awhile and you can sense some of the carryover into her restaurant. We had a fabulous dinner and a marvelous conversation about Polish-Jewish art history, the Chasing Portraits project, Polin: The Museum of History of Polish Jews, and the highly successful release of Karski and The Lords of Humanity.
Sunday morning Cathy and I visited the temporary exhibit space at Polin to see the Roman Vishniac exhibit. Curated by Maya Benton of the International Center of Photography in New York, it is a fabulous exhibit well worth seeing! Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewish life are really well known, but only a small fraction of his work was published during his lifetime. This exhibit gives a much more expansive look at his body of work in which we discover a really diverse number of photographs. I loved all of them and wish I’d had more time.
From Polin we took a taxi a bit beyond the edge of Warsaw to visit with the documentary filmmaker Wieslaw Dabrowski and to watch his 
documentary on Kazimierz Dolny. The film is really interesting to me because it shows archival footage from the art colony and contains a bit of history about the town. The film also features several quotes from Waldemar Odorowski, who I met in October when I visited Kazimierz Dolny to learn more about the place where my great-grandfather is known to have painted a few pieces. My only wish? That the film had more information about my great-grandfather… But that’s okay! I still learned a lot and very much enjoyed talking with Wieslaw with the help of Slawomir Grunberg’s translating for us. Can you imagine? He filmed and translated! So fantastic!
Tonight Slawomir, Cathy, and I went to the showing of Karski and The Lords of Humanity at the 11 Annual Jewish Motifs Film Festival. It was a packed house (200+ people in the audience) and while I couldn’t understand the Q&A which was in Polish, I could tell that people were passionate about the film and the Karski story. The film is playing widely in Poland right now, and Slawek is working on bringing it to the United States. Keep your eyes open for it. It’s a very important story and such an engaging film.
The Poland leg of this trip is almost over. Tomorrow we have one more day of research and filming. We are returning to the Jewish Historical Institute to research some records that we were unable to access in October because of their remodel. Then it’s on to Israel (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem) Tuesday through next weekend.
A profound thank you to Catherine (Cathy) Greenblatt and Slawomir (Slawek) Grunberg for the tremendous support they give Chasing Portraits. I really am so very lucky to have both of them on my team.