Terry Kurgan
Family Secrets: Photography as Storytelling
Summary
Terry Kurgan, South African artist and writer, presents her book “Everyone is Present,” which delves into her family’s history, particularly her grandfather’s diaries from 1939 onwards. The diaries contain notes about personal life, recipes, books, and record the family’s journey from Poland to South Africa during WWII. She explores the intergenerational transmission of memory and the significance of family photographs, especially those linked to traumatic events like the Holocaust.
Terry Kurgan
Terry Kurgan is an eminent South African artist and writer based in Johannesburg. Her book Everyone Is Present received the 2019 Alan Paton Prize, South Africa’s premier literary nonfiction award, and was also selected as a finalist for the 2019 National Jewish Book Awards (New York), and shortlisted for the 2019 Photo Arles Book Prize (France). Terry is a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where she is working on a new book that draws upon her soldier/father’s photographs documenting his participation in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. She teaches and supervises the Masters in Creative Writing Programme at the same university, and is codirector of the independent publishing project, Fourthwall Books.
They fled on the 1st of September, 1939 and walked across into Romania about two weeks later, just before it wasn’t possible to do that, especially not for Jews. During the war, they spent a year in Romania. Everywhere they were, they were desperately trying to find a country that would take them in. So they were in Romania, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, India, and Mombasa. They finally in ended up in Cape Town when their visas, their luck and their stamina ran out, but they were aimed at Brazil.
He was a manufacturing pharmacist, but he really wanted to go to medical school and Jews were not allowed.