The Life and Art of Klara Gereb (1897 –1944)
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... we were forced to move to a makeshift ghetto in Subotica. As we were leaving the apartment, crowds of people lined up in the staircase, waiting to ransack what was left in the apartment, cursing us and spitting on us. Unbeknown to us, our former cook, Maris, was in the crowd; she took our mother’s cookbook and an assortment of artwork that she stuffed into a binder ... Shortly after we got back [from the concentration camps], Maris contacted us. She and her husband Steven (Pista) were of great help: they brought us food, they scouted potential lodging places for us, they scrubbed the meager apartment we moved into, and they somehow located some of our old furniture, including the settee from the parlor. What was most stunning was that Maris brought back the cookbook and the binder of artwork she took from the apartment a year earlier ... Counting every sketchbook page, nearly 300 pieces of Klara Gereb’s art survived in the binder that our cook, Maris, rescued in 1944.
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About the Book
The book. The first part of the book describes the life of Klara Gereb, a graphic artist in Subotica, Yugoslavia, who perished in Auschwitz. She was raised in a Jewish family in Szabadka, in pre-World War I Hungary, and attended the National Hungarian Royal School of Arts and Crafts in Budapest. Following WWI her home town became Subotica, Yugoslavia. After study tours in Austria, Italy, and France she married Louis Fenyves, manager of a printing plant and newspaper. They had two children. In 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz, where she perished. During the deportation her former cook saved a binder of her graphic work, which she returned to the artist’s children. The second part of the book is a catalog of a representative subset of Klara Gereb’s surviving work, in five sections: illustrations, etchings, and lithographs; student work; portraits; nature studies; and cityscapes of Budapest, Vienna, Paris, Venice, and Florence.
About the Author
The author. Steven J. Fenves was born into a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family in Subotica, Yugoslavia. In his youth, he survived the Hungarian occupation, the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, and Communist Yugoslavia before escaping to France. After coming to the US, he served in the US Army and then received BS, MS and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois. For 42 years he taught at the University of Illinois and at Carnegie Mellon University, and retired as University Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching dealt with design data modeling, design standards, knowledge-based systems and structural analysis. He introduced the first user-friendly computational tools that have since revolutionized the practice of structural engineering. He is the author of six books and over 400 papers and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an Honorary Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He and his wife, Norma, reside in Rockville, MD. The designer. Hannah M. Fenves graduated from Saint Mary’s College of California, Magna Cum Laude, with a degree in Art. In 2012, she founded HMF + Design, a freelance design studio. Hannah resides in Austin, Texas, where she specializes in graphic design and illustration, following in her great-grandmother’s footsteps.