Erica Mann’s dream since childhood was to be fulfilled: “Ever since I was a little girl I decided that one day I would come to Africa and look at what was in all the places that were white on the atlas and marked as unknown territory.” 4 Igor Mann had been offered a job in Fort Jameson, Rhodesia. In 1942 an opportunity arose for the couple to move to Africa. In late 1940, she and her husband Ignacius (later Igor) Mann, a Polish veterinarian also of Jewish origin, escaped the dangers of anti-Semitism and war on a journey through Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey to a refugee camp in Palestine. With the outbreak of World War II, Mann, then Erika Schoenbaum, was forced to return to Romania. Born in Vienna to Jewish parents, she was raised in Bucharest and studied architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the only female in a class of 300. But I feel, you know, he is family.” 3 Erica Mann’s roots, however, are in Central Europe. “I have always considered the old man outside as my grandfather,” she says, “He looks ahead, but he also looks behind. 3In a later scene in Beautiful Tree, Severed Roots Erica Mann stands barefoot in a silver dressing gown on the threshold of her house in Nairobi, holding the thin wooden arm of a sculpture of an aged African man (fig. 2).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |