Artist reads Milena Jesenska essay excerpt on fate. She perished Ravensbrück, 1944 © A K Segan

New website (in-progress, July 2019) of artist A K Segan: www.humanrights-holocaust-art.org ~ UTW (Under the Wings art series) 67: Milena Jesenská, a Czech. writer, translator and confidante of Franz Kafka. Art: 2018 Media: Ink, pencil, gouache, colored pencil in the drawing. The drawing paper surrounding the drawing has ten pieces of a (Segan-made 1976) woodcut print (King David) collaged onto the drawing paper. The proof, printed in gold ink on black paper, was printed by the artist around 2010. Paper size: 12 1/8 inches H x 1.5 W Framed: 23.5 inches H x 27.5 W [59.69 cm. H x 27.5 W] ~ Milena Jesenska was a Czech writer, translator, confidente of and one-time lover of Franz Kafka. She was was of Catholic heritage. Her father, according to Philip Boehm, author of the introduction (and translator of) 'Franz Kafka - Letters to Milena' (pub. by Schocken Books, N.Y., 1990, was "Jan Jesensky...a professor at Prague's Charles University... an outspoken Czech nationalist, and anti-Semitic." ~ Aside from her one-time romance with Kafka, she was married to a Jewish man, Ernst Pollak. Her father was so outraged at this that he had her forcibly committed to a sanatorium for several months. She came of legal age there and following her release she married Pollack. ~ She was eventually murdered by the Nazis at the Ravensbrück concentration-death camp. In failing health following a kidney operation in the death camp, she died there on May 17, 1944. ~ The boat was drawn from a model boat. I found it on a community exchange table in the building where I live. It has a Goodwill sticker on the bottom; someone bought it at a Goodwill store. On seeing it, it brought to mind a much smaller but similarly constructed model ship, which I drew in the forehead of my portrayal of Rüdiger Schleicher, a brother-in-law of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who, like Bonhoeffer, was executed by the Nazis within a few weeks of the end of WWII in Europe, 1945. ~ The excerpt from her essay, The Devil at the Hearth, is in the Philip Boehm translated book, Franz Kakfa - Letters to Milena (mentioned above). Her essay was originally published in Narody Listi, January 18, 1923. ~ Art, video © A K Segan