Loli Kantor: Call Me Lola -

“The book is about searching, about loss and the ravages of war, but ultimately about the power of familial love. The result is a self-created family album of sorts filled with proof of existence, proof of memories, proof of love. The work takes us on her journey of discovery on trains, on streets in Poland, in hotel rooms, and most importantly, in the internal and eternal search for self.” (Aline Smithson, Lenscratch)

In the last few years I have read a few works about this very subject, the search for family and connections. None, however, have been as compelling and poignant as Call Me Lola, In Search of Mother by Loli Kantor. For the better part of 20-years, Kantor engaged in a periodic search for family, exploring that story in photos and texts of old material. From the tragic death of her mother shortly after her birth and the heart-breaking loss of her father at 14, and then a brother, this book is the result of traversing many years in various regions and time zones to discover a past that she hardly knew.

In an illuminating and thoughtful Q&A with Danna Heller (Loli’s daughter), who asks Loli about her decision to begin to revisit the documents she had kept with her from the age of fourteen, Loli responds, “As you know for much of my life I was a full-time working mother, so I never had the time to investigate the material. It was only at the age of fifty or so, when I began looking closely at the documents and photos—paper by paper—that I found out more. My wish had been to fill the gaps of my autobiographical story,” Loli replied.

Even though she didn’t take it up seriously until her late forties, being a photographer enabled Loli to digitize much of the family material including her mother’s passport, as well as other keepsake images.

In the essay by Nissan P. Perez, he refers to what Walter Benjamin wrote: “He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns soil. For the ‘matter itself’ is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield those images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights—like torsos in a collector’s gallery. It is undoubtedly useful to plan excavations methodically… genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers.”

There is much to be said about Kantor’s diligence and dedication to an almost insurmountable task. Who among you would like to take a similar jouney (my hand is raised)?

Lola. Munich, Germany. Unknown date and photographer.

A few pages past the cover we see a large pin of the single letter “L,” in script. Upon my first viewing of the book I traced my hand lightly over the image. After going through the book several more times I found I was pressing my hand onto that script a little harder, perhaps because I came to know Lola (and Loli!) a bit more.

More than a print and paper compilation of one’s family and life, Loli Kantor (Lola by birth) carries her mother’s name, a lineage that suredly is on par and might be just as important as the contents of Call Me Lola, In Search of Mother.

The images (following pages) in this review enables us a small, visual and text peek into a life not only of trauma and challenge but one that has been met with the resolve necessary to not let it completely slip away… slip away from the hands and hearts of Loli’s children and her children’s children.

It has already found its place on one of my bookshelves. Now, it’s your turn!