The Holocaust's Uneasy Relationship With Literature

The following article appears in the Dec. 28, 2010 issue of The Atlantic Monthly:

Literature and the Holocaust have a complicated relationship. This isn't to say, of course, that the pairing isn't a fruitful one—the Holocaust has influenced, if not defined, nearly every Jewish writer since, from Saul Bellow to Jonathan Safran Foer, and many non-Jews besides, like W.G. Sebald and Jorge Semprun. Still, literature qua art—innately concerned with representation and appropriation—seemingly stands opposed to the immutability of the Holocaust and our oversized obligations to its memory. Good literature makes artistic demands, flexes and contorts narratives, resists limpid morality, compromises reality's details. Regarding the Holocaust, this seems unconscionable, even blasphemous. The horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald need no artistic amplification.

Since the genre emerged, this has been the defining stance of Holocaust literature—that a work's verisimilitude, or its truth-value, far outweighs its literary merit. The memoir, the first-person unembellished account, has long been considered the apotheosis of the form. Or even, according to some, the only acceptable form—confining Holocaust literature to documentation, and reflexively censuring everything else for crassly misrepresenting the unrepresentable.

Elie Wiesel—the personification of Holocaust remembrance—is the fiercest exponent of art's illegitimacy with respect to the Holocaust. "Then, [Auschwitz] defeated culture; later, it defeated art," he wrote. "The truth of Auschwitz remains hidden in its ashes." Theodore Adorno's famous dictum, that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, has been frequently invoked to criticize any artistic appropriation of the Holocaust.

The apprehension is certainly understandable. The Holocaust is, 60-plus years later, still politicized, and suspect to questionable artistic ambitions and misleading emphases and glosses; the six million deserve unqualified deference, not just our idle respect. Apprehension, however, shouldn't precipitate repudiation; and Holocaust literature's potential shouldn't be understated (or denied), nor its definition misconstrued.

Too many critics, instead of assessing and parsing and criticizing (in the healthiest sense), treat Holocaust works as inviolable, beyond judgment or even approach. Such sacralization is a disservice, smothering the critical dialogue that great literature engenders. Ruth Franklin's new book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, is therefore more than a towering work of criticism and insight—it's an invaluable corrective. Franklin, the in-house critic at The New Republic, seeks to reclaim Holocaust literature as just that—literature about and inspired by the Holocaust—and to reaffirm its significance.

The memoir's primacy over 'standard' literature is misguided for two overlapping reasons: first, the distinction between the two is deceivingly small; and second, their respective functions are aligned. Franklin devotes each chapter to a major Holocaust work (or body of works), from Night to Schindler's List, repeatedly demonstrating just how slippery and arbitrary the division between fact and fiction really is. Because the memoir as unfiltered actuality is a myth. Fickle and unreliable memories must be reconstructed and made coherent; a story's assembly, style, and characterization will inevitably compromise any strict retelling. Emphatically, this does not mean the work is less autobiographically or historically valid—only that it is never pure autobiography or history, and has to be understood and embraced thus. Truth isn't synonymous with historicity, and infidelity to the latter isn't necessarily betrayal of the former.

Even Wiesel's Night, when compared to his autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea, betrays some artistic license: Moshe the Beadle is, in fact, a composite character, and much of Wiesel's ordeal was excised and sharpened for Night's publication. (The original Yiddish manuscript was, Weisel himself reports, more than 800 pages long, about 700 pages longer than the finished product.) The Diary of Anne Frank was edited by Anne herself, then further edited (and censored) by her father, Otto. (Later, playwrights cut and reworked passages for a decidedly more universal and cheery flavor. Diary, in book and stage form, is for many the primary (or only) exposure to the Holocaust, and serves as a cautionary demonstration of art's role in shaping historical perspective.)

The line between novel and memoir, between story and history, is fine indeed. Franklin illustrates how many exemplary (though not necessarily renowned) Holocaust works dance between genres—and are no less valuable for it. In Piotr Rawicz's Blood From the Sky , the narrator (who may or may not be a survivor) patches together a semi-invented character's chaotic manuscript, with dates and names changed or omitted, all amid surrealist elements. W.G. Sebald blends facts and borrows histories and layers narration to produce his masterpieces. Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch is a book originally believed to be fiction and later discovered to be based on fact (its history is a dizzying stream of authorships, ghost-authorships, translations, and revisions, all superbly traced by Franklin); and despite its shifting context, it retains its value (albeit in various currencies).

Memoirs, even Holocaust memoirs, might be properly understood as, or at least overlapping with, literature. This is no downgrade. Literature is supplementary, not antithetical, to history: it allows, and in the best instances demands readers to universalize, empathize, to visualize and imagine, not merely to be informed. Testimony is critical, of course, as are scholarship and personal histories. The Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented events in history, and still entirely resists comprehension. The unadorned facts and uninflected history—pictures, texts, accounts—are almost unbearably distressing. Viewing images of stacked corpses or skimming meticulously organized lists of dead children or hearing of the unlimited fuel for the ovens, what soul doesn't collapse?

Literature, though, affects us in ways that even the most brutal history cannot. It vivifies and propels an event, however geographically and temporally and psychologically removed, towards the personal and immediate. If history teaches and (harshly) informs, then literature rouses and intimately disturbs. Literature is an emotional chronicle, a history of the intangible, a quest to impart sentiment, not information. Conveyance of the Holocaust is an impossible but necessary appeal to our imagination; and literature is the pathos to history's logos. Not merely learning about, but identifying with.

Memoirs are surely part of this legacy. Night's power isn't derived only from its harrowing story, but from its unflinching, deceptively plain delivery of that story, as well. Like other celebrated Holocaust works, it hits a perfect emotional pitch, if you will; notes of tragedy in agonizingly effective arrangement—an arrangement that's measured, appreciated, and felt with literary instruments. Knowing the history isn't enough: literature—and humanism in general—is, as Franklin points out, the spiritual retort to the Nazis' crazed and brutal program of dehumanization. It's more than memory that we must keep alive. Literature reminds us that significance isn't time-dependent, that empathy isn't delimited by proximity, that victims aren't statistics. For the role of Holocaust literature—the eternal role of literature, period—is to make it new again, to make it real, to make it felt.

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This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/12/the-holocausts-uneasy-relationship-with-literature/67998/

Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

Art: Visions stained by the Holocaust | Philadelphia Inquirer | 11/21/2010

Three East Coast artists, two of whom are survivors, exhibit their work on the Holocaust.

Art: Visions stained by the Holocaust | Philadelphia Inquirer | 11/21/2010

Ostatni Etap--The Last Stage: One of the first films about Auschwitz

The following article about Ostatni Etap, one of the first films about Auschwitz, was written by John Bertram and first appeared at his blog Venus Febriculosa:


I first learned about the existence of this relatively obscure (in the United States, anyway) film while perusing a gallery of vintage Polish film posters. My eye was immediately caught by one similar to the original cover for We Were in Auschwitz designed by Anatol Girs. Its designer, Tadeusz Trepkowski (1914-1954), a largely self-taught artist from Warsaw, was one of the original graphic designers commissioned after World War II by Film Polski and Central Wynajmu Filmow (state-run film producers and distributors) to design film posters. The film Ostatni Etap was a semi-autobiographical story about prison life in the women’s barracks at Auschwitz.

A member of the Polish resistance during the war, director and co-writer Wanda Jakubowska (1907-1998) was arrested in 1942 and spent six months in Warsaw’s Pawiak prison before being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where, she says, “the decision to make a film…originated when I crossed the camp’s gate.” A member of the camp resistance, she was moved to the Rajsko, an experimental agricultural station and one of more than 40 sub-camps, and in early 1945 was transferred to Ravensbruck where she was liberated by the Soviet Army. Once free, Jakubowska immediately began work on the script with another survivor Gerda Schneider, a German Communist, based exclusively on events witnessed by them and their fellow prisoners. By the end of the year they had produced a first draft and, returning to Auschwitz in the spring of 1946 where she had decided to film, she was shocked to find “daisies of monstrous proportions and exuberant, indescribable vegetation on the soil that was fertilized by blood and sweat.”

Filming at Auschwitz-Birkenau began in the spring of the following year. Actors, many of whom were originally interned at Auschwitz, lived in the former barracks and instead of costumes wore authentic striped prison uniforms. One actor noted that “the air was filled with a characteristic unpleasant smell that had a depressing effect on us.” As harrowing as the movie is, Jakubowska notes that “the camp’s reality was human skeletons, piles of dead bodies, lice, rats, and various disgusting diseases. On the screen this reality would certainly cause dread and repulsion. It was necessary to eliminate those elements which, although authentic and typical, were unbearable for the post-war viewer.”

 

Released in Poland in March 1948 barely three years after Auschwitz was liberated, Ostatni etap was the second film produced by Film Polski and the first Polish film to get international distribution. Writing in The New York Times upon the occasion of the film’s U.S. release in March 1949, Bosley Crowther points out:

“ …the story itself is secondary…to the staggering accumulation of daily atrocities, seen in the pattern of the story through a pitilessly factual camera’s eye. From the opening shot in the death camp, showing the brutality of a guard to a pregnant girl, standing among a group of women in a dreary sea of mud, the film is a continuation of horrifying episodes which make up a modest realization of the inhumanity of the Nazi camps.

There is the episode, for instance, of the murder of the baby born to the suffering girl. There is the arrival of a trainload of Jewish prisoners who are brutally separated, some to be gassed. There are terrifying scenes of the inmates being driven and beaten in the prison yard while a band plays serenely cheerful music under the baton of an agonized girl. And there is one simply overwhelming sequence of little children being marched off to be killed, with a cut of their discarded toys piled up among the relics of all the dead. There are also recognitions of the frailties of the inmates themselves, revealed in vicious and deceitful stratagems and deeds.”

Interestingly, Wanda Jakubowska’s creative arc parallels that of Tadeusz Borowski’s: imprisoned at Pawiak, then Auschwitz, shortly thereafter producing an authentic, unflinching landmark work based upon harrowing experiences. However, whereas Borowski’s stories remain completely free of any trace of ideology, in Ostatni etap, Jakubowska’s Communist leanings are clear to the point that to some the propagandist nature of the film (at one point, for instance, Stalin’s name is reverently invoked) leave it irrevocably compromised. Still, it remains a valuable document for its powerful imagery that has served as template for numerous subsequent films on Auschwitz.



Special thanks to Polish film historian Professor J. Marek Haltof of Northern Michigan University whose book Polish National Cinema (New York/Oxford, 2002) and essay “The Monstrosity of Auschwitz in Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1948)” provided indispensable background material for this post.

For more information, see Women in Polish Cinema, Chapter 8, Wanda Jakubowska: The Communist Fighter, by Ewa Mazierska.

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To read more about women and what happens to them in war, please click to my post Women in War.

New Tadeusz Borowski Collection

This October, Yale University Press will release a new collection of stories by Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951). Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories, translated by Madeline Levine, offers “the first authoritative translation of Borowski’s prose fiction, including numerous stories that have never appeared in English before.”

Arrested and taken to Auschwitz in 1943, Borowski is one of the most important writers of the Holocaust. His book of stories, This Way For the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, is essential reading about what happened in Auschwitz.

The following poem by Borowski is taken from a site dedicated to his poetry. To read other poems click here.

CURRICVULUM VITAE

I did not join the Home Army
I did not work for the Resistance.
I spent my nights studying
at the underground university.

My friends looked death in the face,
many were killed, as in any battle,
and I wrote about Liebert,
Staff, epithets and rhythm.

I did not smuggle goods to Warsaw,
I never went to trendy bars.
I wrote poems. Not for fame,
but because I had to. Trifles. Youth.

I was not a gold broker,
I didn't know the rates of exchange.
I had a girl. Long nights, my love ...
Where is she? Torture ...

That was my life ... poems, love,
without character, empty, pale.
Perhaps it would not have been wasted
if I'd killed just one single German.



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By the way, there is a competition to design a cover for This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman. To read about it, click here.

Code Name: Zegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-1945: The Most Dangerous Conspiracy

Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski have recently published the American edition of their book about Polish attempts to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Code Name: Zegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-1945: The Most Dangerous Conspiracy in Wartime Europe tells the story of the only secret organization in occupied Europe set up for the sole purpose of saving Jews. The first book on the subject in English, it details the danger and complexity behind Zegota rescue attempts, clarifying the relationship of the Germans, who had total control; the Poles, who were relegated to sub-human status and treated as slave labor; and the Jews, designated nonhuman and collectively condemned to death. Illuminating the moral dilemmas that arose as one life was pitted against another under the lawless apartheid conditions created by the Nazis, Code Name: Zegota explores the critical situation in occupied Poland and the personalities that responded to desperate conditions with a mix of courage and creativity. It profiles the key players and the network behind them and describes the sophisticated organization and its mode of operation. The cast of characters ranges from members of prewar Poland's cultural and political elite to Girl Guides and Boy Scouts, who worked as couriers. As this inspiring book shows, all of these brave souls risked torture, concentration camps, and death—and many paid the price.

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The book is available from Greenwood Press and Amazon.

Irene Tomaszewski is one of the editors of Cosmopolitan Review.

Prism: Spring 2010

The latest issue of Prism (volume 1, issue 2) is now available. Earlier, Charles Fishman conducted an extensive interview with Dr. Karen Shawn of Yeshiva University regarding this journal devoted to Holocaust educators.

The recently-published issue of PRISM discusses the complex story of those who remained bystanders during the Holocaust. The short story “Prelude” by American author and child of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, Albert Halper, serves as the literary centerpiece of the spring issue. Readers will find a wealth of essays, poetry, art, and archival photographs on this complex subject

Editors Karen Shawn and Jeffrey Glanz of Prism have generously offered to send complimentary copies of the journal to our readers. For a complimentary copy of Prism, please send your complete mailing address to prism@yu.edu.

Years Later We Would Remember

Years Later We Would Remember is the forthcoming memoir and film from Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Martin Kent, who has made over 60 films, including a documentary on Oskar Schindler for A&E’s popular Biography series. Of the current work-in-progress, Schindler’s List author Thomas Keneally wrote: “I found it enlightening and engrossing.” Holocaust authority Dr. Michael Berenbaum said: “What results is a story of love and commitment amidst destruction, a glimpse into decency amidst death and devastation and of the price paid for love.”

Here is an excerpt from Years Later We Would Remember:

I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. No grandparents. No aunts and uncles around. In their place — big black holes. While my parents tried to shield me from the details of the horrors they experienced in Poland during the 1930s and ‘40s, they couldn’t protect me from them. No one goes through something like that and leaves it behind. Misery, sorrow and pain are such clever hitchhikers.

Growing up in New York City during the ‘50s and ‘60s, my childhood outside my home was exciting, interesting, stimulating. But inside those four walls, I felt like I was living within a box – one that contained a giant jigsaw puzzle. Many of the pieces were not exactly missing; some were faded, or frayed, and hard to discern; others were locked away – on purpose. My mother Roza (her American name) had a great capacity for joy, but she could also quickly slip into a state of melancholy. My father Jack (also his American name) was remote, quiet, off at work all the time, and had little patience for the precocious, artistic, curious child I was. I had an older brother, Joseph, who found his own coping mechanism for our dysfunctional family. He was never home. We were four people living under the same roof. But we really weren’t a family. Our home was full of secrets. Full of walls. Full of feelings that were alternately repressed — or suddenly, explosively — released.

For most of my life, my parents’ story remained shrouded in mystery. It was something they just couldn’t bring themselves to talk about. At the age of nine, I was shocked to learn my father was Catholic. And yet, my mother was Jewish, and all the cousins we knew — all Holocaust survivors — were also Jewish. So not only was our refugee family different from most Americans, we were different from all our relatives. How did that happen? No explanations. Shhhhhh! Don’t ask questions. My mother and father were unknowable. So… if I couldn’t know my parents, how could I ever hope to truly know myself?

In 1963, when I was twelve years old, I got a glimpse into the mystery of my identity. After much talk and planning, my mother and I boarded an El Al jet and flew to Israel — to spend a summer with her surviving brother and sister, who’d emigrated to the Promised Land after surviving the ravages of Nazi-occupied Poland. We split our time between visits with her brother Jacob, who delivered baked goods in Tel Aviv, and her sister Clara, who ran a small farm with her husband Herman in Nahariya.

Two things struck me immediately about Israel: it felt like a frontier, a work in progress, lacking some of the conveniences we took for granted in America; and yet, everyone seemed happy. Really happy. Passionate. Excited. Hopeful. I never witnessed emotions like that before.

But the most incredible aspect of this experience was that at last, after feeling like an olive in a dish of cherries my whole life, I suddenly felt a sense of belonging. Not just with my aunt and uncle and their families — with whom I experienced an immediate bond of love — but with the whole country. Everywhere I went, I felt like I was with family. A taxi driver wasn’t just someone hired to take us from point A to point B. For a brief moment in time, he was a part of our journey. He wanted to know all about us. And he wanted to share things about himself as well. My big black holes of the Holocaust were now being bombarded with millions of sparks of light.

Until we left.

The first night away, I began to cry, and couldn’t help myself. When my mother asked me why I was suddenly so sad, I told her how much I missed my family in Israel. But my tears weren’t only for them. My mother had told me there were two other siblings — her older brothers Salo and Muno — resistance fighters murdered by the Nazis. I had never emotionally connected to them. They were just names. But now, having spent time with my mother’s surviving brother and sister, I suddenly felt the full weight of the loss of the two other brothers. My brave, beautiful uncles. How can you miss something you never had? You can’t. But somehow, I did. I missed Salo and Muno. I felt them. I loved them. I would never stop cherishing them.

The echoes of my summer in Israel never subsided. The door that had opened prompted me to become a person who would open as many doors as possible. I was fearless. I was determined to explore the world. To dig into the past. To uncover the motivations of people who shaped history. To just know things. I carved out a satisfying career as a journalist, an occasional university instructor and a documentary filmmaker (returning to Israel to make King David, and King Herod’s Lost City) — sharing my passions, telling other people’s stories.

Then in 1999, my life took an irrevocable turn. After the 1993 release of Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” based on Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book (originally entitled “Schindler’s Ark”), Hearst Entertainment hired me to write, produce and direct an A&E Biography of Oskar Schindler, the Nazi who saved over 1,200 Jews from certain death at the hands of his fellow Nazis. Was this by coincidence? Nothing happens by coincidence. This was my gateway to the dark days of the Holocaust. In the process of making this film, I interviewed survivors, Thomas Keneally, world-renowned Holocaust historian Dr. Michael Berenbaum, did all the necessary research and legwork, and looked at all the horrific film footage. When I told my mother about this project, she showed no surprise at all. “Oh, Oskar Schindler? Yes, I knew all about him. You remember my friend Sally Huppert? She was one of the people he saved.”

I considered the irony that one of the greatest stories of the 20th century had been right under my nose for all those years.

“Mom,” I said, “what other stories haven’t you told me about? Isn’t it finally time for you and dad to tell me what happened back in Poland?”

My mother took some time to consider what I had said, and the fact that I had been adequately inoculated by all my work on the Schindler documentary. One morning, she phoned me and said, “Ok, I’ve thought about it. I’m appointing you family historian.” We had had a historian in our family. The late Dr. Philip Friedman, widely considered the father of Holocaust history, was our cousin. Could I walk in his giant footsteps?

At long last my mother felt I was ready to face the demons and ghosts she and my father had tried to tamp down in that jigsaw box for a lifetime. They too had to face them. It was difficult for both of them to delve into their tragic past, but they did it, and they did it for me. Often with tears. Often with self-imposed interruptions, when the burden of memory threatened to crush them.

I spent a year interviewing my parents and doing background research. The story was revealed gradually. Like some sacred, mystical text, it required study, meditation and a pilgrimage. I felt compelled to make a trip to Poland, a place I’d never wanted to visit. I needed to experience total immersion in this process. But by this time, my mother was too frail to make the trip. Still, there was no turning back. I packed a video camera and embarked on a journey to spend nearly a month on the road with a stranger – a man I hardly knew — my father. I had to learn the true story of my parents’ survival and unravel the personas of the two people whom I’d sought to know and understand my whole life.

In Poland, as I walked on ground that held the blood and ashes of millions of murdered souls, I pointed my camera at my father and all the places he wanted to show me. I found out that over half a century ago, my father Olek (his Polish name), a brash Polish Catholic boy of 19, had met my mother Ziuta (as she was known back then), a terrified Jewish girl of 20, when she was on the run after she’d survived two Nazi massacres of 6,500 Jews in her village, some 400 kilometers away from his. The Nazis had murdered her two older brothers, Salo and Muno, shortly after they’d gotten my mother out of the Jewish ghetto.

One day, she walked into the tavern that my father and his father Antoni ran, asking for a job. She was hired on the spot. Olek took an immediate liking to her. A few months later, in a private moment, he confessed to Ziuta the feelings that had grown and overwhelmed him. He told her he’d fallen in love with her.

She was shocked. “Well, I have a shock for you,” she replied. “I’m Jewish.” My father considered the full weight of what she’d said. And then, as only a 19-year-old with stars in his eyes and love in his heart could respond, he said: “You’re Jewish? That’s great! Now I can prove my love for you. I can lay my life on the line.” And he did just that. For two and a half years, they were on the run, with the Nazis at their heels. With bravado, with cunning, he protected her every step of that perilous journey. Or did his love for my mother create an ever-expanding state of grace? One that produced miracle after miracle. In any case, this is why I’m here today. My brother Joseph, too, who was born during that time.

In the course of my research, interviews and journey to Poland, I finally got to know and truly appreciate the wonderful, albeit strange people who’d raised me and made me who I am. When I returned to the United States, I sent a detailed account of this story, along with supporting documentary evidence, to Yad Vashem in Israel. About a year and a half later, they came to a decision. On Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, 2003, in a packed ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles — before the Mayor, and diplomats from Poland and Israel — Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center, bestowed my father with Israel’s highest honor, the Righteous Among the Nations award — the very same medal of heroism Oskar Schindler had received. The story had come full circle.

My mother passed away on the night of January 16, 2009, at the age of 87. My father and I were at her bedside, holding her hands, telling her how much she was loved. She’d led a full and incredible life. I know I was blessed to have her as a mother. But twice blessed to have had the opportunity to discover the truth and meaning of the life she and my father had led before I came into this world. They were together for 67 years.

As for my father and I — we are no longer strangers. I won’t sugarcoat this — we can still get under each other’s skin. But I see him with greater clarity now. I have more compassion for the man. Love doesn’t even begin to describe my feelings for him.

The ghosts and demons my parents tried to keep from me for nearly a lifetime are still there. But they’re no longer a gnawing mystery. I’ve shared a vodka with them. I’ve looked into their eyes. They no longer have power over me.

As difficult as my experiences were, I have no regrets about the doors I chose to open and enter. I hope our family story inspires others to open some new doors — to look inside, to fathom the mysteries of the heart, family, and discover stories never known. I hope it inspires tolerance of those who pray to a different deity, look different, or look at the world differently. And lastly, I hope it inspires unconditional love – not just romantic love, but the love of fellow human beings. We needed that so much back then. We certainly need it now.

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About Martin Kent:

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Martin Kent has made over 60 documentaries during his distinguished career. His work, seen by 100 million viewers, has been critically acclaimed and featured on NBC, ABC, PBS, A&E, History Channel, Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, Fox Sports and VH1, among others. Mr. Kent’s most recent documentary is Oil Apocalypse, currently in rotation on the History Channel. He is in production on Years Later We Would Remember, a documentary focusing on love and heroism during the Holocaust. Mr. Kent was a founding production executive of the E! Channel. He began his career as a print journalist; his work appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times syndicate, and other noteworthy publications. From 1979-82 he was Editor of the Hollywood Reporter; his significant contributions to the improvement of that paper were reported in Time magazine. Mr. Kent holds a Masters Degree in Broadcast Communications from Stanford University and has taught and lectured at UCLA.

To view Martin’s work please visit: http://www.youtube.com/user/martinkentfilms

To learn more about Martin, please visit:

http://yearslaterwewouldremember.com/ or http://www.martinkentproductions.com/