Joan Katzenstein

One never knows where you’re going to meet a really interesting person, or talented artist for that matter. Mrs. Joan Katzenstein is both. I found out about Mrs. Katzenstein from Robert J. Luchi, M.D., the chief of geriatrics and director of the Huffington Center on Aging at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Luchi was returning to Houston from a business trip to Tampa, Florida this spring; the person that some computer seating program put next to him was the interesting artist that you’re about to enjoy getting to know.

One of four children, Joan Rotenberg was born September 25, 1920 in Zwickan, Saxony, Germany, a small town near Leipzig. Her father was a successful business man, owning a laundromat, a number of garages and gasoline stations, and even a truck weighing station. Joan and her sister and brothers would probably have enjoyed their lives in Zwickan and perhaps still be there today had not the increased level of anti-Semitism that preceded the infamous "Kristallnacht" and the prospects of war led her parents to make a bold move to Palestine when Joan was just 15 years old. Leaving Germany no doubt saved Joan’s life and left her and her art for us to enjoy today.

What was life like for a teenager at the Kibbutzim Jagur and Alonim near Haifa in 1935? "Primitive, but not too bad -- three to a tent, half day working, half day of school plus learning Hebrew, enduring the nightly exchange of gunfire with their neighbors occupying the high ground above the wadi and then dancing into the night with her fellow Youth Aliah counterparts from Germany--" was the answer Mrs. Katzenstein told me from her present day home in New Port Richey, Florida. She remembers those days as vividly today as she does the intricate steps to her line dancing class that she attends three times weekly. I don’t know why I was so taken with the naturalness of the continuity of a long life well lived when Mrs. Katzenstein was engaging in the reverie of her youth and telling me about her busy life now at almost 77 years of age. But I was.

When I asked how she got interested in art, she said she always had fresh flowers adorning the pole that held her tent up and she always had a reproduction of van Gogh around as well. But she still was a long way from becoming the artist she is today. After eight years of Kibbutz life, Joan went to the port city of Haifa to buy a new pair of shoes – those grey suede ones with the black leather trim and silver buckle. There she met and married Eric Katzenstein, another German emigre from Frankfurt. In 1947, the instability of Middle East geopolitics led Joan and her husband to leave their new homeland in a converted troop ship for New York City where Eric’s family had settled earlier

In 1983, with family raised, this great grandmother could now pursue her art. She started taking lessons and paints for her pleasure, and now ours. Some of the artists we’ve featured have been painting all their lives; some are even into computer art, but Mrs. Katzenstein is the prime example that it’s never too late to begin. And we’re glad she did, and we’re glad that that computer schedule placed her and Dr. Luchi beside each other on a flight from Tampa to Houston so you could go back in time to Germany and a Kibbutz in Israel and enjoy yet another Arts and Aging story that lifts the human spirit.

Since Joan Rotenberg Katzenstein is a native of Germany and a citizen of the world, perhaps a quote from another notable German might be appropriate: "Science and Art belong to the whole world, and the barriers of nationality vanish before them" -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

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