Decades before Frank Oz was bringing Miss Piggy and Yoda to life, his parents, Mike and Frances Oznowicz, were creating puppets of their own, and using puppetry as a means of parody and resistance in Nazi-era Belgium.
Oz shares their story in a compelling mini-show, currently at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Primary components include expressive marionettes, including a satirical Adolf Hitler puppet, and an interview detailing the couple’s harrowing escape from Nazi horror.
Presented free to the public in a tiny gallery inside the museum’s entrance, “Oz Is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” continues at the CJM through Nov. 27. It overlaps with the related exhibit “Jim Henson Exhibition: Imagination Unlimited,” which runs at the museum through Aug. 14.
An intimate exhibit with universal significance, “Oz Is for Oznowicz” came about when the museum was seeking a Jewish element for the comprehensive Henson exhibition, CJM curator Heidi Rabben says.
“We spoke with Karen Falk, the director of archives for the Jim Henson Company, about Jewish and/or Bay Area ties to Henson and his work,” Rabben says. “We knew that Frank Oz was Jewish and grew up in Oakland, and Karen told us about his family’s marionettes and their extraordinary history.”
Oz, she adds, “was excited about the opportunity to share and honor his parents’ incredible story here and now, and to publicly display these family heirlooms for the first time.”
Discovered by Oz — as the 78-year-old puppeteer-actor-director tells us proudly in his introductory video —in his family’s attic, the featured puppets were created in 1930s Belgium by Isidore (Mike) and Frances Oznowicz, a Dutch-Jewish window trimmer and a Flemish-Catholic dressmaker, respectively. The Antwerp couple also were skilled amateur puppeteers. Mike carved them, and Frances costumed them.
While little information is available about the content of their nightclub acts, the couple were known to have a “great sense of humor,” Rabben says. Additionally, after the war, “They were very prominent and locally respected puppeteers in the Bay Area.”
Family members describe them as humorists with a social conscience.
The half dozen or so puppets on view are, in most cases, marionettes of nightclub entertainers. All but one are male; the sole female puppet is a singer, her mouth wide open and lipstick-red. Their faces reflect Mike Oznowicz’s expressionist and amusing style.
The centerpiece attraction is a Hitler puppet, a 20-inch-tall marionette with a Nazi uniform, black mustache and right arm raised in a Nazi salute. It is presented as it existed when Oz discovered it — no spruce-up has occurred. We don’t know if the couple used it in their performances, but it is believed that the two created it for the purpose of satire and social comment.
Rabben believes that the Hitler puppet will affect viewers in different ways. Some, perhaps due to the puppet’s authenticity, may find it chilling, while others will disagree. For Rabben personally, the puppet looks less “monstrous” than what she was prepared for. “I think the choices Mike made in carving the marionette are much more diminutive and infantilizing,” she says.
The exhibit’s other primary element is a 1970s interview Oz conducted with his father. In this half-hour black-and-white video, Mike Osnowicz details the couple’s harrowing evacuation, which took the pair from Belgium to France, Spain, Morocco, Portugal and eventually England, where they lived for a spell. Their journey involved boats, seasickness, hunger, German torpedos, extreme uncertainty, keen survival instincts, lucky coincidences and an ability, on Mike’s part, to see brightness even in the direst circumstances (as when he marveled at the sight of the Pyrenees).
“It’s a miracle we made it out,” Mike says in the film.
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Rabben describes the interview as “compelling and powerful” and both extraordinary and down to earth.
“It is certainly rare to have firsthand, recorded accounts from Jewish people who escaped and survived World War II, and, according to Frank and his older brother, Ronald, it was also very rare that their parents spoke at all about their experience during that time. ...
“And then you factor in the time period when it was shot … so it’s also using some of the earliest available consumer video recording equipment, a Sony Portapak.”
We also learn that after crossing the Atlantic (Hitler puppet in tow) and settling in Oakland in the early 1950s, Oz’s parents became active in the local puppeteer community.
Oz, meanwhile, presented puppet shows of his own during his teenage years, though he didn’t want to be a puppeteer. After meeting Jim Henson at a puppeteer fair, however, a six-month work plan turned into a 23-year collaboration with the Muppet originator. During this time, Oz created and performed several well-known Muppet characters, including Miss Piggy, Bert and the Cookie Monster.
Oz entered the “Star Wars” universe as well, performing and voicing Yoda.
Oz has also directed films — both Muppet and non-Muppet fare. “The Dark Crystal,” “The Muppets Take Manhattan,” “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” are a few of his works in this arena.
Puppet theater is a centuries-old, internationally practiced art form, explains Rabben. It is “most often categorized under entertainment, but, of course, the premise of many puppet shows is to present an exaggerated and stylized microcosm of things relevant to everyday life,” she says.
“One can presume that figures with power in a society, be they monarchs, religious leaders or politicians, were typically the most known figures of the time because their lives and choices impacted the greater society significantly. So that often made them the central target of critique, mimicry and mockery in puppetry and many other forms of artistic expression.”
Rabben also describes “Oz Is for Oznowicz” as a way to address the continued existence of anti-Semitism nearly 80 years after the Holocaust.
“I think when we are encountering untold stories of World War II and the Holocaust, sharing them is always with the objective of never forgetting that particularly unfathomable moment in history, of course, but also thinking about how it applies to the here and now,” she says.
“Right now, we are on the precipice of losing the last generation of Holocaust survivors, so preserving firsthand accounts of their experiences during that time is tremendously urgent. ... Stories like the Oznowiczes will never stop being relevant and imperative to humanity’s evolution.”
The plight of refugees also was part of “our earliest conversations around this exhibition,” Rabben says.
On this note, she quotes Oz from his introductory video: “‘I view these stories as emblematic of all the refugees past and present. Those refugees who didn’t make it alive. And all their stories are lost. So I honor those refugees as I honor my mom and dad.’”
