Click on a selection below to hear an interview with Samuel Bak, conducted in April 2000 by JHOM Managing Editor, Jennifer Turvey. JHOM has also made available a print summary of the interview. If you don't already have the Real Audio plug-in for your browser, you can download the free RealPlayer from Real Networks in order to hear the broadcast. 1   Family History: Bak: Bet Kuf — "Children of Martyrs." Vilna, Sfat, and Jerusalem. 2   Painting Jewish symbols and Jewish history is like repairing broken vessels 3   Light in Bak's paintings. "Hope is a crucial thing. It keeps human nature together and makes the mind and body function." 4   Repairing the broken vessels of worldly life. "I am grateful to my art." 5   "I realized I had a story to tell." Exchanging 'stylish' art for a deeper, truer one. 6   The continuous struggle of making art. Jacob struggling with the stranger. 7   The many trees in Bak's paintings. 8   Tragic, Sad, Sweet. Memories of childhood in the Vilna Ghetto. 9   Childhood, part II.: Surviving the Holocaust in a Benedictine convent. 10  The child prodigy.: "When I was three or four I was a very talented painter, but I wanted to sell candies with a little monkey in the public gardens, I wanted to be a policeman. . . " 11  Judeo-Christian symbols. The painting "Nuremberg Elegie." 12  The process of creating a painting. Intellectual and intentional, but also spontaneous. 13  Mentors spanning the history of art and a personal library of thousands of volumes.   BAK Introduction