The Crooked Mirror l Louise Steinman’s Blog
Journeys within and beyond
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Meredith Monk: Calling
November 6, Amsterdam, Oude Kerk
Every year on March 9th, at half past eight a.m. at the Solstice, the first ray of sunlight falls on the tomb of Saskia Uylenburgh—Rembrandt's beloved wife— in Amsterdam's Oude Kerk, the city’s oldest building (built in 1302) and as well, one of its newest art institutions.
Now it’s chilly November, the sky dark grey, and I’m walking from Amsterdam’s central station, through the De Waal (Red Light) district, to the entry of the Oude Kerk. This mammoth building is now the venue for a remarkable series of installations comprising the first-ever European survey of the work of polymath artist (choreographer; composer; performer; filmmaker) Meredith Monk. The retrospective, “Calling: Meredith Monk” is being presented in two cities, Amsterdam and Munich, in celebration of the artist’s 80th birthday and her sixty years of prolific art-making.
Bending the River
Crowned with a hard hat and a sporting a Day-Glo orange vest, I stand in the middle of the vast channel of the Los Angeles River, our river—that runs fifty-one miles to the sea. On a searing hot July afternoon, I’m listening to artist Lauren Bon explain her Bending the River project to a small group of people participating in a tour. I’m trying to understand what it is I’m seeing.
A Day in Radomsko
Preface
IN THE SPRING of 2021, KARTA Center in Warsaw brought out a Polish translation of my book, The Crooked Mirror, nine years after its publication in the United States. The book chronicles my decades-long immersion in the discomforting, sometimes surreal, and ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation.
I first visited Poland in 2000 and was privileged to observe, in that more hopeful time, the nation’s new openness to historical inquiry about its past after forty years of Communist rule, when it was taboo to discuss Polish collaborators, pogroms, or the killings of returning Jews after the war. I met brilliant artist-activists who were finding ways to commemorate the Jewish absence in their midst and to educate their communities about a history in danger of being lost or obscenely distorted. I also saw fresh stirrings of Jewish life in Poland, and a touching inquisitiveness among the young about Jewish identities kept hidden after the war.
Greenwriting on the Skarpa
It’s dark when we arrive at Katy’s house in the Polish countryside, early fall, 2019. My friend and I, both road-weary, climb a flight of wooden stairs to retire. My friend installs herself in the bedroom of Katy’s daughter, Magda, now a young doctor in London. I bed down in the room that belongs to Katy’s son, Sammy, a classics major at the University of Warsaw. Everywhere there are stacks of book, fascinating books. Philosophy. History. Poetry. Books in Polish. Books in English. I want to look at all of them, but I’m so sleepy. Before I crash, I peek into Katy’s room/studio, noting piles of notebooks, vibrant watercolors. A chorus of frogs serenades me through the open window as I fall asleep.
The Verb To Inquire
Every Friday afternoon, I have been tutoring a fourth grader named Delilah, whom I view through a screen on Zoom. During the pandemic, Delilah’s school is the bedroom she shares with her two brothers. Her desk is her bunk bed. The family rarely goes out. Her mother quit her job to monitor the three kids’ schooling. Last December, they all got Covid. Her little brother bounces on the bed behind her, desperate for attention. Her older brother is playing a video game, with volume on high. After our first meeting, I cried. Delilah had no books. Everything was on the screen. She told me her eyes hurt after so many school hours on Zoom.
January 6, 2022
I'm walking the Silverlake staircases, listening to the audio version of Colm Toibin’s marvelous novel, The Magician, about Thomas Mann. I’m struck to learn how slow Thomas Mann was to understand the dangers posed by the National Socialists in Germany. Mann held such a deep belief in the staying power of German culture, a world of cosmopolitanism, a culture that treasured Wagner and Mahler, Goethe and Rilke. He was convinced those Nazis would “go away." Even as his eldest son and daughter Klaus and Erica became vocal anti-Nazis, Mann remained unperturbed. After the Nuremberg rally in 1933, his son Golo literally cut out articles from different German papers and laid them out on the dining room table. Look at these, he demanded of his father. “One article says 40,000 attended. Another says 100,000. They will not go away.”
For a break from reading about the rise of the Third Reich, I watched the unsettling and mesmerizing film, “State Funeral” by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitza (viewable on www.mubi.com).
Krzywe Lustro: all art is translation
I'd almost given up on the idea of a Polish translation of my book, The Crooked Mirror (published by Beacon Press in 2013.) But I know some stubborn (read, perseverant, optimistic) people, like the gifted translator Dorota Golebiewska, who decided she'd get to work and translate the book on her own. Who was determined to find the right Polish publisher for the work. And she did. And Rabbi Haim Beliak, who was also determined that the book be translated as part of the work of his organization, Beit Polska, Jewish Renewal in Poland. Dorota connected with the estimable Polish publisher, KARTA, which was founded in Warsaw in 1982 as an underground publication focusing on political commentaries; and which, after a few months, was transformed into an "independent almanac" presenting human attitudes towards dictatorship. The team at KARTA were a delight to work with—editor, researcher, designer. They included in this edition thirty pages of photographs. I wrote a new foreword, Marek Jezowski of Beit Polska wrote a thoughtful afterword: "Fortunately, the Polish-Jewish conversation continues to take place, and as Louise Steinman's book, among others, makes clear, the list of conditions precedent for it occurring is short. Essentially, all that is required is for someone on one side or the other to demonstrate their willingness to understand: to listen with genuine mindfulness and sincere interest."
Silent Witnesses (at the Noah Purifoy Foundation)
April 9, 2021. In Piper’s garden. Joshua Tree. Yesterday a visitation from a woodpecker in the palo Verde. Doves cooing. Ebullition of Lady Banksia roses, tiny yellows cascading over a white wall. Fat black bees dipping into the fragrant drooping wisteria. Orange koi darting in the green brine under magenta lily pads, a paddle of cactus, seeking shade from the desert sun. I’m dancing in the garden to Michele Shocked, “Quality of Mercy,” from the film, Deadman Walking. Where is mercy? Where is its quality not strained?
I’ve been watching the Chauvin trial in “homeopathic” doses, as one friend calls it. Chauvin’s lawyer parsing whether Floyd died of asphyxia or if his heart condition or fentanyl contributed to his death, when we already know, we can see , the experts have confirmed: this man was murdered. Anyone would be dead after being shoved face down for 9 and a half minutes, chest compressed, knee on the back of the neck. That Floyd struggled to raise himself with his knuckles, with his chin. Did they really dare insinuate that a man saying, “I can’t breathe” is a sign of resisting arrest? did they really have the audacity to claim that? Yes they did. Indeed they did.
Unclaimed, Unforgotten
Pouring rain this morning, as I set out for the Los Angeles County Crematory and Cemetery , next to Evergreen Cemetery in East L.A. for the annual ceremony honoring the unclaimed dead. Some of the 1457 unclaimed have no names; others have family too poor to afford the mortuary fees. Some of them have no family. Veterans. Stillborn babies. Homeless women and homeless men. Elderly. Young. I’d imagined there would only be a few people at the ceremony, but it was crowded under the blue awning, and water came through the cracks.