The Crooked Mirror l Louise Steinman’s Blog
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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.
A Peaceful Return
Those flags with their bright red disks on white silk were just like the one I found with my father's possessions, after he died, in an envelope with one of his letters home from combat in Luzon and wrote about in my memoir, The Souvenir. These flags on display in the darkened gallery are the centerpiece of an unusual exhibition called “A Peaceful Return: The Story of the Yosegaki Hinomaru” at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria, Oregon.
