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.
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.
Ceremony of Forgiveness/ Night before the Electoral College
Reeling from the latest barrage of globally catastrophic images—my mind gravitates to that startling and necessary image—beamed to us from Standing Rock.It is the image of a U.S. veteran named Wesley Clark, Jr kneeling down, with veterans of various American combat units standing behind him—offering his formal apology to Lakota Medicine Man Leonard Crow Dog. Who ever thought we would see this in our life time?
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.
Notes on a Warsaw Residency, 2
Shall I write about the storks clacking their beaks high in their nests on the road to Sejny? And in Krasnogruda, near the border with Lithuania, the hare that bounded across the road and straight out of Milosz' beautiful poem? In the candle-light coffee-house, Song of Porcelein Cafe, in the basement of what was once Milosz' childhood summer home, surrounded by Polish listeners from surrounding villages, I speak with my host--Krzysztof Czyzewski-- about my "time-based" work, this ten year journey to learn about the actual Poland, our shared history, to "re-imagine" the "Poland in my head."
