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A Day in Radomsko
[photo: on the street in Radomsko. LS2021] 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 […]
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Greenwriting on the Skarpa
My Afterword to Katy Bentall’s Greenwriting, published by (and available for purchase from) the estimable Bored Wolves Press, Krakow. 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 […]
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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’ […]
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January 6, 2022
from “State Funeral,” Sergei Loznitza , (film release 2021; footage, 1953) 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 […]
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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 […]
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Krzywe Lustro: all art is translation
Join a Panel Discussion about the book, July 25th, 10 AM PDT, in English and Polish 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 […]
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The Collaborative Skein: A Conversation
The poet Piotr Florczyk just published a remarkable collections of poems, From the Annals of Krakow, based on testimonies from Jewish survivors from his home town, Krakow, in the Shoah Archive at USC, where he Piotr did a residency. This conversation between the two of us, about Piotr’s book, about the forthcoming Polish edition of […]
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Welcome the Stranger: An urban installation for social engagement [Lublin, Poland]
![Welcome the Stranger: An urban installation for social engagement [Lublin, Poland]](https://crookedmirror.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/img_8364.jpg?w=1024)
It’s been an intense and magical week in Lublin, Poland. A Kabbalistic text appears over the archway of the Brama Grodzka; a flamingo is invited to perch in a storks nest high in a poplar tree; the words of Polish veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq are projected on the walls of the cultural center, reminding […]
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Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
What does July 4 feel like to a child in a cage in Clint, TX? To a Salvadoran mother wearing an ankle monitoring device afraid of being deported? How can one celebrate the 4th of July in America? The Statue of Liberty is weeping.
The Crooked Mirror, Louise Steinman's Blog 