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Friends in Warsaw, Late Summer 2011
It is such a pleasure to visit friends in a foreign city, though Warsaw sometimes feels as familiar as New York. I like to touch into my friends’ current preoccupations, catch glimpses of their lives. Today a visit to Staszek and Monika, took the tram at the stop across from the two mighty atlases at […]
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Still a Cold Case, 20 Years Later
It’s hard to believe today is the twentieth anniversary of my cousin Grisha Steinman’s murder. August 9, 1991. It’s been five years since I last checked in with the Van Nuys homicide desk, back when I wrote an article about the murder for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. “No new developments,” Detective Bub (!) said […]
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Yizkor Bucher (The Glatstein Chronicles)
[published in the Los Angeles Review of Books] 27th Jun 2011 Louise Steinman Jacob Glatstein The Glatstein Chronicles Translated by Maier Deshell and Norbert Guterman Edited by Ruth R. Wisse Yale University Press, November 2010. 432 pp. On my trip to Poland this past winter, I brought the perfect book as my traveling companion. The […]
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The Song the Poet Sang: Remembering the life and times of Lew Welch
[Forty years] have passed since the winter we hosted Reed College‘s poet in residence. We were living then on Southeast Schiller, in a tiny two-story house set back from the street behind three towering European birches. Dan had just graduated from Reed, and I was a sophomore studying American lit. Our friends lived in Reed […]
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Paradise on Hope: On the 25th Anniversary of the Central Library fire
“I have always thought that Paradise was a kind of library.” -Jorge Luis Borges On a November morning, a crowd soaks up the wan sun in the Maguire Gardens in front of Central Library. The lucky ones sip coffee out of paper cups, others slump in the stupor of the unslept. A black feral cat […]
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Why Is This Night Different?
I was on a bus to Jerusalem in 1975 when I opened and read a letter from a friend in Los Angeles informing me that Herschel Lymon, my childhood rabbi, had committed suicide. What could be more shocking? I loved Herschel. He bar mitzvahed my brother Larry, visited my Sunday School classes at Temple Akiba […]
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Sarah’s Brain
Sarah Rebecca Steinman, eldest daughter of my younger brother, is named for her two great-grandmothers. She’s named for Sarah Konarska Weiskopf (my mother’s mother), born in NowoRadomsk, Poland and for Rebecca Nusenov Steinman (my father’s mother) born in Cherniakhiv, Ukraine. My female lineage is embodied in this beautiful young woman, whose mother (née Pedersen) is […]
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Traces
It’s a big shift from the solitude of the page to a roomful of faces. I gave a talk at Pepperdine University in Malibu yesterday to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of photographs (titled TRACES OF MEMORY: A CONTEMPORARY LOOK AT THE JEWISH PAST IN POLAND) by the late photojournalist Christopher Schwartz, the permanent […]
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Evidence
Evidence. Means ‘sign’ or ‘proof’. ‘Statements of witnesses.’ Last fall I heard a thought-provoking talk– sponsored by the Casden Institute at USC — by Daniel Mendelsohn, author of THE LOST: Searching for Six of Six Million. Mendelsohn spoke about the “problem of the witness” and as well, “the problem of the historian.” How are those […]
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