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A Gift
My husband’s gift this holiday was an offer to read out loud to me the entire manuscript of “The Crooked Mirror.” He wanted to have an intimate relationship with the work, he said. I balked. He insisted. About eight days ago, he began reading and I began listening. It really has been a gift, as […]
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What We Carry in a Name
What does one carry in a name? The custom, among Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews, to name a child after a deceased family member is meant to keep the name and the memory of that person alive. It is supposed to forge a bond between the soul of the named and the soul of the namesake. […]
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The house on Rolna
Back in Los Angeles in the wake of my return from Poland, I discover a strategy for jetlag. Late at night, sleep elusive, I fly to Radomsko via Google Earth, sipping tea as the glowing globe rotates on its axis and the image on my screen zooms in on the little town between Czestochowa and […]
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The Overcoat
I was in Warsaw in the winter of 2002, with my dear friend Cheryl who is the daughter of survivors from the town of Kolomyja, which was in Poland and is now in Ukraine. We rented an apartment in the Old Town and got a taste of Warsaw cultural life. Before we left on that […]
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Neither Black nor Gray
Many journeys yesterday, first the train from Krakow to Warsaw past hundreds of kilometers of white fields and forests. I shivered waiting on the platform in Krakow and was glad to see the train puff into the station. Several gallant Polish gentleman helped me onto the train with luggage and I had a window seat […]
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A Rescuer
He carefully sketches out the dimensions of the bunker in my little black notebook: the trapdoor in the kitchen, the second door to the potato cellar. Five Jewish souls hidden under their roof, under their floor. I let the tape recorder run and jot down phrases as they are translated. He is a forceful storyteller, […]
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Ginsberg in Nowa Huta
last night’s performance (by Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards) based on Ginsberg’s long poem “America” was the perfect conclusion to the Boska Komedia festival for me. An international cast of actors sang, danced, pounded, intoned, laughed, sobbed… “I’m going to pray all night with the water up to my knees,” eliding Ginsberg’s scathing […]
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Underground
What I love about attending an international festival like Boska Komedia here in Krakow is the way one slip-slides into intense social encounters (slip-sliding is on my mind as I navigate the slick cobblestones in Old Town each morning) Last night i exited a Polish play that had no English translation and, at the coat […]
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The Odyssey
I brought the perfect traveling companion with me to Krakow… “The Glatstein Chronicles” by Jacob Glatstein. Written when Glatstein (one of the foremost Yiddish poets of his day) was summoned home from New York to Lublin, Poland, to the bedside of his sick mother. He traveled on a trans-Atlantic steamer, writing “the ship seemed to […]
The Crooked Mirror, Louise Steinman's Blog 