Archive for Katyn

Time Regained: Reading Józef Czapski in Billings, MT (about Marcel Proust, the Gulag, and reading as salvation)

Posted in ALOUD, Art and Culture, Crooked Mirror, drawing, history, Human Rights, Literature, Poland, social justice, translation, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 30, 2019 by Louise Steinman

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[from THE NOTEBOOKS OF JOZEF CZAPSKI, Polish limited edition]

I WOKE UP around 5:00 a.m., disoriented in an unfamiliar bed. I did not know east from west, up from down, where I’d find a floor to take the weight of my body. The hazy proportions of the room gave no clue; curtains blocked the winter light. In the moment my eyes opened, I lost my connection to those essentials that are, as Proust assures his readers, held fast by our psyches during sleep: “[T]he sequence of the hours, the order of the years, and the worlds.”

 

My disorientation went beyond the geo-gravitational. One era of my life had ended, and the next had not yet begun. If I lived in a traditional society, I’d have been standing on the threshold of the hut listening as a priest beat drums and stirred strong potions, a state the anthropologists call liminality.

Just six weeks before, I’d been fired from my job of 25 years. It was a job I’d loved, that had drawn on my love of literature and my delight at convening people from across Los Angeles to engage with the issues of the day, to ask questions of innovative thinkers, to practice agreeing and disagreeing in a public forum. The events at Central Library, the hearth of the city, were free; homeless patrons sat next to lawyers and teachers and students to listen to Christopher Hitchens talk about religion or Ta-Nehesi Coates discuss reparations. They came to hear local poets read Walt Whitman translated into Farsi and Spanish; to celebrate novelists like Colson Whitehead and his re-imagining of the Underground Railroad, to learn from naturalists like Terry Tempest Williams, primatologists like Frans de Waal. Hundreds of literary luminaries — Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, W. G. Sebald, Margaret Atwood, Adam Zagajewski, Ursula LeGuin — all presented their work on our stage over the years. At our last event, Nelson Mandela’s granddaughter read from her grandfather’s just-published prison letters. One evening, during his sound check, Cornel West pulled me aside to say, “You know, don’t you, that this space is sanctified?” I did.

Now I was untethered from the satisfactions of my job and as well, from the scaffold of responsibilities that had, for so many years, structured the rhythms of my life. I was past the tearful stage, but I was still heart-torn, grieving. Luckily, I had been granted a writing residency that fall at an arts colony on a ranch outside of Sheridan, Wyoming, and Susan — my soul sister-in-art — had been awarded a residency there as well. Perhaps some time away would open a way to re-focus, to pick up the thread of my own writing life.

As a way to jumpstart our adventure, Susan and I schemed a rendezvous, picking a town on the map that neither of us knew at all — Billings, Montana — simply because it had an airport and decent airfares from Los Angeles, for me, and from Portland, Oregon, for Susan.

Susan rented us a car and a two-bedroom Airbnb bungalow in Billings. We planned to cook simple meals together, drink good wine, catch up on stories about our lives, plan collaborative projects, and, at the end of the weekend, drive the 70 miles to the Crow Reservation to spend some daylight hours at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, then travel the final stretch to the Wyoming ranch and our official residency.

At the last moment, life tectonics shifted. A mutual friend — jazz musician David Ornette Cherry — suffered a medical emergency. He couldn’t breathe, barely managed to call 911 from his Portland studio before he suffered a cardiac arrest. David was “gone,” the paramedics said, for four whole minutes, and was now in an induced coma, on a ventilator in a Portland hospital, in the limbo of the ICU, where machines bleated heart rates and IV bags dripped nourishment into human veins, between life and death, this world, that world, with Susan by his bedside. He had no family nearby. He was going to need a lot of support to pull through.

I wholeheartedly supported Susan’s decision to stay behind, to forgo the residency if David didn’t recover soon. I realized as well that it was too last-minute and too costly to redirect my itinerary.

Which is why I woke up alone, in a strange bed in a strange house in Billings, Montana, where I dreaded spending the weekend alone.

MORE. READ ENTIRE PIECE, as published in Los Angeles Review of Books, May 21, 2019

Thinking about Katyn and onwards to Poland

Posted in Poland with tags , on November 27, 2010 by Louise Steinman

All over Poland there are memorials to  Katyn. For decades under Communism, all mention of this 1940 NKVD massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers in a remote forest in western Russia was taboo, punishable by prison or worse. Poland’s wartime underground heroes were considered traitors to the Communist cause. (In Moczarski’s “Conversations with an Executioner,” the former Home Army officer was imprisoned in the same cell (!)  as SS General Jurgen Stroop, the liquidator of the Warsaw Ghetto, a man whom Moczarski had once tried to kill… it’s one of the strangest and most profound jailtime interviews you’ll ever read.)  Poland’s Communist rulers kept in tune with the Soviet hierarchy in claiming that the massacres were the work of the Nazis. But they were lying. And the Poles knew better. As historian Norman Davies writes, “For once, Goebbels could have been telling the truth.” And yesterday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev  announced the resolution of the Russian Parliament to make what the Poles have long known official:  Stalin ordered the Katyn massacres. It’s a big step forward in Polish-Russian relations. For a visceral understanding of this tragedy and its central place in Polish political and cultural history since 1940, don’t miss Andrzej Wajda’s gut-wrenching film from 2007, KATYN.

I’m heading to Poland later this week, and it will be interesting to see the reverberations of this decision among friends in Krakow and Warsaw. I’ve started this blog THE CROOKED MIRROR primarily to blog on this trip. My friend Anne asked about the blog title, a good question. It (mirrors) the title of the book I’ve been working on for some time–  THE CROOKED MIRROR: A Conversation with Poland. The phrase comes from the title of a satirical Yiddish paper — Der Krumer Spigel (the crooked mirror) once published in the little Polish town of Radomsko, where my family lived for hundreds of years.   I loved that phrase and later read an essay by the Polish priest Josef Tischner in which he talks about how– when we look at our neighbor through a crooked mirror– what we see is distorted, unrecognizable. That’s how Poles and Jews have largely regarded each other since the traumas of the last war.  For the last eight years, I’ve been exploring the problematic, surreal and sometimes surprisingly exhilarating territory of Jewish-Polish dialogue in Poland, a journey into The Crooked Mirror.

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