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Krzywe lustro. Dziennik polsko-żydowskiego pojednania
Louise Steinman zwraca się ku historii rodzinnej, podróżuje do kraju, z którym związani byli jej pochodzący z Radomska żydowscy dziadkowie i gdzie część jej rodziny zginęła w Zagładzie. Zapisuje, jak w bezpośrednim kontakcie, odrzucając zniekształcone obrazy odbite w „krzywym lustrze”, współcześni Żydzi i Polacy zaczynają widzieć i rozumieć się lepiej. Polska, kojarząca się jej dotychczas z cierpieniem i katastrofą, staje się jej bliższa, a porozumienie polsko-żydowskie – możliwe.
350 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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March 6, 2014
Louise Steinman's "The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation" has been praised as "appealing to wide audiences," and "unblinking, scrupulous and enduring." Richard Rodriguez called "Crooked Mirror" "the most extraordinary travel book I have ever read" about a "nightmare" country, "dark, haunted" Poland, into which "miracle" working Steinman breaks "shattering light."
In fact "The Crooked Mirror" is the self-indulgent, impressionistic travel diary of a New Age, dilettante Holocaust tourist. The book consists of brief, unorganized anecdotes. In one, a Lakota healer burns sweet grass and waves an eagle feather over Auschwitz visitors. In another, an impoverished Polish peasant listens to Radio Maryja. These anecdotes are meant to give us enough ammo to conclude who our protagonists and antagonists are. With the sketchiest of information, we presume to gain the authority to elevate the healer as a good guy, and condemn the old woman.
"Crooked Mirror"'s literary style is basic, its discipline absent, its arrogance depressing. Steinman's tic is putting two parts of speech at the end of sentences and separating them with a comma. The Jews she knew hated Poland more than Germany, "a fact I never questioned as odd, misplaced." Or, "why would you expect your neighbors to shoot you, take your house?" Or "she begged her father, her aunts." Or "he questioned her urgently, gently." Or "We baffled him with our reactions, our decisions." Or "my overcoat was forgiving, pliant." Steinman's tic is distracting, annoying. Where is the editor, the proofreader?
Steinman visits Treblinka and tries to say something of note about that piece of earthly Hell, but Treblinka receives fewer words than tedious descriptions of the dreams of Steinman's travel companion, Cheryl Holtzman.
During a layover in Paris, Steinman visits La Bibliotheque Polonaise – the Polish library. In this chapter she says a few things about Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish national poet, and then a bit about the gingko trees in Krakow, Polish words for trees, and how fashionably dressed and made-up the library's chief curator is. At the end of this chapter I had to ask myself, "Why did I just read that?"
Steinman asks rhetorical questions, for example, "Why does one person reject" stereotypes, and why does another accept them? She responds to her own rhetorical question: "Breathe in why. Breathe out why. So simple. So difficult." The chapter, and the book's attempt to plumb the serious questions it raises, end right there.
Steinman purports to be addressing how the Holocaust could happen, and why Polish Catholics responded as they did. Scholars have addressed these questions. Michael C. Steinlauf provides historical context and psychological insight. Jan Tomasz Gross cites economic motivations. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz writes about real tensions caused by high-profile Jewish Communists who did torture and murder Home Army veterans. Edna Bonacich and Amy Chua advance universally-applicable theories that explain atrocity as far afield as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Africa – not just acts committed by Polish Catholics. It behooves any ethical author and publisher taking on this topic to engage previous scholarship. Steinman and Beacon Press do not.
Nature abhors a vacuum. In this empty space where scholarship should be, Steinman reveals her "answer" to the big questions in a series of anecdotes. For the most part, older, poorer more rural and more Catholic Poles are "provincial" "Neanderthals" who hate Jews. Younger, better educated, more sartorially elegant Poles who have devoted their lives to recreating Poland's lost Jewish culture through tours, publications and artwork are good Poles.
Steinman and Beacon Press hand a free pass to the reader. Do you, reader, need to know any serious facts about Poland before making up your mind about any of these issues? Nah, not really. Just interpret the dream you had last night.
Breathtaking in its arrogance and solipsism, "Crooked Mirror" reports that Steinman and her travel companion Cheryl "imagined convening some grand international conference" for Jews and Poles. Later she and Cheryl powwow with "four sincere Polish university students. It was a start." "It was a start"? There have been numerous international conferences dedicated to Polish-Jewish relations. Steinman's and Cheryl's chat was not "a start" at anything.
Steinman appears never to have learned even conversational Polish – but that's okay; she speaks hot-tub. Steinman encounters an elderly Polish woman. This woman wears "threadbare" and "frayed" clothing. Her hands are "stained" with dirt. Her greenhouse is "rotting." Her lawn furniture is "overturned." Her blanket is "rumpled." Her hand is a "claw." This Polish peasant crone is listening to the "infamous Radio Maryja," an "anti-Semitic station." Steinman concludes that the old woman is an anti-Semite and "xenophobic."
Those who know Poland know that Radio Maryja does broadcast anti-Semitic material, but the station also broadcasts genuinely loving material. I have met deeply good people who listen to Radio Maryja. Not all its listeners are anti-Semites, any more than all NPR listeners are effete, brie-eating anti-Zionists. I suspect that had this old woman been more elegantly dressed – perhaps in garments by Hugo Boss, the Nazis' couturier – Steinman would not have judged her so harshly. Indeed Steinman, while writing about Poland but never capturing its appearance except to describe it in clichéd ways as dreary or grim, never misses a chance to report who is wearing a leather jacket.
Cheryl dresses "beguilingly" with "great fashion sense." Cheryl is an American woman who lives in the South of France and enjoys the beach. She makes everyone around her indulge her whims to march, unannounced, almost into strangers' laps at their workplaces, withdraw into pouts, stop a car suddenly, run down a public road, and scream, or to detail yet another one of her dreams. Cheryl's carte blanche to be difficult: she inherited grief from her survivor father.
The reader is to be less indulgent of August Kowalczyk. Kowalczyk, a Pole, was captured by Nazis at age 19 when attempting to join the resistance. He was imprisoned in Auschwitz for eighteen months. He was tortured. Kowalczyk described an SS man casually reading the newspaper, his pet dog at his feet, during this torture. Kowalczyk escaped. In retribution for his escape, Nazis gassed three hundred Poles.
The only thing in Kowalczyk's talk that raised a reaction from his listeners – one was "stricken" – was his perhaps casual comment that "Jews were resigned." Listeners to Kowalczyk's talk protested – just that comment. That was perhaps all they heard of this Polish man's description of his own crucifixion in Auschwitz. One must question a value system that allows Cheryl her constant indulgence of her own pain, though she was born in the US and lives in the South of France, and denies to a man like August Kowalczyk his heroism and his pain because he is Polish.
Steinman reports anecdotes as unquestioned fact. Scholarship shows that this is a mistake. People alter first-person accounts. Anecdotes may or may not be representational. A responsible storyteller addressing the Holocaust will compare first-person accounts with accepted scholarship. Steinman's readers will take these stories as true and representational. That is unfortunate on so important a topic.
Steinman Orientalizes. Because she does not speak Polish or Ukrainian, or possess much knowledge of the cultures she visits, Poles and Ukrainians come across as wacky exotics. They paint murals, sing songs, love or hate Jews, and kiss hands. Poles exist exclusively as "Neanderthals" who hate Jews or good goys who love Jews and devote their lives to them. There are no Poles who live their lives without their relationship to Jews being their primary feature.
I cannot imagine Beacon Press publishing such an Orientalizing text about Jews and the Holocaust. Would they publish a book about a tourist who spent several weeks in Israel and never bothered to learn conversational Hebrew, or penetrate Israeli culture? No. Then by what set of rules is this book's paradigm acceptable? Poles remain objects in this text – things about which Steinman speaks. They do not speak, or live, for themselves.
In fact "The Crooked Mirror" is the self-indulgent, impressionistic travel diary of a New Age, dilettante Holocaust tourist. The book consists of brief, unorganized anecdotes. In one, a Lakota healer burns sweet grass and waves an eagle feather over Auschwitz visitors. In another, an impoverished Polish peasant listens to Radio Maryja. These anecdotes are meant to give us enough ammo to conclude who our protagonists and antagonists are. With the sketchiest of information, we presume to gain the authority to elevate the healer as a good guy, and condemn the old woman.
"Crooked Mirror"'s literary style is basic, its discipline absent, its arrogance depressing. Steinman's tic is putting two parts of speech at the end of sentences and separating them with a comma. The Jews she knew hated Poland more than Germany, "a fact I never questioned as odd, misplaced." Or, "why would you expect your neighbors to shoot you, take your house?" Or "she begged her father, her aunts." Or "he questioned her urgently, gently." Or "We baffled him with our reactions, our decisions." Or "my overcoat was forgiving, pliant." Steinman's tic is distracting, annoying. Where is the editor, the proofreader?
Steinman visits Treblinka and tries to say something of note about that piece of earthly Hell, but Treblinka receives fewer words than tedious descriptions of the dreams of Steinman's travel companion, Cheryl Holtzman.
During a layover in Paris, Steinman visits La Bibliotheque Polonaise – the Polish library. In this chapter she says a few things about Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish national poet, and then a bit about the gingko trees in Krakow, Polish words for trees, and how fashionably dressed and made-up the library's chief curator is. At the end of this chapter I had to ask myself, "Why did I just read that?"
Steinman asks rhetorical questions, for example, "Why does one person reject" stereotypes, and why does another accept them? She responds to her own rhetorical question: "Breathe in why. Breathe out why. So simple. So difficult." The chapter, and the book's attempt to plumb the serious questions it raises, end right there.
Steinman purports to be addressing how the Holocaust could happen, and why Polish Catholics responded as they did. Scholars have addressed these questions. Michael C. Steinlauf provides historical context and psychological insight. Jan Tomasz Gross cites economic motivations. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz writes about real tensions caused by high-profile Jewish Communists who did torture and murder Home Army veterans. Edna Bonacich and Amy Chua advance universally-applicable theories that explain atrocity as far afield as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Africa – not just acts committed by Polish Catholics. It behooves any ethical author and publisher taking on this topic to engage previous scholarship. Steinman and Beacon Press do not.
Nature abhors a vacuum. In this empty space where scholarship should be, Steinman reveals her "answer" to the big questions in a series of anecdotes. For the most part, older, poorer more rural and more Catholic Poles are "provincial" "Neanderthals" who hate Jews. Younger, better educated, more sartorially elegant Poles who have devoted their lives to recreating Poland's lost Jewish culture through tours, publications and artwork are good Poles.
Steinman and Beacon Press hand a free pass to the reader. Do you, reader, need to know any serious facts about Poland before making up your mind about any of these issues? Nah, not really. Just interpret the dream you had last night.
Breathtaking in its arrogance and solipsism, "Crooked Mirror" reports that Steinman and her travel companion Cheryl "imagined convening some grand international conference" for Jews and Poles. Later she and Cheryl powwow with "four sincere Polish university students. It was a start." "It was a start"? There have been numerous international conferences dedicated to Polish-Jewish relations. Steinman's and Cheryl's chat was not "a start" at anything.
Steinman appears never to have learned even conversational Polish – but that's okay; she speaks hot-tub. Steinman encounters an elderly Polish woman. This woman wears "threadbare" and "frayed" clothing. Her hands are "stained" with dirt. Her greenhouse is "rotting." Her lawn furniture is "overturned." Her blanket is "rumpled." Her hand is a "claw." This Polish peasant crone is listening to the "infamous Radio Maryja," an "anti-Semitic station." Steinman concludes that the old woman is an anti-Semite and "xenophobic."
Those who know Poland know that Radio Maryja does broadcast anti-Semitic material, but the station also broadcasts genuinely loving material. I have met deeply good people who listen to Radio Maryja. Not all its listeners are anti-Semites, any more than all NPR listeners are effete, brie-eating anti-Zionists. I suspect that had this old woman been more elegantly dressed – perhaps in garments by Hugo Boss, the Nazis' couturier – Steinman would not have judged her so harshly. Indeed Steinman, while writing about Poland but never capturing its appearance except to describe it in clichéd ways as dreary or grim, never misses a chance to report who is wearing a leather jacket.
Cheryl dresses "beguilingly" with "great fashion sense." Cheryl is an American woman who lives in the South of France and enjoys the beach. She makes everyone around her indulge her whims to march, unannounced, almost into strangers' laps at their workplaces, withdraw into pouts, stop a car suddenly, run down a public road, and scream, or to detail yet another one of her dreams. Cheryl's carte blanche to be difficult: she inherited grief from her survivor father.
The reader is to be less indulgent of August Kowalczyk. Kowalczyk, a Pole, was captured by Nazis at age 19 when attempting to join the resistance. He was imprisoned in Auschwitz for eighteen months. He was tortured. Kowalczyk described an SS man casually reading the newspaper, his pet dog at his feet, during this torture. Kowalczyk escaped. In retribution for his escape, Nazis gassed three hundred Poles.
The only thing in Kowalczyk's talk that raised a reaction from his listeners – one was "stricken" – was his perhaps casual comment that "Jews were resigned." Listeners to Kowalczyk's talk protested – just that comment. That was perhaps all they heard of this Polish man's description of his own crucifixion in Auschwitz. One must question a value system that allows Cheryl her constant indulgence of her own pain, though she was born in the US and lives in the South of France, and denies to a man like August Kowalczyk his heroism and his pain because he is Polish.
Steinman reports anecdotes as unquestioned fact. Scholarship shows that this is a mistake. People alter first-person accounts. Anecdotes may or may not be representational. A responsible storyteller addressing the Holocaust will compare first-person accounts with accepted scholarship. Steinman's readers will take these stories as true and representational. That is unfortunate on so important a topic.
Steinman Orientalizes. Because she does not speak Polish or Ukrainian, or possess much knowledge of the cultures she visits, Poles and Ukrainians come across as wacky exotics. They paint murals, sing songs, love or hate Jews, and kiss hands. Poles exist exclusively as "Neanderthals" who hate Jews or good goys who love Jews and devote their lives to them. There are no Poles who live their lives without their relationship to Jews being their primary feature.
I cannot imagine Beacon Press publishing such an Orientalizing text about Jews and the Holocaust. Would they publish a book about a tourist who spent several weeks in Israel and never bothered to learn conversational Hebrew, or penetrate Israeli culture? No. Then by what set of rules is this book's paradigm acceptable? Poles remain objects in this text – things about which Steinman speaks. They do not speak, or live, for themselves.
June 8, 2015
Louise writes about the Poland that exists in American Jewish consciousness, and connects this perception to the Poland of today. As a Jewish woman growing up in California and the daughter or Polish Jewish immigrants who arrived in the US before the war, she had always been taught that Poland is a land of anti-Semites and collaborators. “Bitterness calcified, and in my home and among my generation of comfortable suburban Los Angeles Jewish kids, the very idea of Poland resonated anguish and betrayal in a way it did not for other Americans.” So it comes as a shock to her that her rabbi, Rabbi Singer, sends her to visit Poland to engage in a Polish Jewish reconciliation. After all, if Poland is a country of anti-Semites how can it be, or ever have been, a homeland for Jewish people?
It is extremely satisfying to travel this mind and history together; Louise’s feelings about her friends, family and community bring passion to history, something historians as a whole often can not do when writing purportedly objective accounts. Because this is also a comprehensive introduction to Polish history, which goes back hundreds of years, from the Kingdom of Polonia up to today. Polonia is a birth country for a multiplicity of ethnicities and Jewish communities who lived in symbiotic relationships with their neighbours across the duchies.
The Crooked Mirror is a wormhole to this history of tolerance and its promise. The Golden Era in Poland’s history was brought to its knees when diplomacy was steamrolled by invaders who gained leadership through conquest. Finally, it is crushed in the middle of the 20th Century, when the worst of humanity’s behaviour enacts a violence and murder so thorough that it is still a well of trauma from which Europe has to emerge. For me, as my mother is Polish Catholic and my father is Jewish, second generation with roots in Poland and surrounding areas, I have always asked the question of how people can be so effectively mobilized to murder. Louise’s stories further answer this question for me, and passionately inspires me to further commit myself to the belief that it is our moral imperative to return to values of tolerance and diplomacy – and not vengeance or military action. The governance which values tolerance is central to the history of Europe and to its finest hours.
In Lublin, Radomsko, Warsaw, Krakow, throughout cities in Poland, there are people passionately dedicated to telling the stories of Polish Jews. The stories coruscate in archival papers and in their objects which survive until today. There are stories people have only started to tell in recent years, stories about libraries, great lovers and great meals – all of which were the results of progressive values and multi-ethnic Europe. The Crooked Mirror brings these fragments together and the effect is something like having a front door which presents a new street scene every time you open it. The Jewish photographer and his mistress, the Jewish butchers of Radomsk and their friendship with the local police, the murals of synagogues painted by Poles, and the tiled floors and spires of Churches crafted by Jews. These images are profound, but then the doors open and you see a scene from 1939, the torture happens, and everything after is affected.
And today, there is every reason to care about Poland and encourage a greater understanding of its place in history. Through this, we understand ourselves better, and our fragility in the face of violence. It helps us understand that when we say ‘never again’ and ‘always remember’ the two statements are also positive - to always value peaceful governance and remember the intelligence, love, and stories – of which there is an abundance - of those who came before us.
It is extremely satisfying to travel this mind and history together; Louise’s feelings about her friends, family and community bring passion to history, something historians as a whole often can not do when writing purportedly objective accounts. Because this is also a comprehensive introduction to Polish history, which goes back hundreds of years, from the Kingdom of Polonia up to today. Polonia is a birth country for a multiplicity of ethnicities and Jewish communities who lived in symbiotic relationships with their neighbours across the duchies.
The Crooked Mirror is a wormhole to this history of tolerance and its promise. The Golden Era in Poland’s history was brought to its knees when diplomacy was steamrolled by invaders who gained leadership through conquest. Finally, it is crushed in the middle of the 20th Century, when the worst of humanity’s behaviour enacts a violence and murder so thorough that it is still a well of trauma from which Europe has to emerge. For me, as my mother is Polish Catholic and my father is Jewish, second generation with roots in Poland and surrounding areas, I have always asked the question of how people can be so effectively mobilized to murder. Louise’s stories further answer this question for me, and passionately inspires me to further commit myself to the belief that it is our moral imperative to return to values of tolerance and diplomacy – and not vengeance or military action. The governance which values tolerance is central to the history of Europe and to its finest hours.
In Lublin, Radomsko, Warsaw, Krakow, throughout cities in Poland, there are people passionately dedicated to telling the stories of Polish Jews. The stories coruscate in archival papers and in their objects which survive until today. There are stories people have only started to tell in recent years, stories about libraries, great lovers and great meals – all of which were the results of progressive values and multi-ethnic Europe. The Crooked Mirror brings these fragments together and the effect is something like having a front door which presents a new street scene every time you open it. The Jewish photographer and his mistress, the Jewish butchers of Radomsk and their friendship with the local police, the murals of synagogues painted by Poles, and the tiled floors and spires of Churches crafted by Jews. These images are profound, but then the doors open and you see a scene from 1939, the torture happens, and everything after is affected.
And today, there is every reason to care about Poland and encourage a greater understanding of its place in history. Through this, we understand ourselves better, and our fragility in the face of violence. It helps us understand that when we say ‘never again’ and ‘always remember’ the two statements are also positive - to always value peaceful governance and remember the intelligence, love, and stories – of which there is an abundance - of those who came before us.
February 15, 2014
In graceful and heartfelt prose, Louise Steinman captures a horrific topic: the results and residue of the Holocaust in Poland. Thanks to my reader friend with whom I formed the World's Smallest Reading Group (just the two of us), I learned about and read The Crooked Mirror.
Louise Steinman, daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants, had lived all her life without learning a thing about her family's past. Her mother could not even say the word Poland and Louise was only told that the country allowed almost all of Poland's Jews to be exterminated and possibly was even complicit in the genocide.
I immediately sympathized with her dilemma. One of the reasons I decided to write my own autobiography was because my parents rarely talked about their ancestors, nor as it turned out did they know much about them. All my ancestors were German immigrants who came to the United States in the mid to late 1800s. Two world wars with Germany as America's enemy had effectively silenced my grandparents about their origins. In their efforts to assimilate and blend in, neither their native language nor tales of the families' pasts survived.
By the time Louise Steinman began her quest and odyssey into the past, she was a practicing American Jew in Los Angeles whose rabbi was also a Zen Buddhist. Only in LA, right? The purpose of her first trip to Poland, by invitation of the rabbi, was to attend an International Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This experience led her to Radomsko, her grandparent's Polish hometown, and ultimately to a more complete understanding of the complexity of Polish-Jewish relations.
Having read John Hersey's The Wall and Leon Uris's Mila 18 (both are fictional accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto), as well as The Patagonian Hare, the memoir of Claude Lanzmann (creator of the Holocaust movie Shoa which I watched), I was fairly well prepared historically to appreciate the emotional prejudices Steinman had to confront. None of this reading prepared me at all for the reading group discussion of The Crooked Mirror.
My friend brought another friend to the meeting. Both of them are Jews of Polish descent. My friend has been to Poland twice and her friend at least four times, including visits to the hometowns of their forebears. The book meant more to them than I could have imagined.
My ancestors were Lutheran and emigrated for economic reasons. These women's ancestors were obliterated almost without a trace. Our discussion ranged far and wide leaving me with many of my preconceived notions rearranged.
To all of these women goes my admiration for their courage in facing the past and their willingness to help heal a countrywide breach caused by the evils of both the Nazis and post WWII Communism. Though the history of the persecution towards the Jewish people dates much further back than 1939, there was a time when Jews and Catholics in Poland lived shoulder to shoulder in tolerance and cooperation.
Steinman's memoir follows her progression from tentative inquiry through increased involvement and finally to enough healing to allow hope. To this day hardly any Jews live in the entire country of Poland, but efforts by both Jews and present day Polish Catholics have brought to light what really happened. In older times "a Polish Catholic painted the zodiac on the ceiling of Radomsko's Great Synagogue and a Polish Jewish tinsmith designed the spires of the town's cathedral."
March 18, 2014
3.5. I love books in which before I even finish reading the introduction I have already learned something I did not know. I had never heard of the Kielce Pogrom that took place in 1946, which convinced those that survived the camps, to flee Poland.
The author sets out to attend an international Witness retreat at Auschwitz and this starts her quest to trace her Polish Jewish past. She goes to Wannsee where the 1942 conference on the final solution took place and continues on to many other places trying to figure out the present day understanding between Poles and Jews.
Part memoir, part historical, it is a book from which I learned much. Would have rated it a solid 4 except, I found the writing quite choppy at times and a bit difficult to follow from place to place.
Loved her interpretation of The Crooked Mirror, where neighbors turn on each other. A good addition to this genre.
The author sets out to attend an international Witness retreat at Auschwitz and this starts her quest to trace her Polish Jewish past. She goes to Wannsee where the 1942 conference on the final solution took place and continues on to many other places trying to figure out the present day understanding between Poles and Jews.
Part memoir, part historical, it is a book from which I learned much. Would have rated it a solid 4 except, I found the writing quite choppy at times and a bit difficult to follow from place to place.
Loved her interpretation of The Crooked Mirror, where neighbors turn on each other. A good addition to this genre.
December 9, 2013
This book has revealed a lot to me. My Paternal family is all Polish, both of my Dad's parents and grand-parents being 100%. It's true that although I have heard a few stories about them, and their struggles growing up and being successful in America after immigrating here--I've never heard a single story about Poland or any family history before America. It's been as if the family didn't start until they moved here. I can't say for certain that this is because of the shame/guilt associated with Poland that's described in this memoir, but it did make me wonder. My family is all Catholic (so far as I know), and primarily soft-spoken and introverted. As I was reading about Ms. Steinman's experiences, I sort of linked that up with the devastating existence she describes here. I imagine years of living in those times changed everyone, not just the Jewish population.
For anyone reading that might not have Polish or Jewish ties, the book is well worth the read. It's put together beautifully, and written in a very relatable, understandable style. I felt as though a family friend were telling me a historical, and deeply emotional story.
I'm very grateful to Beacon Press for affording me the chance to experience it through a Goodreads giveaway.
For anyone reading that might not have Polish or Jewish ties, the book is well worth the read. It's put together beautifully, and written in a very relatable, understandable style. I felt as though a family friend were telling me a historical, and deeply emotional story.
I'm very grateful to Beacon Press for affording me the chance to experience it through a Goodreads giveaway.
May 1, 2017
XXX I received this book as a give-away from the publisher. Thank you! Louise Steinman wrote this memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation from her own struggle as the descendant of a participant in the atrocities lived through in Poland before and during the Second World War. On the face of it, this seems simple. In reality, doing a successful reconciliation is anything but simple, and Louise Steinman outlines the proper steps to make this horrendous mend in the fabric of Polish life as seamlessly as possible. We southerners, and those of us in the melting pots of America, all the rival feuds instilled over the years from misunderstandings or misinformation or just basic life vision, be it accurate or read through a crooked mirror, need to approach our differences in the way outlined in this insightful record of a true melding of hearts and understanding. It is possible to apologize and explain, to mourn and live again as neighbors and friends. I find that very encouraging to know, and am grateful for the insights I was able to take away from this memoir. Thank you, Ms. Steinman!
October 10, 2014
Disclosure: I won a copy of this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway. I wasn't required to review the book, but prefer to do so.
Beautiful book by a woman who decided that her family's past wasn't past. Louise Steinman overcame her family's hatred of Poland by finding out what modern Poles thought about the Holocaust, in which most of Steinman's ancestors died. With the help of dozens of family members, fellow travelers, Poles speaking for the dead, and Jewish people searching for resolution, she explores the complex and difficult relationship that her Jewish forebears had with their ethnic Pole neighbors during the Holocaust.
Four stars. I did keep getting tripped up by Steinman's privilege and what some would call a "hippy-dippy" attitude, but it's what she needed to write such a book and to forgive those who committed atrocities.
Beautiful book by a woman who decided that her family's past wasn't past. Louise Steinman overcame her family's hatred of Poland by finding out what modern Poles thought about the Holocaust, in which most of Steinman's ancestors died. With the help of dozens of family members, fellow travelers, Poles speaking for the dead, and Jewish people searching for resolution, she explores the complex and difficult relationship that her Jewish forebears had with their ethnic Pole neighbors during the Holocaust.
Four stars. I did keep getting tripped up by Steinman's privilege and what some would call a "hippy-dippy" attitude, but it's what she needed to write such a book and to forgive those who committed atrocities.
January 18, 2016
This is a wonderful book about losing and finding history and its meaning, both personal and societal; family and how understanding trumps myths; and redemption both for ourselves and others both of whom we thought we knew and didn't. It is a also a book about the Holocaust and the war we and others still fight within ourselves, and how that war and the way we fight it or make peace with it influence the the present and the future for ourselves and future generations. This is a book at once fascinating and close to the bone, analytical and emotional. It has moved me, inspired me, changed my understanding of Poland, Poles, Polish history, and the place of Jews in Poland for centuries before World War II. I heartily recommend it.
August 9, 2016
First, I must note that Louise Steinman has been a dear friend for many years. While this has probably colored my opinion of this book, what she has written is heartfelt, thoroughly researched and beautifully written.
Without my having much prior knowledge of the plight of Polish Jews, this book brought to mind so many incidents of how people are treated wrongly and how this treatment is ignored. We can reflect on our own histories, and what we know and do not know about our families as well as what we can discover about ourselves.
http://vimeo.com/80390469
Without my having much prior knowledge of the plight of Polish Jews, this book brought to mind so many incidents of how people are treated wrongly and how this treatment is ignored. We can reflect on our own histories, and what we know and do not know about our families as well as what we can discover about ourselves.
http://vimeo.com/80390469
February 26, 2015
I found this book to be a valuable supplement to the holocaust books that are available. It tells of Jewish and non-Jewish descendants of Poland who attempt to trace their relatives. It revisits and reconstructs the past. I was surprised by some of the attitudes and stereotypes that still prevail. It takes us to monuments and museums dedicated to remembering the events of the holocaust. Some searches for family are fruitful and some are not. It is a book of journeys and heart breaks. This is another book everyone should read. It is an important piece of history. I give this one a 4 out of 5.
August 25, 2016
This book was deeply personal, so perhaps that inflated my rating. But not by much. A moving, beautiful story about suffering, loss, making atonement, and hope.
July 16, 2016
I cannot finish this book. The topic seems to be interesting, but the actual content is more pseudoscience (aka woo) than anything else.
August 22, 2022
Jay Martin writes, in her memoir of living in Poland some ten or fifteen years ago, that Heinrich Himmler had issued a directive...that Polish children not be educated above grade four, with teaching limited to counting to five hundred only, and writing to be of their names only. Poles were supposed to end up the slaves of the occupying Germans, what was the point of more education? (Jay Martin, Vodka and Apple Juice, 188). Yet for many, Poland was—still is—simply the site of atrocities wreaked upon both Poland's Jewish population and Jews brought in from elsewhere.
I read The Crooked Mirror last year, and what has stayed with me is surprise: surprise that it takes so long in the book for Steinman to come to the realisation that the Poles were not all Nazis and Nazi sympathisers during World War II, that Poland was in fact an occupied country. And it's not that I can or would blame her: she grew up knowing what her family had lost in the Holocaust, and knowing that she would never really understand the full impact of that loss but feeling its reverberations over and over. There are parts of the story that you're just going to miss when that is the case.
But, partly because of that, it ended up feeling like the book only barely starts to scrape the surface—because it's hard to get into the complexities of a matter when the starting point is good-and-bad-and-nothing-in-between and it takes so long to realise that there is grey, and there are complexities. There's a point in the book when a Christian priest apologises to the tour group (I don't have a better term for this—Steinman was in Poland as part of an organised group of Jewish—I think they were all Jewish, but time has passed since I read this and I may be wrong—folks who had a personal stake in what had happened in Poland during the Holocaust). There's a sense of utter shock from the group that this has happened. But I guess it's also...when you have grown up believing an entire population is monsters, and this is the first time you are looking outside that view, it's easy to be surprised.
But I say this with the significant caveat that Steinman's background is one that I cannot understand viscerally—I just do not have that family history. It is entirely possible that this would resonate better with someone who does have that family history (not just the Holocaust—there are many, many other atrocities in recent history that might feel fitting); in fact, I'm reminded of My Germany, in which the author comes to realise that there is more to the Germany of the present than the Holocaust.
I read The Crooked Mirror last year, and what has stayed with me is surprise: surprise that it takes so long in the book for Steinman to come to the realisation that the Poles were not all Nazis and Nazi sympathisers during World War II, that Poland was in fact an occupied country. And it's not that I can or would blame her: she grew up knowing what her family had lost in the Holocaust, and knowing that she would never really understand the full impact of that loss but feeling its reverberations over and over. There are parts of the story that you're just going to miss when that is the case.
But, partly because of that, it ended up feeling like the book only barely starts to scrape the surface—because it's hard to get into the complexities of a matter when the starting point is good-and-bad-and-nothing-in-between and it takes so long to realise that there is grey, and there are complexities. There's a point in the book when a Christian priest apologises to the tour group (I don't have a better term for this—Steinman was in Poland as part of an organised group of Jewish—I think they were all Jewish, but time has passed since I read this and I may be wrong—folks who had a personal stake in what had happened in Poland during the Holocaust). There's a sense of utter shock from the group that this has happened. But I guess it's also...when you have grown up believing an entire population is monsters, and this is the first time you are looking outside that view, it's easy to be surprised.
But I say this with the significant caveat that Steinman's background is one that I cannot understand viscerally—I just do not have that family history. It is entirely possible that this would resonate better with someone who does have that family history (not just the Holocaust—there are many, many other atrocities in recent history that might feel fitting); in fact, I'm reminded of My Germany, in which the author comes to realise that there is more to the Germany of the present than the Holocaust.
October 13, 2014
This book, by an American Jew who visited Poland to visit the homes of her ancestors, discusses her travels through Poland and Ukraine, as well as some of the people she met there.
The first half of the book, discussing the author's personal memories, was less interesting to me than the second half, which is more focused on conversations with Poles who explain the common Polish desire to memorialize Poland's Jewish heritage by repairing Jewish cemeteries and similar acts of benevolence. One journalist explained that he grew up under Soviet-dominated Communist Poland, which he viewed as "fake." He added: "The last time we had a 'genuine' Poland was the interwar republic [before the Nazi invasion]. And it was the Poland of the Jews ... In the paradox of Polish nationalism, a Jewish presence is what makes Poland genuine."
One especially unusual manifestation of Polish philo-Semitism is the Purim play in the small town of Tykocin, performed roughly on the same spot where Jews were rounded up to be murdered by Nazis in 1941. Why would Christian Poles perform a ritual once performed by their now-deceased Jewish neighbors? Steinman explains that this play was not meant for foreign consumption, but is "a healing ritual for their community... [and] an opportunity for the villagers to mourn the loss of their Jewish brethren."
The first half of the book, discussing the author's personal memories, was less interesting to me than the second half, which is more focused on conversations with Poles who explain the common Polish desire to memorialize Poland's Jewish heritage by repairing Jewish cemeteries and similar acts of benevolence. One journalist explained that he grew up under Soviet-dominated Communist Poland, which he viewed as "fake." He added: "The last time we had a 'genuine' Poland was the interwar republic [before the Nazi invasion]. And it was the Poland of the Jews ... In the paradox of Polish nationalism, a Jewish presence is what makes Poland genuine."
One especially unusual manifestation of Polish philo-Semitism is the Purim play in the small town of Tykocin, performed roughly on the same spot where Jews were rounded up to be murdered by Nazis in 1941. Why would Christian Poles perform a ritual once performed by their now-deceased Jewish neighbors? Steinman explains that this play was not meant for foreign consumption, but is "a healing ritual for their community... [and] an opportunity for the villagers to mourn the loss of their Jewish brethren."
March 13, 2014
Read my full review: http://bit.ly/1lChRqj
My opinion: Let me preface my review in saying that I love unique reads. Ms. Steinman has delivered this. While I think this book was part memoir, I feel that it could also be considered a history/current events book.
While the story was fascinating, I felt that the writing was disconnected. It almost had the feeling of someone, instead of being part of the story, was writing it from the outside looking in. It truly lacked the emotional aspect that given the topic, I felt it should have had. I felt that if there had been an inkling of emotion to the "aweness" of this story, this, hands down, would have been a 5 star read.
Genealogy people will LOVE this book. I found that aspect of the book fascinating. I was emotional with some of the incidents occurring in the book, but felt that the author was writing of them from the perspective of a historian versus that of a family...granted long removed, but still family.
My opinion: Let me preface my review in saying that I love unique reads. Ms. Steinman has delivered this. While I think this book was part memoir, I feel that it could also be considered a history/current events book.
While the story was fascinating, I felt that the writing was disconnected. It almost had the feeling of someone, instead of being part of the story, was writing it from the outside looking in. It truly lacked the emotional aspect that given the topic, I felt it should have had. I felt that if there had been an inkling of emotion to the "aweness" of this story, this, hands down, would have been a 5 star read.
Genealogy people will LOVE this book. I found that aspect of the book fascinating. I was emotional with some of the incidents occurring in the book, but felt that the author was writing of them from the perspective of a historian versus that of a family...granted long removed, but still family.
December 17, 2013
I could not get into this book. I'll admit I didn't finish it.
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