"Steinman's elegiac book is a powerful reminder of how ideologies can become 'crooked mirror[s]' that distort reality and destroy lives, cultures and nations." --
Kirkus Reviews "Lyrical yet magesterial...heartfelt, poignant, redemptive, and brave." --
Los Angeles Review of Books "Readers can be grateful to Ms. Steinman for bearing witness to those seeds of understanding being planted in lands where so much blood flowed." --
The Wall Street Journal "[Steinman] achieves something close to peace with those struggling intensely to understand and rectify Poland's Jewish past." --
Foreign Affairs
"Louise Steinman's story is heroic in all the old senses of the word: a journey of a literal sort; a journey into the terrible past; and a journey into her own soul. Unblinking, scrupulous and enduring." --Alexandra Fuller, author of
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight "An event like the Holocaust not only takes a toll of dead and traumatizes the survivors. It leaves its mark on later generations as well--the children and grandchildren of the families of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. This is the territory Louise Steinman explores, with great feeling and with hope, in
The Crooked Mirror." --Adam Hochschild, author of
To End All Wars
"Louise Steinman has written the most extraordinary travel book I have ever read--about a journey to nightmare, through unmarked mass graveyards and dark haunted Polish and Ukrainian streets. The miracle is that shattering light breaks repeatedly into this otherwise dark journey. Jews--religious and secular--will have many reasons to read this book. As a Christian, I urge other Christians to read every page of
The Crooked Mirror, to face evil again, and to better understand redemption." --Richard Rodriguez, author of
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography
"
The Crooked Mirror is both provocative and ultimately redemptive, a book that will appeal to a wide audience of readers who care about history, genealogy, and the possibility of peace between estranged peoples." --Jonathan Kirsch, author of
The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan From the Hardcover edition.
Louise Steinman is the author of the award-winning memoir
The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War and
The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance. For the past two decades, she has curated the ALOUD literary and performance series for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. She also codirects the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at the University of Southern California.
From the Hardcover edition.