With the word “reconciliation” as her mantra, author Louise Steinman fuses the bitter past of Jewish persecution in Poland with the importance of forgiveness in her newest book “The Crooked Mirrors,” from which she will be reading today at 4 p.m. in Payson Library.
Steinman spoke about her journeys in Poland 3 years ago during the writing process of “The Crooked Mirrors,” and now she’s back with the completed narration, recently published in November 2013.
“She was actually my first speaker,” Director of Public Affairs and Advancement of University Library Ken LaZebnik said, who will be leaving Pepperdine at the end of the month. “It’s kind of a wonderful, full-circle thing for me.”
LaZebnik, who is in charge of raising money for the library and booking speakers and events, said he aims to choose speakers who align with the university’s mission statement along with helping create a cultural hub on campus.
“I also spend a lot of time pointing our speakers toward the spiritual mission of Pepperdine,” LaZebnik said. “So we have a lot of speakers who have insightful commentary of religious issues of theology.”
Steinman traveled to Poland for the first time more than 10 years ago to attend a Bearing Witness retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was struck with a curiosity for the Polish people and her family’s past.
“I realized I’d never met any Poles, knew nothing about their history, and furthermore, I was fascinated by the world my family came from,” Steinman wrote in an email. “Growing up, I always knew there had been family ‘who never left Poland’ who perished in the Holocaust. I had no names. Inherited from my parents, I carried deep-seated (and unexamined) bitterness against Poles for whatever was perceived as their role in the disaster.”
From a Jewish background himself, LaZebnik said Steinman’s work is personal to him along with the whole Jewish community.
“We view Poland with great suspicion and we think of it as the home of the concentration camps, which it was,” LaZebnik said. “[Steinman] went to Poland with a great amount of trepidation and suspicion of what she’d find. This whole journey is really wonderful with reconciliation with the country her ancestors lived in.”
For those attending the reading, LaZebnik would like people to look forward to a “spiritual journey.”
“It’s very significant for the Pepperdine community, who is all about finding fellowship and finding higher spiritual ground,” LaZebnik said. “And I think Louise really does that brilliantly. People will come and find a very moving experience and be able to relate it to their personal lives by moving past assumptions and moving to reconciliation.”
In light of Steinman’s new book, Dean of Libraries Mark Roosa wrote in an email that he hopes students learn “that forgiveness is always possibble, that assumptions about people one has ever met are likely to be wrong, and to bring an open mind and heart to cultural encounters.”
Though her book is largely based on the importance of creating peace where prejudices once stood, Steinman said that there isn’t just one lesson she wants her readers to receive.
“I’m a storyteller, and I hope these stories in my book illuminate a personal path toward reconciliation,” Steinman wrote. “I am using my own initial resistance and unease about the subject as a way to follow the fault line of my received prejudices. We all have them. Bearing witness to suffering is one of the requisite steps towards creating peace on a larger scale. But you have to start one to one, person to person. As one Polish friend put it, ‘real people with real bones meeting real people with real bones.’”
Steinman said Responses to “The Crooked Mirror” from publications like the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Jewish Journal and the Los Angeles Review of Books have been extremely positive.
“What’s most gratifying is when readers tell me they’ve been inspired to look into their own family history,” Steinman wrote. “I’ve gained a great deal by learning my family history, finding my great-grandmother’s grave, getting to know the people who still live in the town where my ancestors lived for hundreds of years. I feel more three-dimensional, in the sense of knowing where I come from. This was not an easy journey. There were many, many uncomfortable moments. But what was more surprising, perhaps, was how familiar it felt to be in Poland.”
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Follow Julia Naman on Twitter: @julia_naman
As published in the Jan. 16 issue of the Pepperdine Graphic.
