The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation

“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

Louise Steinman is curator of the award-winning ALOUD at Central Library literary series at the Los Angeles Public Library. Her work appears frequently in “The Los Angeles Times “and “L.A. Weekly, “and has appeared in syndication in “The New York Times “and other publications.

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