“I’d grown up with the phrase ‘Never forget’ imprinted on my psyche. Its corollary was more elusive. Was it possible to remember—at least to recall—a world that existed before the calamity?”

A lyrical memoir chronicling my immersion in the exhilarating, discomforting, sometimes surreal and ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation. What happens when we look at our entwined history together?

Recent praise for The Souvenir from author Alexander Nemerov, distinguished scholar of American culture, author, Summoning Pearl Harbor

Dear Louise,

With time at last this summer to catch up on my reading, I’ve read The Souvenir and come away very moved. The blending of times, as you go back and forth between your father’s wartime letters and your own experiences of finding and reading and acting on them, as well as between your visits to Suibara and the experiences of Yoshio Shimizu, achieve what no linear history could: a blending of past and present, a “haunting” requisite to the material: in and of the pathologies, damage, and regret, the inexplicable sadness such as your father’s, yet not the same as those things either.

Rather, in creating a story you make, how to say it, a return of the swans: not a rebirth or a redemption but some kindling of life where there might have been none, or none recoverable. So it is that your act of writing, for me, is as powerful an act of restitution as the return of the flag itself.

Among my favorite scenes—favorite because in them the atmosphere I describe above seems most thick for me—I was so struck by the stories of your father’s long long silence in Los Angeles, so struck by the way you conveyed that silence as a war, indeed a “home front,” a Best Years of Our Lives lasting forty-four years. For me, the reality tumbling into the illusion of Frederic March acting the soldier is so complex, a high point of the book

And I was so touched by the trip up to Balete Pass. It reads like a Pilgrim’s Progress except without the promise of heavenly reward. I guess that is what is most noble about your book for me: that you pursued the journey to these dangerous places, to these uncertain places, without any certainty about what you were doing. The highway grew beneath you as you moved. Had you not ventured, no path would have appeared. Even the taxi-drivers would never have existed.

And that path—that Pass—Passover—passing—passing strange—is a universal in your book: the experience of having gone to the ambiguous “high ground,” and in descending to have risen absent of any mountain.

Erica Clark, Louise Steinman, Joseph Giovannini, Alma Ruiz

Edited by Laurie Winer and Alma Ruiz

Designed by Brad Bartlett

240 pages, 150 black-and-white and color illustrations

Published by the Sam Francis Foundation, California

October 2022

ISBN 978-1-7339663-2-0

Printed in Italy by O.G.M. SpA

Produced in a limited edition of 1,000

Led by Richard Koshalek, from 1980-1982 MOCA’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator, and from 1983-1999 the Museum’s Director, the book is conceived as a cultural and educational initiative, and not as a commercial product: a resource to share with cultural, civic, and educational institutions, artists, students, scholars, art professionals, and trustees and philanthropists.

The book, whose research and execution took four years to complete, details the first 20 years of MOCA’s founding and emergence as an international arts institution. Documenting the complex collaborative efforts required to bring a major new cultural institution into being, and to serve as a potential guide to others seeking to create new arts institutions.

All copies will be distributed nationally and internationally to museums, art schools, and libraries; public and private universities and colleges with museum- and curatorial-studies programs; art professionals; art foundations and galleries involved in the making of the .

from THE QUESTIONS WE ASK

“MOCA reflected Los Angeles, that something brash could happen.” - Richard Koshalek

In July of 1980, Richard Koshalek, the thirty-six-year-old director of the Hudson River Museum, boarded Metro North at Grand Central Station. He settled into his window seat, unfolded his New York Times and opened to the arts section. A headline caught his eye: “Los Angeles Putting Focus on Modern Art.” The piece heralded the building of a new institution to be named the Museum of Contemporary Art. Out of curiosity, Koshalek scanned the piece and was dumbfounded to see his own name listed as one of the leading contenders for the position of director. “I just thought, ‘Well, there’s some mistake here.’"

This hands-on guidebook to creating and understanding performance pieces offers a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process involved in transforming personal stories to theater.

from ONE: The Body AS HOME

Road to Recovery

At the time I am writing this chapter, I am one year from a car accident which nearly claimed my life, and which seriously injured my body. The road to recovery has taught me many lessons not dissimilar from those I learned from creating performance. Both experiences have to do with “making whole”—bringing together bone, bringing together the disparate experiences and sensations of one’s life.

Edited by David Kipen

Dispatches from a land of extremes, by writers and movie stars, natives and visitors, activists and pioneers, and more.

California has always been, literally, a place to write home about. Renowned figures and iconoclasts; politicians, actors, and artists; the world-famous and the not-so-much—all have contributed their voices to the patchwork of the state. With this book, cultural historian and California scholar David Kipen reveals this long-storied place through its diaries and letters, and gives readers a highly anticipated follow up to his book Dear Los Angeles.

Running from January 1 through December 31, leaping across decades and centuries, Dear California reflects on the state's shifting landscapes and the notion of place. Entries talk across the centuries, from indigenous stories told before the Spanish arrived on the Pacific coast through to present-day tweets, blogs, and other ephemera. The collected voices show how far we've wandered—and how far we still have to go in chasing the elusive California dream.

This is a book for readers who love California—and for anyone who simply treasures flavorful writing. Weaving together the personal, the insightful, the impressionistic, the lewd, and the hysterically funny, Dear California presents collected writings essential to understanding the diversity, antagonisms, and abiding promise of the Golden State.

Redwood Press (Stanford University)
October 2023

Hardcover ISBN: 9781503614697
Ebook ISBN: 9781503637054

A limited edition, crowdsourced nightmare anthology, edited by Louise Steinman with illustrations by Beth Thielen.

Benefit edition to support Swingleft's grassroots efforts to take back the House in 2018