A sixty-nine-year-old woman living in New York City remembered an event in her life as a ten-year-old girl living in a Polish village in 1937. Here is her permanently stitched memory:
After he came to my defense in a fight with my friend, my brother Ruven was afraid to come home, knowing that my mother, who had heard about the fight, had threatened to beat him. He spent the night in the horse barn. In the morning, after my mother left, I fixed him a bowl of borscht and crawled through the kitchen window to bring it to him.
Ruven was the girl’s older brother. The girl’s fight with her friend evidently was serious. So too was her older brother’s intervention and her mother’s response. The girl probably fought physically with her friend. Her older brother probably physically intervened on her side and perhaps even did some minor physical harm to her friend.
The moral universe of those events differs significantly from that of many children in New York today. In that Polish village, the threat of police action and state-directed punishment was less relevant to interpersonal relations. Children then did not have continuous adult supervision. Girls and boys were physically strong and physically active. Parents physically chastised children within normal bounds. But an older boy physically fighting with a younger girl who was his ten-year-old sister’s friend — that would be gravely forbidden. For the younger sister in these circumstances, the older brother’s physical intervention would be extraordinarily heroic.
The sixty-nine-year-old woman living in New York City remembered a later memory. After catastrophic human violence had destroyed her earlier life and inscribed horrors in her mind, she remembered her punished brother and that borscht:
When I returned to my house after the war and found a Polish family living there, I walked into the kitchen and stood in front of the window with my eyes closed, wanting to relive the feeling of that time when I sat close to my brother and watched him eat.
How could that specific memory, after a massive, general catastrophe, be remembered? How can a massive, general catastrophe be remembered in all its specific details? The best answer is the living experience of memory connecting particular, personal events to the deep, fear-inspiring nature of humanity and the world.
Esther Nisenthal Krinitz’s sublime fabrics of memory unforgettably remember the Holocaust in details. She was that ten-year-old girl fighting with her friend. She was a Jewish girl living in the Polish village of Mniszek. The Nazi’s program to exterminate the Jews put to death her older brother, two of her three sisters, her parents, her grandparents, and almost all the Jews in Mniszek and millions of Jews across Europe. Only Esther and one of her sisters escaped and eventually settled in the U.S. Beginning in 1977 at age 50 and working for about two decades, Esther created thirty-six needlework and collage fabrics showing her experiences growing up in Poland and living through the Nazi horrors. These fabrics are unsentimental representations of specific, personal events and circumstances. Esther made these fabrics to pass on her memories to her children.
Esther’s fabrics of memory have great, universal significance and deserve to be preserved forever and within everyone. Fortunately, Esther’s children are generously sharing her memories. Ester’s fabrics are on display at the Smithsonian’s Ripley Center in Washington, DC, through January 29, 2012. In addition, the Art & Remembrance website offers images of the fabrics, as well as an exhibit brochure and a teacher’s guide to the exhibit. If you can get to the Ripley Center to see the actual fabrics, go. Large and richly textured, Esther Nisenthal Krinitz’s fabrics of memory are stunningly memorable.