Lineage

after Art & Remembrance by Esther Nisenthal Krinitz (1927-2001)
at the Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland 

In this gallery, Mother, your memory lingers along
with your Noah’s Ark embroidery kit framed for my

childhood wall now hanging in my office all these decades
later. Your playful pairs of animals parading down a garden

path and you laughed away its artistry—I just filled in
the lines. How you would have revered this woman’s

embroidered atlas of survival in a life your emigrant parents
escaped just in time. Esther’s threads bear the needle’s prayer

fired through the eyes of woman’s art of fiber. What is a text
before it’s a text? Her hands, pollinators taking bits from

here and there to make something new, story cloths for
the one stitch at a time, each trembling to call on memory.

Threads pulled in, then out, to embed the shudder and spar
of moments lived. Mniszek, her shtetl, idyllic in simplicity.

Yes, those are the horses and wagons and thatched roofs
and the love of soil with chickens and geese everywhere.

This is a story of loops, faith in the telling; bravery of tender
pigtails whose childhood vanished when the black-on-black

clouds entered and the war invaded. Jewish boys digging tank
trenches, shot in the woods, her roll calls of neighbors in wagons

bound for death camps, as she and her sister hid in fields and
forests or masqueraded in other villages as Catholic farm girls.

After liberation she ached for signs of what happened to her family.
At Maidanek she found piles of dust-covered shoes and rows of

giant cabbages thriving in fields made rich with human ashes.
In her final panel, June 10, 1949, the Statue of Liberty reaches

above her new family with a chorus of sea gulls circling. What lives
outside that freeze-framed sky we call hope, is a reminder through the

politics in textile—for today’s Mother of Exiles stands weary as the
hinges of her golden doors corrode in the squalls of intoxicated power.