Still Life with Remorse

Starred review from November 18, 2024
Artist Kalman (Women Holding Things) poignantly examines loss, death, and regret in this idiosyncratic collage of vignettes rendered in verse and still life paintings. Her father and uncles flee to Palestine in 1939 from Belarus, where their parents are eventually killed in the Holocaust. In the following years, her family faces dislocation and regret: her sister, who was born in Tel Aviv with severe asthma, is sent to grow up apart from the family in Jerusalem, where the climate was supposedly healthier (“We believed it was /for her well being. /But no no no. /What remorse /we feel to this day”). After the family moves to America, her father learns by telegram that his younger brother had shot himself (“He walked wildly up and down /the living room holding the telegraph in his hand... /I don’t remember anyone going to comfort him”). Each vignette is paired with a still life of furniture, fruit, and other everyday objects, where the pointed absence of the human form calls attention to an eerie culture of silence around the Holocaust. Though these tokens of daily life are portrayed as masking deep remorse, the author’s art and writing highlight the unexpected links between sorrow and creativity. The account is also unexpectedly witty in places (the author’s asthmatic sister was sent to what she describes as a “Hasidic-Dickensian orphanage”). It’s a powerful exploration of the human condition. Illus.