Cuban-born, U.S.-based writer and art conservator Rosa Lowinger is the author of “Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile and Repair.” (Scarlett Freund)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Rosa Lowinger knows this from a lifetime of study of how things are made and how they fall apart. An art conservator who specializes in sculpture and historic architectural materials, Lowinger has written a memoir of her Cuban-Jewish family that uses such materials \u2014 marble, concrete, bone, plastic \u2014 as organizing principles. Each chapter of \u201cDwell Time\u201d takes its name and theme from one of those materials to tell how her family came to Cuba and fled after the revolution, and what they found and lost when they settled in Miami. <\/p>\n
She also examines with a conservator\u2019s eye \u2014 appreciatively, but looking for cracks and flaws \u2014 her own shortcomings as a daughter, wife and businesswoman.<\/p>\n
\u201cTerrazzo is robust, but it yields easily to gouges and cracks from settling or expansion,\u201d she writes in a typical passage. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to fix without leaving enormous scars. It reminds me of my family, those Eastern Europeans who left for America and found themselves settled in the tropics, only to be forced to bust out of their foundation within a few decades. It\u2019s true of my profoundly damaged mother, who had the spark of inspiration and presence of mind to know when it was time to flee the country of her birth, but has a way of smashing relationships to smithereens.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three generations of her family, beginning with her paternal grandfather Avrom L\u00f6vinger\u2019s arrival from Cluj in northern Transylvania, lived in Cuba \u2014 which was still taking in Jews when the United States had closed its doors. Her Cuban-born mother, Hilda Peresechensky, spent her youth in an orphanage founded in the early 1920s as a home for poor Ashkenazi Jewish women. She attended a Jewish high school on a scholarship, experiencing periods of poverty that would haunt her the rest of her life. <\/p>\n
The author\u2019s father, Leonardo \u201cLindy\u201d Lowinger, was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1932, and, putting aside his own dreams of being an architect, had a peripatetic career in the eyeglasses business as a salesman and occasional optician. <\/p>\n
The Lowingers were middle-class Jews who by the mid-1950s were well-established members of Cuban society. Most of Cuba\u2019s 20,000 Jews lived in Havana, a city, she writes, \u201cthat boasted Jewish schools, kosher restaurants, and three synagogues.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Castro came to power in 1959, he didn\u2019t target Jews, but businesspeople like Lindy Lowinger saw a dim future under communism. In 1961, after a fraught flight, father, mother and young Rosa \u2014 born in 1956 \u2014 found a one-bedroom apartment in Miami Beach. <\/p>\n
The exodus of most of the country\u2019s Jews \u2014 and the Jewish history of the Cuba they left behind \u2014 has recently been the subject of several new books as a new generation of people with ties to the country make sense of their families\u2019 stories. Aaron Hamburger\u2019s \u201cHotel Cuba,\u201d published in May, examines how his grandmother\u2019s American Jewish identity was forged during a stint in Cuba in the 1920s. \u201cTia Fortuna\u2019s New Home,\u201d a children\u2019s book by Ruth Behar published last year and distributed through PJ Library, tells the story of a contemporary grandmother facing dislocation for a second time after leaving Havana as a young woman. And AJ Sidransky\u2019s \u201cThe Incident at San Miguel,\u201d published in March, is historical fiction based on the real story of two Jewish brothers torn apart by the Cuban revolution \u2014 including one, like Rosa Lowinger\u2019s family, who barely managed to flee.<\/p>\n
As it did for many Cuban exiles, the exodus of Lowinger\u2019s family left scars. She would later tell a friend that her father is \u201cmorose, suspicious, and we always have money problems.\u201d Meanwhile, Hilda was beautiful and resourceful, but took out her frustration and disappointment on her daughter. \u201cMy mother\u2019s punishments were laced with turbulence beyond her control, a violence born of pure rage at the world that had betrayed her, the sort of thing that feels like it will escalate dangerously toward irrevocable tragedy,\u201d writes Lowinger. \u201cThough her behavior appeared sadistic and designed to terrorize, I see now that she was simply drowning in her own suffering.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a generous view of what appears to be child abuse, but the description seems part of Lowinger\u2019s project to understand her family members, like her conservation projects, in all their dimensions. \u201cThere was also active kindness, humor, and generosity in my family,\u201d she writes. \u201cIt was hard to see it, just as it\u2019s hard to notice anything but the dents and cracks and gouges in an otherwise beautiful sculpture.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a child, Lowinger attended Jewish schools and practiced what she calls \u201ca moderate form of Conservative Judaism.\u201d By the time she was a teenager, Lowinger could not wait to leave Miami, and took off for Brandeis University in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n
Lowinger went on to land an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a fellowship at the W.F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and a job at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and later launched a number of consulting businesses. Among her career highlights was the conservation of the Watts Towers, the monumental folk art sculptures in Los Angeles, and relocating a 100-foot-wide mosaic from the fa\u00e7ade of Houston Methodist Hospital.<\/p>\n
Lowinger would eventually marry and embark on a series of professional and personal journeys that would take her to Los Angeles, Israel, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina. And yet, rarely at home in the cities she lived in, she was constantly drawn back to Cuba, mostly by its vivid but crumbling architecture but also by \u201cthe cloying nostalgia of Cuban exiles\u201d that she once tried to escape. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat place where I was born and that my parents left behind is forged from African, indigenous, Spanish, Chinese, French, North American, Ashkenazi, and Sephardic cultures,\u201d she writes. \u201cPeople who were fleeing from and coming toward. Builders, planters, innovators, tinkerers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her mother, still alive and in her 90s at the book\u2019s end, remains a huge presence in Lowinger\u2019s life, a conservation project the author is never going to complete<\/p>\n
\u201cTry as I might, I can never get my mother to understand that conservation is not about repairing what is old. It\u2019s about sustaining all fabric of human endeavor, what people treasure, where we live, and what we honor, no matter when it was made.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDwell Time\u201d\u2019 takes its title from an art conservationists\u2019 term meaning how long it takes for a cleaning product to do its work. Lowinger calls her book a \u201clove story\u201d to the profession of conservation, but it is also a guide to examining the Jewish past, understanding loss and appreciating the ways people and individuals can emerge stronger and sometimes more beautiful after decades of wear and tear. <\/p>\n
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.<\/p>\n
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