October 15, 2023
In this beautifully conceived memoir about generational trauma by a Jewish Cuban American art conservator, the author uses the materials she repairs in her work (marble, bronze, wood, etc.) as frames for excavating her family's past. Marble, for instance, connects the childhood years Lowinger's mother spent living in a Jewish orphanage in Old Havana, where she was tasked with scrubbing clean the long marble dining tables, to when Lowinger, given her interest in delving into family history, was invited to lead a workshop on marble restoration and ended up studying the headstones that mark the graves of her grandmothers and other Cuban Jews. Lowinger also uses concepts and terminology from conservation to consider her relatives and analyze their interpersonal dynamics. For example, she introduces ""inherent vice,"" "a term for works of art that come with intrinsic defects" (like a painting so heavy with paint that the canvas won't hold it), to reflect on her mother and grandfather's relationship. This technique prompts insightful reflection and offers a fresh take on how art can help us make sense of life.
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September 1, 2023
An art conservator's personal and professional memoir. From the coasts of Cuba to Israel's Mediterranean shores, Lowinger, the author of Tropicana Nights, interweaves her life story with insights drawn from her career in art conservation and restoration. Fleeing rising antisemitic sentiment in Eastern Europe and landing somewhat accidentally in Cuba, the author's family became immigrants twice over when they left their successful dry-goods stores and Fidel Castro's communist autocracy for Miami. "We'd lost an island, but gained America," she writes. "Refugees around the world were clamoring to get into this amazing country." Though her parents saw some financial success in their new country and Lowinger herself rose from a small South Beach apartment to build a successful art restoration practice, the generational weight of dreams foregone, marital tensions, and homelands left behind, wormed indelibly into the family. Undercurrents of violent tempers, indignation, and self-doubt hum throughout the text, with the author's simple, straightforward prose and humble anecdotes belying her impressive professional stature, particularly as one of the few Latinas in the field. Lowinger offers detailed but approachable explanations of materials and techniques used in her work as metaphors (some more cohesive than others) for life's ups and downs, from personal experiences of marriage and divorce to societal reckonings with racial, political, or economic injustice. As she acquired the skills, experience, and judgment required to lead prolific restoration projects, she began to understand, forgive, and love the places and people she came from, both physically and psychologically. Willing to immerse herself in the complexities and contradictions that mark Cuba, her family, and herself, without rushing to erase them, the author leaves readers with respect for the hazy, ever-moving line between remedy and disease and between making something better and destroying it completely, in life as well as in art. A masterful revelation about life and art imitating each other in maintenance and repair.
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