Heimlich Unheimlich (or, literally, Homely Unhomely) is a multimedia book that incorporates poetry, art, and photographs to tell the stories of two childhoods. It is a collaboration between artists Hazel Smith and Sieglinde Karl-Spence, and their personal stories are reflected in the lives of the main characters.
Hessian is a German girl born toward the end of the Second World War whose father fought in the Germany army. Muslin is born into a Jewish family in England after the war. Both families end up moving to Australia. The girls have different ghosts to contend with, but they also have a lot in common. They are both displaced refugees, dealing with the intergenerational trauma of being the children of Holocaust survivors.
In the first poem, “Archive of the Evergreen,” Muslin becomes aware of her loss:” a family tree is a set of tags/ it does not disclose/the lives of the people to whom the names belong/what they were like/the homes from which they were torn.”
The poem ends on a note of redemption when we find out that Muslin’s grandfather wrote a memoir. He couldn’t get it published in his day, but now it’s available online, so the world can find out who he was.
In the poem “From Rubble to Reliving,” the artists say that “memory is a collage not a video recorder.” All we have to rely on are photos, dreams, stories, and, sadly, the resurgence of racism that pops up in the news. At the end of the day, it becomes hard to determine the place where we belong, because that place is but a collage of our past experiences:
she belongs in Australia
belongs in Germany
belongs in England
belonging has always
been a faithless bedfellow
In “The White Rose,” Hessian confronts the accusations that get hurled at her family. Like many people with her background, she wants to hide the fact that she’s German, but her father is still proud of their heritage. Her parents dress her up for school in a German apron, and her classmates laugh at her: “she would tear the apron off/when he found out she had discarded it/her father would beat her.”
In the final poem, “Gathering,” the artists put images of their families together and honor their differences and similarities. In the end, they say, we try to find out as much as we can about our lives, but there will always be something we do not know: “What we cannot apprehend eludes us.”
At its best, the book’s words, images, and photographs move together in a kaleidoscopic way. All of the elements seem to inform and support each other, as we watch these different families come to life and deal with their unique stories — stories that ultimately have more in common than at first meets the eye.
Stewart Florsheim’s poetry has been widely published in magazines and anthologies. He was the editor of Ghosts of the Holocaust, an anthology of poetry by children of Holocaust survivors (Wayne State University Press, 1989). He wrote the poetry chapbook, The Girl Eating Oysters (2River, 2004). In 2005, Stewart won the Blue Light Book Award for The Short Fall From Grace (Blue Light Press, 2006). His collection, A Split Second of Light, was published by Blue Light Press in 2011 and received an Honorable Mention in the San Francisco Book Festival, honoring the best books published in the Spring of 2011. Stewart’s new collection, Amusing the Angels, won the Blue Light Book Award in 2022.
