Hell of a View
The last time I went to San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, it was to attend a Yom Ha’atzmaut (independence day) party hosted by the Israeli consulate. I’d been invited by the consular press officer at the time, a sarcastic, American who was always interested in hooking me up with offbeat Israeli filmmakers and novelists that the government thought would be appreciated by the idiosyncratic, bohemian sensibilities of local Jewry.
Since the apartment we’re subletting is only six blocks away, I walked over to the museum yesterday, only to stumble upon this rather intense display. A memorial to Jews who died in the Holocaust, it points north, slightly west of the Marin Headlands, out towards the Pacific Ocean. On the other side of this pile of ceramic corpses stands a ghostlike mannequin, staring through a well-worn fence made of wood and barbed wire.