Tapestry

About the Book

TAPESTRY

Comments on an uncommon life

This really is a collection of bits and pieces written during three or four decades in the course of different centuries on a couple of continents. I haven't tried to be particularly kind or politically correct. On the other hand, I have carefully avoided mention of a number of people, places and things best buried in a deep pit somewhere out back This is about me. It's far less a chronicle of how it was, than how I felt about how it was. With all the warts. I don't come out smelling like roses. I didn't really mean to. Mostly I'm trying to chronicle a lost world, write a history of a time, a place which, like Tartessos, sank long ago beneath the seas. There are wonderful days and days of misery. Pain and pleasure intermingled. The human mind, the soul, unaffected by mankind’s manufacturing genius. We learn a lot. Do we really? Isn’t it all the same? We give up some things in favor of others. It’s all a trade-off. It’s not all wonderful. It’s not all a waste. Best not to spend too much time in deciding which to discard, which to keep. There’s only one life. You could call it a memoir, you could call it a fairy tale. Either way you wouldn't be far off the mark. It's the story of a young girl with straight, lank blond hair who leaves her childhood home in Chicago's outskirts of the 30’s, and finds adventure and a life as one of New York's first women filmmakers of the 50's, as well as a wife and mother of three, then tops it off with thirty years as an expatriate raising her children on the Spanish Mediterranean shore, before returning to America to spend her older age in, of all places, Aspen, Colorado. It's a mélange of prose and poetry, a glimpse of the rich and famous, the often outrageous. It's a love story (but a far cry from the woman's romance category), of a woman who makes her own rules in searching for her ego, in searching for a fuller life for herself and her family. The author's early milieu was the Depression, World War II and Greenwich Village of the 50’s. It covers the art scene, the film people, the Eurotrash. It deals in ego, in archeology, architecture, culture and taste; in off-beat travels, in the very unconventional education of the children and their parents. It takes you from the back rooms of Seventh Ave. designers to the remotest Spanish mountain village, from glittering corridas and country fairs to the earliest human endeavors—Palaeolithic cave art. Home base for this American family's three decades in Spain is a huge Andalusian l5th Century Cortijo, entirely rebuilt by them without architect or engineer, using only the treasures of Sephardic Cordoba, of Moorish Granada, of Medieval Spain to reconstruct their dream house with a bit of Iberian, Phoenician, Roman and Vizigoth thrown in. It is a home for myriad birds of prey, five-in-hand carriages, a month-long family horse trip across Spain to run with the bulls in Pamplona. A home of love and living, of life and death. It has something for everyone.

About the Author

REFLECTIONS, through personal essays, poetry, and photos, pays homage to various colorful characters and places that have been woven into the fabric of my life. What began in 1924 as an ordinary life in the American Midwest has gone in unexpected directions, taking me first to New York, where my husband Gino and I established ourselves as respected filmmakers, and then to Andalusia, where we stayed for thirty years, traveling throughout the country, following the corridas, meeting people of many nations, the famed and the feckless. We arrived in Spain in 1962 with six hundred bucks to our name, not knowing where or how we would live. We thrived, built our home and filled it with children, dogs, cats, horses, birds, and countless visiting friends. In 1982, having unearthed or acquired some five thousand significant artifacts dating from Neolithic times to the fifteenth century, and 400 prime pieces of Spanish antiquities, we started Museo Hollander. Nearly twenty years ago, Gino and I donated our museum to the Spanish government and began our reentry into life in the States. Instead of returning to the hectic pace of Manhattan, we opted for the sylvan beauties of Aspen, Colorado—quiet and peace for me and snow-capped magnificent wilderness adventure for Gino. I’ve had more than my share of careers, among them, high school teacher, filmmaker, museum designer and curator, hotel decorator, and poet. These days, Gino paints; I write; our children and grandchildren visit from around the globe. And we pretend that life will go on forever.