Why I Decided to Write my Memoir and Share my Story

The seed for my memoir was planted in 2009 when I first read Primo Levi’s book “The Periodic Table.” I was living in Rome, researching the history of vandalism to art and public places on a fellowship. I had spent three decades working as a conservator of sculpture and buildings, and this was a year that I had to write and think about a topic that was vexing me constantly- why people deliberately damage things of value.

Was there a common thread between unauthorized attacks on works of art? Was there a connection between graffiti and the systematic destruction of monumental Buddhas, synagogues and other places of worship? Primo Levi was an Italian chemist who had written several books about his years in Auschwitz. The Periodic Table used his work as a chemist as an organizing metaphor for telling stories about his Jewish Italian ancestors.

Immediately I recognized that the structure of Levi’s book could be used to write about art conservation, a field which delves into the way materials behave, and how we repair art and buildings. No one had ever done this before. Conservators made occasional appearances in fiction; but most depictions of our work were improbable and hyper-romanticized.

The conservator would be a part-time sleuth or spy, or a dewy-eyed ingenue who had a torrid affair with the curator who’d entrusted her to work on a rare old master canvas. To those of us in the field this was all laughable. But none of us had ever penned a memoir of our own about the way we think, plan, approach a treatment, or manage our own limitations. I’d found the model in Levi’s book. Now all I needed was to tease out the family thread.

My first published book had been a memoir of sorts. Written a few years before my stint in Rome, Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub told the history of 1950s Havana, the time and place where I’d been born, through the lens of its most glamorous performance venue. Though the actual story was centered around Ofelia Fox, the octogenarian widow of Tropicana’s owner, my parents’ voices appeared from time to time in the text. “There never was and never will be a place like Tropicana,” my parents had always said. 

My editor at Harcourt, Tim Bent, suggested that I weave my relationship with Ofelia into the narrative. Her “housemate” Rosa Sanchez liked to hover around us as Ofelia poured martinis and told me stories about dazzling nights of mambo, Celia Cruz, and mobsters in the place known as the “Paradise Under the Stars.” 1950s Cuba’s nightclubs were known as a freewheeling, “anything goes” environments; but Rosa coyly steered my inquiries away from anything that touched upon the fluid sexuality of its denizens.

As we got to the end of the writing, they trusted me to tell the truth about their four decades of love and devotion to each other. “People can be more than one thing,” Ofelia explained sagely. “I just needed to be sure we could trust you.”

Just before I left for the year in Rome, my 25- year marriage fell apart. So did my relationship with my business partner- the third such failure in two decades. When I returned to Los Angeles, I started a new practice which turned into the largest woman-owned conservation firm in the United States, and the only one Latina-owned. 

Then, in 2019, my father died. Six months later, the world went into lockdown. To fill my days that summer of the virus, I began writing a novel about 1950s Havana. A fictionalized version of the Tropicana story, it included a gorgeous showgirl who had been raised in an orphanage under destitute conditions, and a Romanian Jewish immigrant to Cuba who had trained as an art restorer in 1930s Rome.

As the story unfolded, I realized that the characters were stand-ins for my parents. Their fraught backgrounds and tumultuous marriage formed the emotional core of the novel. My father had wanted to study architecture in Cuba, but his Romanian immigrant father refused him. My fictional art restorer had my father’s heart, his personality. But each time he struggled to match a color, or repair a moldy canvas, I was unlocking the mysteries of conservation for the reader.

Unfortunately, not being a novelist, I soon wrote myself into a corner. The novel stagnated. At night, I ‘d call my mother in Miami. This woman, whose mercurial moods had tormented my childhood, was inconsolable over her widowhood and the lockdown: “I am alone, alone! No one cares about me. My life is worse now than when I lived in the orphanage!” I felt her despair, but part of me was glad that the virus kept me from having to get on a plane. “They beat me every day,” she’d wail. “They hated me because I was poor. I was forced to clean 10 long marble tables twice a day after each meal…” 

One morning, when I sat down to try and break through the writer’s block, I wrote the words, “A five-year old’s hand drags a soapy rag across a marble table.” And then, “I, too, am an expert in cleaning marble.” 

Primo Levi came to mind. And my memoir about art conservation and repairing the trauma of my Cuban Jewish family was on its way.

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Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair

What Kirkus describes as a “masterful revelation about life and art imitating each other in maintenance and repair” in a starred review, Dwell Time is an illuminating debut memoir by one of the few prominent Latinas in the field of art and architectural conservation; a moving portrait of a Cuban Jewish family’s intergenerational trauma; and a story about repair and healing that will forever change how you see the objects and places we cherish and how we manage damage and loss.

Dwell Time is a term that measures the amount of time something takes to happen – immigrants waiting at a border, human eyes on a website, the minutes people wait in an airport, and, in art conservation, the time it takes for a chemical to react with a material.

Renowned art conservator Rosa Lowinger spent a difficult childhood in Miami among people whose losses in the Cuban revolution, and earlier by the decimation of family in the Holocaust, clouded all family life.

After moving away to escape the “cloying exile’s nostalgia,” Lowinger discovered the unique field of art conservation, which led her to work in Tel Aviv, Philadelphia, Rome, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Charleston, Marfa, South Dakota, and Port-Au-Prince. Eventually returning to Havana for work, Lowinger suddenly finds herself embarking on a remarkable journey of family repair that begins, as it does in conservation, with an understanding of the origins of damage.

Inspired by and structured similarly to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, this first memoir by a working art conservator is organized by chapters based on the materials Lowinger handles in her thriving private practice – Marble, Limestone, Bronze, Ceramics, Concrete, Silver, Wood, Mosaic, Paint, Aluminum, Terrazzo, Steel, Glass and Plastics. Lowinger offers insider accounts of conservation that form the backbone of her immigrant family’s story of healing that beautifully juxtaposes repair of the material with repair of the personal. Through Lowinger’s relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx.

Dwell Time is an immigrant’s story seen through an entirely new lens, that which connects the material to the personal and helps us see what is possible when one opens one’s heart to another person’s wounds.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American writer and art conservator. The author of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005) and Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (Wolfsonian Museum, 2016), she is the founder and current vice-president of RLA Conservation, LLC, the U.S.’s largest woman-owned materials conservation practice, based in Miami and Los Angeles. A fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and the American Academy in Rome, Rosa writes regularly for popular and academic media about conservation, the arts, and Cuba. She holds an M.A. in art history and conservation from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and divides her time between Los Angeles and Miami. For more information, visit https://rosalowinger.com/.

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