n Conversations with Rzeszow, I am engaged in a dialogue between the familiar and a place I knew initially only through fragmentary stories, silence and the efforts of my own imagination. Rzeszow is a small city in southeastern Poland, where my father grew up within an extensive Jewish community that was destroyed in World War II. As a child I was told little about the fate of my father’s family; in recent years I have felt the need to know more. The dialogue in the work involves both images and text. There are several voices: my own, recounting and questioning my perceptions, and quotes from Primo Levi and Francine Prose, more knowledgeable sources, who recount and question theirs. Some of the drawings are about places in Poland: the endless fields of barrack chimneys I saw at Birkenau, a mass grave in the woods near Rzeszow. Others are places I know more intimately: a Minneapolis bird sanctuary, a summer home in upstate New York. The metaphor of place becomes means to explore many kinds of knowing: one’s own direct experience and its limitations, what can be intuited, what is possible to learn at a distance and what cannot, finally, be understood.