We had been farming for fifteen years when I started drawing our daily lives in this place. During those years, as I worked on the land, the land also worked on me. It wove its way into my imagination like the bindweed that stitches our tomato cages to the soil. After a year of drawing, I had filled four sketchbooks with ink and watercolor images, side by side with short written reflections on the day’s doings.

In telling the story of my family’s struggle to survive and thrive on the farm, Landings grapples with the legacy of our cultural divide between art and land, and celebrates the beauty discovered along the way.

At the end of World War II, many Holocaust survivors immigrated to the United States from Europe in search of a new beginning. Most settled in major metropolitan areas, usually in predominantly Jewish communities. However, some settled in smaller cities and rural areas, including in Kentucky, where they encountered an entirely different set of circumstances. This Is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak presents the accounts of nine of these survivors.