Lee Krasner (3 page)

As an adult, Krasner remembered that when she was about five
years old, she was alone in their home's dark hall when something that was “half man, half beast” seemed to vault the banister and land on the floor by her side. She cried out—a childhood enigma that resurfaced during psychoanalysis and made its way into a painting.
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Though we know that the adult Krasner remained traumatized by this early experience, she did not elaborate on what sort of monster she experienced. Though she picked up her mother's fears and superstitions, Krasner longed to be strong like her legendary great-aunt and adopted that persona whenever she could.

Joseph's religious books with their elaborate decorations and Hebrew script also fascinated little Lena. There were also newspapers in Yiddish, a Germanic vernacular language that utilized Hebrew letters. Lena started Hebrew school when she was about five years old, but instruction focused on shaping letters instead of thoughts: “I learned to write but I couldn't read it…. Visually I loved it. I didn't know what it meant. What they're teaching, they will say—they'll give you the alphabet, identify it—I could follow that to a certain point. What I couldn't follow was actually reading. I was slow there, if you will. So that visually I could stay with it.”
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At home her parents spoke Yiddish and Russian, but her older siblings also spoke English, which she learned at school. She recalled later that she also spoke “a bit of Yiddish, but if [her parents and elder siblings] went off and spoke real fast [she] couldn't even get that.”
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By her own admission, languages were not her forte, and that kept her out of some of the family's interaction.

Through memorization, she learned to recite the daily morning prayer in Hebrew when she got up each day, though she never understood what it meant until much later in life. “Well I didn't know what I was saying; I had to say it or God would strike me dead.”
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She later referred to this prayer as “my own shattering experience,” explaining that when she finally “read a translation of the Prayer, which is indeed a beautiful prayer in every sense except
for the closing of it; it said, if you are a male you say, ‘Thank You, O Lord, for creating me in Your image' and if you are a woman you say, ‘Thank You, O Lord, for creating me as You saw fit.'”
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In many ways, the Krasner family adhered to traditional Jewish mores. They shared their modest quarters at 373 Sackman Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with Anna's younger brother, William Weiss, who was still not married and who worked as an operator in a clothing factory.
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The eldest sister, Edith, did the family cooking, kept the woodstove stoked, and took charge of the younger siblings. Anna dominated the household and enforced Jewish ritual observance. She never learned to read or write in English and remained fearful and superstitious.
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Esther later told her grandson stories of their arduous childhood.
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Lee confirmed her sister's memories: “Yes, we were very poor. Everyone had to work. Every penny had to be dealt with,” pointing out that her mother herself had been an orphan.
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“I was brought up to be independent,” she recalled.
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Continuing the mores of the shtetl, the Krasner parents expected the children's obedience and respect, as declared in the fifth commandment, “Honor thy Father and thy Mother.”
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Yet Lee somehow managed to deviate from the family customs without causing too much friction.

Although many women of Anna's background did not read, she may have suffered from what is now called dyslexia and passed on this genetic trait to her next to youngest daughter. For Anna, modernity and secularism produced a kind of culture shock; like many other Jewish mothers, she favored her only son over her daughters.

Most of the Krasners' neighbors in Brownsville were like them—predominantly poor Jewish immigrants of East European origin, some relocated from Manhattan's congested Lower East Side. The Fulton Street El, the elevated railway's extension in 1889, had eased access to Manhattan, where Lena's uncle and many of their neighbors worked in the garment industry. The neighbor
hood teemed with activity and Yiddish was usually the language heard in the shops and the open-air market where pushcarts filled the streets.

Sometimes the old world did not seem so far away because its ancient customs pervaded daily life. Many Orthodox synagogues drew the pious. One of the oldest, Beth Hamidrash Hagodal, founded in 1889, was also on Sackman Street, just a short walk down from the Krasners' first home. Young Jewish boys learned Orthodox traditions and rituals at
Cheders,
the schools where they went, but girls were not eligible to attend the same classes. Instead, they attended their own separate Hebrew school, where they were taught only enough mechanical reading skills to let them pray (even if they didn't understand what they were saying).
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Lena liked the forms of the Hebrew letters: “When I was very young, I had to study Hebrew, and I had to learn to write in Hebrew.”
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She was conscientious about religious practice: “I went to services at the synagogue, partly because it was expected of me. But there must have been something beyond, because I wasn't forced to go, and my younger sister did not.”
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Krasner later reflected that some part of her must have responded to her religion. “I fasted [on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement]. I didn't shortcut. I was religious. I observed.”
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That “something” might have been her strong identification with her adored father; yet she resented being told to go upstairs in the synagogue, which segregated the men from the women.

Her mother had little time to consider the merit of Jewish customs. At the age of thirty, in 1910, she gave birth to her seventh and last child—Lena's younger sister, Ruth (whose Yiddish name was Udel), when Lena was two years old. Lena soon found herself displaced from the role of the large family's beloved baby, and she began to distinguish herself from the more adorable Ruth by demonstrating strong intelligence and quick wit, attributes that were not especially admired in Jewish girls. An intense rivalry developed between Lena and Ruth, who shared a bed with their
older sister Rose, as they vied for attention from their parents and older siblings.

That her older siblings were European-born and spoke both Yiddish and Russian practically made the two youngest girls like a different family. Although Krasner later claimed that her family members also spoke Hebrew, this seems unlikely.
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Some rabbis might even have objected to speaking Hebrew on ideological (religious) grounds because Hebrew was
lashon kodesh
—a holy language—only for prayer and study. Lena and Ruth were so eager to be American that they hardly bothered to speak Yiddish or Russian.

The two girls posed on their front stoop for a photograph when they were about seven and five, wearing identical coats and boots as well as short, cropped straight hair. In the photograph, Lena's arm is around Ruth's shoulder and she smiles; Ruth's hand is on Lena's knee, but she appears fearful and distrustful of the photographer.

By the time Lena entered elementary school at Brooklyn's P.S. 72, the family had moved about two miles away to a clapboard row house on Jerome Street in East New York, on central Brooklyn's eastern edge, adjacent to, yet different from, the much more crowded Brownsville.
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East New York was originally called Oostwout by the Dutch.
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This neighborhood became known as the New Lots, a part of the town of Flatbush. Laid out in 1835 to 1836, East New York was originally conceived as a rival to New York City. Nevertheless its development progressed rather slowly until the Williamsburg Bridge opened in 1903. Even so it continued to feel more rural than Brownsville.

Krasner recalled East New York as “rural. Not a city,” and she quickly began to delight in the new natural surroundings: “Where I lived there were beautiful flowers. I loved it. A backyard with irises. My fleurs-de-lis—my favorite flower. And wild daisies. Bridal veil. And lilac. And roses on the fences, and in all the back yards.”
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This love of nature would stay with Krasner her entire
life. She later commented: “There's nothing that I can think of, including spirit, that I conceive away from nature. How shall I sense it? This is the all-over, if you will, my God.”
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Lena relished walking to school “through the lots filled with buttercups. There was a farm with a pail and cows. Smells. Warm milk in the bucket. I hated the taste, but for Mother and the family it was a treat. So I would go through the fields to get there.”
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At least some of the cows belonged to a neighbor, who housed them in his stable at the corner of New Lots Road and Hendrix Street, not far from Lena's home and school. Years earlier, the school's principal had protested about the cows to the New Lots Board of Trade organization, claiming that the cows clogged the sewers and threatened the schoolhouse's sanitation. But the cows' owner refused to move his cows, insisting that he had been there first, before real estate development spilled over from Brownsville.
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To Lena's parents, this kind of rural bickering made the area feel more like the shtetl in the woods where they grew up. Looking back fondly on her neighborhood, Krasner recalled it having old clapboard houses, “traditional saltboxes.” She remembered “a little wooden bridge,” the neighbors' vegetable gardens, and chestnut trees, the blooms of which thrilled her.
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Lena's school was on New Lots Avenue between Schenck and Livonia Avenues, also close to her house.
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Her father ran a fish, vegetable, and fruit stand at the Blake Avenue Market nearby. According to the United States Census for 1910, he owned a retail store and was classified as a “fish monger.” That meant he had to get up at dawn and travel to Manhattan's wholesale market, buy fish—carp, pike, and whitefish—packed in heavy wooden crates chilled by ice, haul it by horse and wagon to the small stall at the market, and try to sell out by late afternoon before all the ice melted and the fish spoiled.
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Managing the business left little time for the Krasner parents to attend to their children, and with time and money in short supply, Anna and Joseph struggled to provide their children with the basic necessities.

At school Krasner came into contact with new ideas and the ideal of personal goals and dreams. This differed from what she saw at home, where her mother was a model of stoicism and self-sacrifice for her family. Lena described her mother, exhausted from the family business, as “loving but not demonstrative. She would back what I wanted.”
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The contrast between her new values and those of her family would remain a source of inner tension for much of her life.

P.S. 72 had about 1,500 students in classes from kindergarten through eighth grade.
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There were more girls than boys in Lena's class, presumably because so many of the boys attended private cheders. Though the school introduced Lena to the idea of art, she later said that she did not yet draw.
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Her sister Ruth recalled, however, that Lena found and copied fashion advertisements in the newspaper: “She used to draw clothed women figures all the time. We were all aware of that—how marvelous it was to be able to put her pencil to paper and get a figure.”
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It was one of the few nice things Ruth ever recollected about Lee.

Lena also began going to the library to look at the art in books, such as the illustrations in her favorite fairy tales.
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Krasner recalled that the only art in their home hung in the parlor. It was a print that depicted Columbus receiving jewels from Queen Isabella. The Brooklyn Museum, though already established, was too far for her to venture alone, and apparently no one in the family or at school took her there.

At the same time, East New York also offered a station on the Long Island Railroad's Manhattan Beach Branch, which ran from Long Island City in Queens to Manhattan Beach, the part of Coney Island east of Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn. The route had been built in the nineteenth century originally as one of several summer beach railways. There was, however, no subway service until 1922, miraculously finished just in time to fulfill Lena's desire to travel to Manhattan for high school.

Krasner enjoyed her neighborhood—there was still a village
atmosphere, even in Brooklyn. She knew all her neighbors and felt very much at home. Her friends were diverse, like the neighborhood: Sissy (Adelaide) Rhodes, who lived next door was a mulatto; Margaret Williams was French and Margaret Lehmann was German.
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As Lena was growing up, Brownsville welcomed radical social movements and philosophies including anarchism, socialism, and communism. There also were secularists and Zionists and leftist-oriented schools. Many different types of candidates ran for local elections. Some mounted wooden soapboxes on street corners or in the nearest park to deliver speeches against capitalism to whoever would listen. The district elected socialists to the New York State Assembly from 1915 to 1921.

During this time, women's activism became important and accepted in her immigrant community.
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Women initiated protest movements, starting with the kosher meat boycott of 1902, in which 20,000 Jewish women on the Lower East Side broke into kosher butcher shops and rendered the meat inedible to protest rising prices. Many women led rent strikes and participated in the garment strike of 1909, which lasted for fourteen weeks and won for workers improved wages, working conditions, and hours.

Additionally the women's suffrage movement was growing, and it gained more support from Jewish immigrant groups than from any others in the state elections of 1915 and 1917.
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Jewish women worked hard to get out the vote. Many of the immigrants had already been radicalized after fleeing oppression in Eastern Europe. Although the historian Daniel Bell has argued that “European enthusiasms were tempered” after immigrants accommodated to their new environment in America, it appears that the immigrants' American-born children often not only acquired an instinct for radical politics but also their parents' sense of social justice.
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