Anna Krassner was a contentious, pragmatic, grim-faced woman a decade younger than her husband, but careworn far beyond her years. “She was all business,” recalls one of her daughters. If she was hard on her children, it was because she herself had missed childhood. Married at eleven, she had borne five children before turning twenty. One had died, leaving three daughters—Edith, Esther, and Rose—and a son, Anna’s pride, Izzy (later called Irving). The older sisters helped at the market, lifting heavy loads of pike, carp, and whitefish, and “doing all the things that should have been done by the man in the family.” Irving stayed home with Anna and helped plan the family finances. Unlike her taciturn husband, Anna was short-tempered and confrontational. She never punished by “hitting,” but instead “would lose her temper with her mouth,” according to daughter Ruth, often reducing her children to tears with barrages of verbal abuse. On those rare occasions when she sought escape from the burdens of the temporal world, she turned not only to religion but, like many shtetl women, to mysticism: the world of spirits and curses and supernatural powers. Her motherin-law in Russia, Pesa Krassner, had been a psychic and fortune-teller, and she passed the same fears and superstitions on to her children. At the sound of thunder—considered an especially potent ill omen—she and her daughters would run to the kitchen stove and clutch each other in sheer terror until the storm passed.
The Krassners, about 1908; Lena (Lenore) on her father’s knee, Izzy (Irving) standing center.
This was the family into which Lena Krassner was born on October 27, 1908. It was, from the beginning, a family already in decline and disarray: a distant and often absent father; a moody, shrewish mother who pined loudly and often for her home in Russia; older sisters approaching marriageable age; and a usurpative son deeply involved in an Oedipal triangle. It was also a closed, complete unit, hostile to newcomers, even by blood, with its roots thousands of miles away. “Any member of the family,” Lee later complained, “could always break out in a language I couldn’t understand”—a cacophony of Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish with only “a smattering of English.” Outsiders called her Lenore, but the family always used her Yiddish name, Lena. It was, she said, “like living in some litttle ghetto back in Stalingrad or somewhere.” Or like living with a family of strangers. Years later, she described her childhood self as “an oddball” and “an outcast,” and admitted that her earliest memory was of a burning desire to leave home.
When Lenore was three, another child was born. Her Yiddish name was Udel (which, when mangled by her first grade teacher, became “Adele”), but outside the family she would be known as Ruth. Although constant companions, the two youngest sisters were never intimate. In a picture taken while both were in elementary school, they pose on the front steps of the Jerome Street house wearing identical Sabbath coats, their hair cut in identical pageboys. Ruth’s hand rests lightly on Lee’s knee; Lee’s arm reaches behind her sister’s shoulders in a feint of possessiveness. Lee knows enough to smile; Ruth stares uncomfortably into the camera, obviously unused to her older sister’s solicitude. “I didn’t look up to her,” Ruth recalls. “She had no influence on me and I had none on her. We had nothing in common.”
In fact, Ruth left more of a mark than she knew. She was not only Anna’s favorite, and therefore exempt from the “work-until-you-drop” rules imposed on her older sisters, she was also the prettiest in the family. Not that any of Joseph and Anna Krassner’s other children were attractive. Most had inherited either their father’s jutting chin and protruding eyes or their mother’s long nose and shallow brow. Lee, unfortunately, had inherited both. Ruth, on the other hand, looked hardly like a Krassner at all, and relatives came from far away to admire her and vie for the privilege of showing her off or taking her on weekend trips—trips on which Lee was never invited.
Udel (Ruth) and Lena, about 1916
Jealous of her baby sister, alienated from the rest of the family, and desperate for attention, Lee turned inward. “From an early age,” comments John Bernard Myers, a friend in later years, “Lee had to invent a life for herself.” Like Jackson, she created a fantasy world to compensate for the inadequacies of the real one. Dressed up in her Sabbath clothes, to which she always added a special touch like a bow or a sash, she would promenade down the dilapidated street, stopping at each house to pay “a social call.” Because East New York, along with neighboring Brownsville and New Lots, was a way station for Jews from all over Europe, Jerome Street offered a world’s fair of exotic cultures to stimulate a little girl’s imagination. A German family, the Lehmans, lived on one side; a French family, the Granvilles, on the other. “There were always wonderful odors of strange food in the air,” Lee recalled years later, “different foods, different languages, different cultures. It was a very European atmosphere. It made me feel very grown up.”
As both the only son and, in his father’s absence, the only male, Irving dominated the Krassner family. Indeed, he terrorized it. In close alliance with Anna, the source of all domestic authority—“She almost treated him like he was her husband,” Ruth recalls—Irving meted out physical punishment with as much relish as his dour sense of responsibility would permit. “You had to be afraid of my brother,” Ruth recalls. “If he said he was going to smack you, he smacked you. He didn’t threaten, he just did it. We died when he was around.”
Irving Krassner
Even so, Lee adored him. Long before she could read, she would follow him to the library and sit at a safe distance holding a book, her eyes darting back and forth between the indecipherable pages of Grimm’s Fairy-Tales and the sight of Irving slowly and intently turning the pages of Gogol, Tolstoy, or Turgenev. In the evenings, she would plead with him to read to her—“from whatever book he happened to have, it didn’t matter,” says Ruth. Even when he raised his hand threateningly against her pestering, she persisted. At school, she learned to read on her own only reluctantly and, later in life, would coax, cajole, and trick friends into reading to her aloud. At home, it was a rare privilege when Irving allowed her to listen to his recordings of Enrico Caruso.
Everything that Charles Pollock was to Jackson, Irving was to Lee. In the rush to make herself over in his image, she adopted his mannerisms, his temper, even his bilious disposition. “Irving was a tough nut,” Ruth recalls. “He didn’t take any crap from anybody, and he could put you down pretty good. So Lee became even tougher than he was. Irving had a temper, but you’d have to step hard on his toes before he would lose it. Lee would go off without warning.” Later in life, family members referred to Irving and Lee as “the immovable object and the unstoppable force.”
When Irving renounced Judaism, Lee, at age twelve or thirteen, quickly followed suit. “I crashed into the living room just as my parents were having tea with a doctor who was a distant relative,” Lee recounted later, “and [I] announced that I was through with religion.” (Lee’s jealousy of Anna, whose intimacy with Irving she coveted wildly, turned mother and daughter into lifelong enemies. “She was always getting back at my mother,” says Ruth. “Everything that went wrong in her life was Mama’s fault. … Mother haunted her to the grave.”)
But nothing pleased Irving. Where Jackson had received at least moral and logistical support from his oldest brother, Lee met with open hostility. “She wanted Irving to be close to her,” Ruth recalls, “but he never was. Never.” Essentially mean-spirited, manipulative, and misanthropic (he never married), Irving had only a sadist’s interest in Lee’s adulation. The harder she tried to please him, the more abusive he became. Later in life, “if Lee didn’t do what he wanted,” says Ruth, “he just walked away from her. Every once in a while, she would be difficult and he’d smack her down fast. He would say, ‘If you don’t shut your mouth, I’m walking out and you’ll never see me again.’ And she knew that’s just what he would do, so she shut up.”
At the age of five, Lee Krasner was already locked in a contest that would shape all her future relationships with men. With unwavering mas
ochistic determination, she would always seek out men as remote, abusive, and implacable as Irving, and lose herself in them with the same guileless abandon. A half dozen times over the next three decades she would repeat the cycle, each time with another man and a fresh determination to make the old formula yield a new result.
Because confrontation and abuse were the only forms of attention she could elicit from Irving, she learned to cultivate them. At school, she refused to sing Christmas carols that proclaimed “Jesus Christ [was] the Lord” because, she protested, “he just wasn’t mine.” At home, she denounced the Jewish faith to her shuka father and bridled at the role her faith assigned to women. As a teenager, she came to see the cosmopolitan neighborhood of her girllhood as an unbearable “condition of slavery” and her neighbors, however colorful their origins, as hopelessly mundane Americans. Convinced that the world operated by the same harsh rules as her family, she entered that world hardened by her years with Irving and prepared to do battle. “You couldn’t just have a conversation with Lee,” says Ruth. “Oh, no! She’d bite your head off even before you had a chance to say hello!”
Later in life, Lee frequently spoke of “colliding” with people, even when referring to chance encounters on the street. It was a revealing word choice. For her, all interactions between people were collisions: the more traumatic, the more explosive, the more satisfying. Addicted from infancy to the highs of aggravation and abuse, she sought them out, always living, as Fritz Bultman observed, “on the edge of antagonism,” waging a secret war on self-control and civility, searching for the hidden enmity she sensed in every encounter, always testing for the rejection that would be her vindication.
For Lena Krassner, art was the ultimate collision.
Nothing in the record explains where her first artistic impulse came from. Although, as a child, she loved to copy the pictures of beautiful ladies from newspaper advertisements, Lee later claimed that the desire to pursue art as a career was “haphazard,” that it simply “sounded more alive than secretarial work.” The only artwork in the house on Jerome Street was Irving’s reproduction of a painting of Queen Isabella giving her jewels to Columbus. But Irving’s passion was reserved for the giants of Russian literature and for Enrico Caruso, not for art. His frequent trips to the library and evenings in front of the Victrola did, however, introduce Lee to the possibility of aesthetic fulfillment, to the existence of a world where beauty was not physical and rewards were not necessarily tangible.
In 1922, fourteen-year-old Lena graduated from P.S. 72 in Brooklyn and applied to Manhattan’s Washington Irving High School, the only high school in the city that permitted girls to major in art. Her application was rejected. It was only the first of many rejections to come: in her family, at school, in her religion, in the art world, in society itself. It was a path that promised endless collisions.
Like all their neighbors on Jerome Street, the Krassners had come to America to find financial security. But centuries of Talmudic scholarship had also instilled in Jewish families like the Krassners an almost reverential appreciation of culture, which they called by its Russian name: iskusstvo. Ibram Lassaw, an abstract sculptor whose family had traveled from the Ukraine to Egypt to America, remembers conversations he overheard as a child, when friends from the old country would sit around the samovar and talk in Russian about iskusstvo. “I didn’t know what the word meant, but I could tell from the tone of their voices that they had great respect for it.” The area of the Ukraine where the Krassners had lived was, in fact, the capital of Jewish culture in Russia during the czarist days, and Odessa, “the Paris of the East.”
Even in Odessa, however, art never commanded the reverence that literature or theater or even music did. “The graphic arts had absolutely no place in our lives,” said Maurice Sterne, a painter who grew up in the Baltic region of Russia. The same Talmudic culture that sanctified words had been denuded by the biblical injunction against graven images. Except for decorated candlesticks, prayer shawls, and other objects used in worship, it was a culture virtually without a visual tradition. To become an artist was to live “outside the boundaries of respect,” stripped of both the financial rewards conferred by business and the dignity conferred by iskusstvo. In time, Lee and the other Jewish artists of her generation would help reshape the art world into a form more consistent with the values of their parents—a form more responsive both to financial imperatives and to the written word. At the time, however, no such synthesis seemed possible. To become an artist was to leap from a high cliff “into the gentile unknown”—without benefit of culture, religion, or family to cushion the fall.
But Lee’s rebellion went even further. Unlike her male counterparts, Lee was also rebelling against her sex—or at least against the role her sex traditionally played in Jewish culture, described by Irving Howe as “a combination of social inferiority and business activity.” Jewish girls were supposed to be “quiet and modest” and, if at all possible, to have a job—at least as a shopgirl, preferably as a teacher. (Teaching was considered a dignified way of earning a good salary without trespassing on male prerogatives.) Once married, Jewish women were expected to do as Anna Krassner had done: manage their families—even to the extent of supervising children at work in a family business—but not to have opinions and certainly not to voice them.
Like other Jewish girls locked by tradition into “the progression from shopgirl to housewife,” Lee found herself inspired, or at least made restless, by ideas never heard in the shtetl in Shpikov—American ideas. Jewish girls “came to value pleasure in the immediate moment,” according to Howe; “some were even drawn to the revolutionary thought that they had a right to an autonomous selfhood.” Like Stella Pollock and her magazine-reading consoeurs in the Midwest, Jewish women quickly carved out “a niche of privacy within the cluttered family apartment, [where] they responded to the allure of style, the delicacies of manners, the promise of culture.” For the rest of her life, Lee lived in both these worlds, alternately struggling to establish her autonomy and yielding to the belief that “a woman alone, not a wife and not a mother, has no existence”; avoiding marriage, but seldom living without a man; insisting on her independence, but refusing to learn to drive until she was in her forties; flaunting her artistic ambition, but often putting aside her work for long periods to concentrate on pleasing a man. In every relationship, she played out the dilemma of her generation, while underneath, the older, private battle with Irving continued to rage.
Yet, for all Lee’s noisy rebellion, her family hardly noticed. If her parents were less disappointed with her than they would have been with a son, it was because they didn’t have the same high expectations. “A girl who sacrificed a career for the arts,” says Ernestine Lassaw, who once shared Lee’s creative ambitions, “didn’t have much of a career to sacrifice.” It was the final, parting insult; one that deprived her of the climactic collision she so desperately sought. Eventually, she exacted her revenge, first by dropping an s from the family name, then by changing her first name altogether, from Lenore to the sexually ambiguous “Lee.” Years later, when a friend asked her what her parents had contributed to her career as an artist, she replied dryly: “A mauve sweater.”
After a dismal year in a pre-law program at Girls’ High School in Brooklyn during which she supported herself by decorating lampshades, china, and felt hats, Lee reapplied to Washington Irving and this time was accepted. Unfortunately, the thrill of commuting to Manhattan and studying art did nothing to improve her grades. In fact, art was her worst subject. In later years, she derived a sly pleasure from repeating her art teacher’s caustic remark: “I am going to pass you in art with sixty-five, not because you deserve it, but because you have done so well in all your other subjects.” But poor grades and teachers’ ridicule only emboldened her. After graduating in 1925, she applied to the Women’s Art School of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, located in Cooper Square on the edge of Greenwich Village, and was acc
epted. To celebrate, she made a score of small paintings of flowers and gave them to all her old friends in Brooklyn.
Like Alfred Kazin and a generation of artists and intellectuals who grew up in Brooklyn, Lee Krasner was in a “terrible rush to get away from everything [she] had grown up with.” And the place to get away to was Manhattan. For years, she had lived in its shadow, never more than an hour away by trolley (even less by the newly built El), catching occasional glimpses of its hurly-burly glamour. “(It] revealed a style of life that was as alluring as it at first seemed frightening,” wrote Matthew Josephson, another refugee from Brooklyn. “Its intensely metropolitan character and electrifying tempo seemed to drain the neighboring borough of all attraction, making it by comparison utterly provincial.” In 1926, in the last golden years before the Great Depression, Lee crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and began her new life as an artist. Decades later, she reminisced: “Coming over the bridge was like arriving in another world … like suddenly being in Paris in 1900. It was my salvation.”
No sooner had she shaken herself free of the past, however, than she began to recreate it in her new surroundings. Like Jackson, she didn’t really escape her family by coming to Manhattan, she merely recast it. For the rigidity and oppressiveness of shtetl home life, she substituted the strict discipline of traditional academic training. (At Cooper Union, classes were organized according to “alcoves.” In the first alcove, students drew from plaster casts of hands and feet; in the second, from casts of torsos; in the third, from casts of the full figure. Not until the fourth alcove did live human models appear.) To play Irving’s immovable object to her unstoppable force, Lee found Charles Louis Hinton, a sculptor and instructor in the second alcove. Hinton made no secret of his distaste for Lee’s work (he called it “messy”) although he did eventually promote her to the third alcove, according to Lee, “in utter disappointment and desperation.” “I’m going to promote you,” Hinton told her, “not because you deserve it, but because I can’t do anything with you.” In her odd way, Lee relished Hinton’s grudging promotion more than the ones she earned.
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