Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Reading Cantemir was part of Steinberg’s discovery of “the true history of other nations” just as he was preparing to enter the university. He had been force-fed a history that was small-minded and regional rather than international, “made by—adopted by—politicians to cause us to be patriotic and hate the Hungarians.” He was shocked by things he had not been taught about the true histories of other eastern European nations, above all “the influence of the Slavic world, the Russian Empire, the Russian civilization.” He did not mention the most shattering event of recent history—World War I— or the major countries that fought in it, because nothing about the war or its aftermath was then taught in Romania.

  Steinberg’s years in the lycée, 1928 to 1932, coincided with the start of the Great Depression, during which Romania became even more cloistered and isolated by extreme poverty. From the start, every segment of society suffered, including Moritz Steinberg’s factory, where manufacturing contracts for specialty boxes dwindled and the business was reduced mostly to bookbinding. It was what Moritz liked best, because it was a sedentary pursuit that left him alone in peace and quiet. However, it did not pay well, and at the end of 1929, when Saul was fifteen and finishing his first year at the lycée, Moritz had to move both his family and his factory to Strada Justitie (Justice Street). The “workshop,” which had been a good-sized Romanian fabrica, was now known by the French term atelier to denote its greatly reduced size and staff. The Steinbergs lived in a small house next door to the atelier, and in these years they were often “without [electric] current, heat, bathroom, lights.”

  IF THERE WAS EVER ANY THOUGHT that Saul might enter the business and someday take it over, it does not appear in any of the many letters Moritz and Rosa wrote to their various family members, nor did Saul ever mention it in his correspondence or other written reflections. He was the family’s wunderkind, and even in such dire economic times he was destined for the university, although there was no mention of what he would study or what profession he intended to follow.

  He grew up to become an independent individual within a tightly knit family group, a beloved member who deliberately placed himself in the position of the outsider and observer of the domestic scene. In 1942, in one of the earliest of his many attempts to recapture and re-create the memories and images of his first eighteen years—the only years he lived in Romania—he painted a telling portrait of daily life in Strada Palas 9, before the family had to move. His mother, father, and sister are seated at the breakfast table as the Romany servant girl walks toward them carrying a platter of food. Rosa sits close to Lica and hovers over her, while Moritz sits apart from them at the far end of the table, upright and crisply dressed for business, drinking his coffee with perfect rectitude. Behind Moritz, sheer curtains blow in a window open to the courtyard, where other life is under way, separate from the life in the Steinberg dining room. This domestic scene fills the top half of the page, while in the bottom right-hand corner Steinberg depicted himself in his schoolboy uniform, “wearing a name plate with a number, like an automobile.” It is a strong statement of his place within the family, for he stands away from the cozy domestic scene at the table, carrying his bookbag and ready to depart. He observes his family as they go about their daily business, but they do not observe him. He is separate and distanced; he has presented a happy and peaceful domesticity, but he is not a part of it.

  By the time he was eighteen, he was indeed a separate entity. Moritz and Rosa respected him, mainly for his intelligence and success at school, and so they deferred to him because he brought home to them his knowledge of the outside world and the wisdom to interpret it. They were both innately intelligent and intellectually curious, but they were not formally educated, so they appreciated the new knowledge their son imparted. They knew what a good education could do for an ambitious Jewish boy, and they wanted something better for their son than a life like theirs, subject to the whims of those in power and the vagaries of fortune and finance that dominated their business dealings. It was important for their only son to better himself and, by extension, to better their own position in the world. They allowed Saul, even encouraged him to pursue what interested him most, but the underlying message was that it should lead to a solid and secure career.

  And so he entered the University of Bucharest in 1932, unsure of what it might lead to but imbued with a questing intelligence and an eagerness to find out. He lasted exactly one year, a restless year in which he read a great deal, wrote only what his courses required, spent time with his lycée friends, and did not seem to make new ones. He might have worried about what would become of him, but if he did, he never said so, and no one else did either. At the end of that year of drifting, through a series of happenstances and compromises he decided to become an architect.

  CHAPTER 4

  A SECURE TRADE

  I accepted a kind of compromise. If I had declared that I wanted to dedicate myself to art, my parents would not have supported me in school. So I declared that I wanted to study architecture…[a] serious and prestigious profession, almost on the same level with medicine.

  Moritz and Rosa Steinberg would have been alarmed if they had known Saul was flirting with the idea of becoming a writer, but they would have been terrified if they had known he was also considering a career as an artist. When he applied for admission to the university, they were overjoyed with his decision to become an architect and broadcast it to their entire community. The local custom was for Jewish matchmakers (shadchanim) to visit the aspiring student’s house, bringing offers from rich practitioners in the chosen field to sponsor the student and pay for his education if he would agree to work for them after graduation. Unfortunately, Saul was rejected when the admissions committee for the school of architecture pronounced him deficient in the two most important criteria for an architect: mathematical ability and skill in drawing. They deemed him far more talented in languages and shunted his admission to the university’s liberal arts division, the Faculty of Arts and Letters.

  This was the first-ever rejection in all Steinberg’s years as a Jewish wunderkind, which may have been why he spent his only year at the University of Bucharest lackadaisically reading philosophy and literature, pursuing several girls, and occasionally worrying, along with his parents, that he was not preparing for a profession that would enable him to become self-supporting. Throughout his life, he was asked many times what had led him to become an architect, and as he did with so many other questions, he invented a variety of answers. Probably one of his most truthful came when he told a friend that “for a young Romanian Jew, construction was a secure trade.”

  In 1932, when Steinberg began his university studies, architecture was a sound career choice for the son of a Jewish small-business owner in search of a more secure profession. By the 1930s, building was a booming enterprise in Bucharest, as Romania was rebounding from the years of deprivation imposed on it at the end of World War I. Literally overnight the country doubled in size, when the provinces of Transylvania-Banat and Bessarabia-Bukovina were ceded to the “Old Kingdom,” and became known as the kingdom of Romania, home to seventeen million people of disparate ethnic backgrounds spread over 295,000 square kilometers. It was “an interesting, animated time,” especially in Bucharest, as Aron Sigalu, who changed his name to Arthur Segal when he moved to Germany to become a painter, described it. Suddenly there were all sorts of possibilities in a new country “where the capital does everything possible to look like Paris though the king is a prince of the house of Hohenzollern and the nobility a carryover from the Ottoman [Empire].”

  People poured into what had been a sleepy country town of rutted and unpaved streets with run-down houses that were now being demolished and replaced by huge barracklike buildings on broad thoroughfares. Everything was done in the name of modernism and “the new Romanian architecture.” No matter how ugly the building or inappropriate the setting, everything was touted as “progressive.” And there were not enough architects to
design all the new government offices and apartment blocks, which could not be built fast enough.

  The sudden need for skilled builders forced those in authority to turn architecture into a profession open to anyone who could qualify, one that all but guaranteed wealth, prestige, and high social status. The profession became both honored and rigorously structured after 1921, when the Corpul Tehnic al Arhitectilor (Architects’ Technical Association) was created, and by the time Steinberg applied to the university’s Scoala Superiora de Arhitectura (Upper School of Architecture), all architects were required to pass a rigid system of testing and professional registration. Throughout the 1930s, diplomas granted by the Bucharest School of Architecture were recognized in Europe as being on a par with those granted in Paris, Zurich, Milan, and Berlin. Many young Romanian sons of wealthy parents chose to study abroad, but those who came from the working classes stayed at home to earn diplomas that were accorded equal respect. Thus, for a student like Saul Steinberg, whose family could not provide the financial wherewithal for him to go abroad, rejection at home was especially stinging.

  The year he spent reading literature and philosophy unfolded easily enough but without much to engage him. The curriculum concentrated on everything local and patriotic, and every field within the humanities was filtered through the lives and works of exemplary Romanian personalities. Among those especially revered was George Matei Cantacuzino (1899–1960), a prominent architect who had begun his professional life as an artist and writer. Known as the “chronicler of Romanian spirituality” and praised for insisting on the interlinked totality of all forms of art, Cantacuzino promoted the German idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, which held that architecture must be closely related to every other artistic expression and that its relevance must be central to any study of a given culture.

  Cantacuzino’s first and most important architectural commission was the restoration of the Byzantine ruins at the Palace of Mogos¸oaia, which he worked on from 1920 to 1931. Just outside Budapest, it was a popular destination for students on hiking trips, and Steinberg went there with three of his lycée classmates in April 1932, more for the fun of the outing than for architectural edification. He also joined them to hike on Omu and Caraiman mountains, an activity he immediately disliked and never engaged in again.

  Steinberg enjoyed these three friends: Eugen Campus, Bruno Leventi, and one known only by his surname, Pascharides, whom he described as “rich Jews and Greeks, swift, happy, the aristocracy of the class.” He always insisted that he made few, if any, close friends during his school years in Bucharest and described himself as awkward and clumsy in social settings, constantly fearful of making a fool of himself and unable to interact naturally with people his own age. There is a contradiction in this description of himself, for fifty years after their schooldays ended, he rekindled a warm friendship with Leventi and actively sought to reconnect with Campus, who was living in Israel and writing for Romanian-language publications there and elsewhere.

  Campus was the one who initiated the literary circle and dubbed them “the serious boys.” It was an unusual group in that its members were not interested in becoming poets or novelists but rather “wanted to explore the world of cultural values together.” This was where Steinberg first understood how essential the study of literature and literary criticism were to the acquisition of knowledge. However, such study would not lead directly to the lucrative profession his parents expected, and so architecture offered the perfect compromise, particularly after he learned of the Iancu brothers, the success story held up for their own sons by every Jewish parent of Steinberg’s generation.

  Steinberg and his school friends were a decade younger than most of the prominent Jewish men who were luminaries of architecture in Romania, particularly the Iancu brothers (who changed their name to Janco to make it easier to pronounce when they went to France to practice in 1920). Steinberg did not even know of Marcel and Iuliu (later Jules or Julius) Janco until he went to the university and heard their names bandied about. Their father was so wealthy that the brothers were accepted as assimilated Jews who were able to move so freely throughout Bucharest’s upper-class society that they attended the extremely prestigious Liceul Gheorghe Lazar, which had very few Jewish students. Steinberg’s father and uncles were well aware of these architects and hoped that their own sons might achieve the same professional success and emulate the lifestyle of their social superiors.

  Marcel and Jules Janco were among those who were wealthy enough to study abroad. With a third brother, George, they went to Zurich in 1915 and enrolled in the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, but instead of concentrating on their studies, they spent the better part of the next five years involved with another Romanian Jew who had been their lycée classmate, Samuel Rosenstock, who changed his name to Tristan Tzara and became one of the founders of Dada at the famed Cabaret Voltaire in 1919. By 1932, when Steinberg was studying literature, the Janco brothers had long given up Dada and were living in Bucharest, welcomed as respected members of the local intelligentsia. Instead of coming home with them, Tristan Tzara went to Paris and was being cited by Steinberg’s professors as an example of the “Judeo-Bolsheviks” whose “literary anarchism” was corrupting Romanian culture.

  Steinberg and his classmates were too respectful of authority to contradict their professors, but they were always aware of Jewish inroads in local society, and Tzara and his ilk represented the burgeoning number of “young emancipated Jewish writers” who encouraged “the openness of Romanian environments toward artistic modernity.” They knew that the very modernity their professors touted in all things Romanian was a predominantly Jewish phenomenon, a fact that those in authority carefully ignored. The professors did not tell their students that within a country of six million people, 300,000 of whom were Jews, the vast majority of the avant-garde had been born into and grown up in a Jewish culture and tradition.

  The eighteen-year-old Steinberg was vaguely aware that something interesting was going on in Bucharest’s artistic circles. A lot of names he remembered hearing were figuring in what later became known as the beginning of Balkan absurdist writing, but with the exception of the literary circle at Campus’s house, his youth and personal circumstances left him far removed from any direct contact with it. He and his few friends had little opportunity to socialize with these writers and were too shy to seek them out.

  They were also too shy to pursue girls, and there was almost no chance to meet them through their school. Even so, girls had been capturing Steinberg’s fancy for several years. In Buzău, for example, on visits to his grandfather, he “took pleasure from a city full of young girls … on the sidewalk, a few magnificent brunettes in school uniforms.” In Bucharest, the only girls he knew were those who lived on his street or were the sisters of his friends, and there was no opportunity for anything but casual conversation in awkward chance meetings. Like other adolescent boys, he kept these encounters and everything else about girls to himself.

  He wondered how he was going to promote himself as an architect when he looked at himself in photographs and saw a shy, skinny fellow with a “gigantic head,” a dandy in spats and a well-worn suit, topped off with a “George Raft and Ronald Colman hat.” Campus described him as having a “timid and taciturn” personality and a “thin bony body … elongated face … and prominent nose.” Steinberg may well have wondered how far such looks were going to get him in business, let alone in life.

  He recognized that there was a strong contrast between himself and the Romanian Jews who had succeeded in gaining the right to study for a secure profession. His father was still struggling to keep the fabrica going, while on the other side of town, Hermann Iancu, father of the architects, was a prosperous commerciant, or merchant, another of the few occupations open to Jews. Hermann Iancu was so successful that his family lived on one of Bucharest’s finest streets in an architect-designed villa surrounded by several thousand square meters of pri
vate gardens. The house they lived in and the life they led was light-years removed from the overcrowded Jewish quarter where the Steinberg family and all their relatives congregated. Nevertheless, the Steinbergs were all well aware of this other, magical way of life. Everyone in Steinberg’s extended family knew that when the Janco brothers went abroad, they were supported in grand style by their father, and when he abruptly summoned them home in 1921, it was because they were “needed,” as so many building projects had begun and each one was “bigger than the next.” Money and social standing begat success, and when Saul Steinberg was considering architecture as his profession, the Janco brothers were at the pinnacle.

  Steinberg was one of four in his neighborhood who wanted to become architects. Jacques Ghelber, who later became his cousin by marriage, passed the Bucharest entrance exam and was admitted, while Steinberg and two of his friends from the lycée, Bruno Leventi (whom Steinberg now called Leventer), and Mihail “Ciucu” Perlmutter, were not. All three were left with two options: either to look for a job or study something else. Because they had no other option that year, they all enrolled in the university’s liberal arts division, but while Steinberg was drifting along studying philosophy and literature and wondering what to do next, Leventer had not given up on architecture and was earnestly investigating foreign possibilities.

  On the one hand, it was depressing to hear Ghelber’s enthusiastic reports about his architectural studies, but on the other, because Steinberg and Leventer were neighbors as well as friends who saw each other almost every day, it was much more intriguing to hear him describe his foreign research. Steinberg began to think that going abroad to study architecture would get him out of what had become a stultifying home life and a dismal educational experience and would be far more exciting than the uncertain future he faced if he stayed in Bucharest.