by Wendy Lesser
Mendel Mendelowitsch, who was variously described as an artisan, a shoemaker, and a tinsmith, apparently adapted to the resort environment by opening a rooming house: at least, his grandson remembered that he owned a “hotel,” which in the case of a Jew was more likely to be a small boardinghouse. Relations between Jews and non-Jews on Ösel were comfortable if not close. The island had been ruled by so many different nations over the years—including Estonians, Swedes, Danes, two varieties of Germans, and Russians—that it was much more mixed and cosmopolitan than most of the mainland. Catholics, Lutherans, Russian Orthodox, and Jews were all buried in a single cemetery in Arensburg (though in different sections). Tourists, especially German tourists, came through all the time to take the waters and luxuriate in the health-giving mud baths. An elegant Kursaal, in appearance a bit like Bath’s Pump Room, provided a social focus for these visitors, with its grand dining room, its sunny terrace, and its bandstand set within a large city park. The town itself had a number of charming old buildings clustered around the market square, including not only the venerable Town Hall, but also an ancient weigh house which had been built in 1633 and was later transformed into the local post office. Older even than the weigh house was the Bishop’s Castle, a massive fourteenth-century structure on the outskirts of town that was set within a sixteenth-century fortress and surrounded by a moat. A well-preserved ruin in 1901, the castle was one of the defining features of Arensburg, with its two square towers visible from any point in the town.
Life for the Mendelowitsch family continued to move back and forth between Riga—the place where they remained officially registered, in case deportation became necessary—and Arensburg, where they actually lived. In 1900, for instance, Mendel and Rocha-Lea were recorded as living with their son Abram at 108 Maskavas Street, in the heart of the Riga ghetto; yet by 1901 the family had a tinsmith shop at 16 Tolli Street in Arensburg. By that time, too, they had acquired a new family member, for on May 28, 1900, Beila-Rebeckah married Leib Schmulowsky, a twenty-five-year-old Lithuanian Jew who had recently served as a paymaster in the Russian army. The marriage took place in Riga, but when Leib and Beila’s first child was born nine months later (by which time Leib’s status was vaguely described as “tradesman”), they were already in either Pernau or Arensburg.
No residential or employment records from the turn of the century hint at where Leib Schmulowsky might have lived or worked before or after coming to Riga. Nor did he seem to have any relatives of his own nearby (the marriage register simply lists his father’s name, Mendel Schmulowsky, and his place of origin, the Lithuanian city of Rossieni). Later in life Leib apparently told his oldest son that on Ösel he had worked for a while as a clerk at the Arensburg fortress, though nothing but his word supports this. Employment, in any case, was never his strong point. But he was a good-looking man, he wrote a fine hand, he spoke five languages, and he and his wife doted on each other. Beila-Rebeckah was twenty-eight at the time of the marriage, and her family must have been immensely relieved that she had been saved from spinsterhood, as well as grateful to the suitor who claimed her.
And if the new husband proved restless—he was already planning to decamp for America as soon as his wife delivered their third child—that was to be expected of an ambitious young man in his circumstances. Certainly things did not look promising for the Jews in Tsarist Livonia. Rumors of Russian pogroms had penetrated even Arensburg, setting off a migration that caused the local Jewish population to decline from 111 in 1881 to 35 or fewer at the start of the First World War. To this general motive for flight Leib added a more specific one: he wanted to avoid being drafted again into the Russian army, which in February of 1904 had just embarked on a war with the Japanese. Spurred into action by this latest development, Leib Schmulowsky began plotting his move to Philadelphia, where he had a half-brother who he hoped might help him find work.
* * *
A building that is being built is not yet in servitude. It is so anxious to be that no grass can grow under its feet, so high is the spirit of wanting to be. When it is in service and finished, the building wants to say: “Look, I want to tell you about the way I was made.” Nobody listens. Everybody is busy going from room to room. But when the building is a ruin and free of servitude, the spirit emerges telling of the marvel that a building was made.
—Louis Kahn
They told him the Arensburg Castle was a ruin, and he loved the word ruin almost as much as he loved the word castle. It was his favorite place in the whole town. He wasn’t allowed to go there by himself—even the short fifteen-minute walk was too far for a small boy alone, and the long-uninhabited structure was too dangerous to play in—but sometimes his mother or father would take him there, down the cobbled length of Lossi Street, past the park surrounding the Kursaal, across the wooden bridge that spanned the moat, and into the dark tunnel that led through the fortress’s thick wall. One of his favorite moments of the walk was the point at which the tunnel curved and you could see for the first time the sunlight shining at the far end, with the castle’s tall corner tower framed in the arch of the tunnel exit. It was always exciting to come around that turn. And then to emerge into the vast forecourt, now occupied by the Russian garrison, with the fortress walls far away on either side and the immense stone front of the castle itself looming above you—that was even more thrilling. Not everyone was allowed inside this part of the fort, but because of his father’s job with the garrison, he was sometimes permitted to wander around there. He liked the way, when you stood in front of it, the left side of the castle was not quite the same as the right: the two corner towers, though both were square and capped with pointy pyramids, were of different heights and widths. They matched and at the same time they didn’t match.
The castle felt enormous, and the closer you got to it, the more impossibly tall it seemed. Yet though it was impressive, it was not at all frightening. He loved to go right up to the front wall and stroke the rough texture of the closely fitted beige stones. He also liked walking to either side and feeling the curve of the stone as it rounded the corner. And when he got back to the front, if his parents allowed it, he especially liked to go inside the castle itself, through that tiny off-center door, only a bit larger than the doors in their house—a door that seemed too small for such a grand place. But he liked that too, because it made him feel as if something in this gigantic structure had been shaped to his own small size. He had the same feeling when he got all the way to the interior courtyard of the castle (which was as far as you were allowed to go, because the rooms themselves were in a ruined state) and looked around at the four inner walls that surrounded him. They were not far away, as the fortress walls out front had been, but comfortably close, and somehow shorter than they had seemed from the outside, so that he could sense the presence of the sky above him as he stood in this little space which was at once a room and an outdoors. And as he stood there he thought: The inside is different from the outside.
Or perhaps not. Maybe he didn’t think any of this. No reliable records survived from this early period of his life, just hazy family memories and hearsay. What was certain, though, was that he loved the Arensburg Castle—he was to remember it and speak about it as an adult—just as he loved ruins of all kinds for their qualities of stillness and repose. Yet even ruins, he would discover, did not always stay the same. In 1904, when he was three years old, renovation work began on the castle in an effort to make it a place that tourists and townspeople could visit. All the building activity was no doubt fascinating to a small boy, who would have enjoyed watching men and equipment at work. But it was the castle as he first saw it, as a ruin, that was to stimulate his imagination for the rest of his life.
The fact that you could see the castle from anywhere in town was just one of the things that made Arensburg a good place for this little boy. Everything important to him was within walking distance. If he and his mother set out from his grandparents’ house at 4 Kohtu Street to walk to the market s
quare, they could get there in about three minutes—maybe five minutes if his sister was with them, because she was a year younger and slowed them down a bit. The market square (which was actually shaped like a rough trapezoid rather than a formal square) was not only the center of town, the gathering spot where beautiful buildings like the town hall and the old weigh house lined the wide-open space. It was also the recognizable landmark which told him he had almost reached his uncles’ shop.
From the point at which Kohtu Street entered the square, you could see across to the long, symmetrical two-story building, just to the right of the town hall, that was 1 Lossi Street. This fine address, with its multiple arched entrances on the ground floor and its wrought-iron balcony on the second, was where Abram and Benjamin Mendelowitsch had their butcher shop. If, after visiting his uncles, he and his mother walked down Lossi in the direction that led away from the market square, they would pass the intriguing-looking Russian Orthodox church called St. Nicholas and eventually (if he was lucky) end up at the castle. If instead they turned off the main cobbled street to the left or the right, they would find themselves on one of the town’s many unpaved roads, their surface made up of dirt that turned to mud when it rained. These streets led to his relatives’ houses, or to the little school where his aunt taught, or to the address at 16 Tolli Street where the family tinsmith business was located.
Sometimes he was taken down by the harbor, where the fishermen’s boats and small pleasure craft came in. (The big ferries from Riga, he knew, docked at the larger port at nearby Roomessaare, from which you had to take a little train to travel the few kilometers to Arensburg.) On the rare occasions when he was driven in a cart out beyond the city limits, he found himself in a flat, seemingly endless countryside filled with trees. But even here there were pleasant surprises—sudden clearings in the forest, for instance, where there might be an old stone church or a newer wooden farmhouse. The houses out there had much more land around them than the tightly packed city houses. But whether in the town or the country, most of the buildings on the island had the same kind of steeply pitched roof, often made of square metal tiles, though sometimes thatched or shingled. In winter the snow would pile up on all these steep roofs, getting thicker and thicker as it froze in layers, until the warm days of spring finally melted it off.
The little boy did not mind winter. One of his very earliest memories—he must have been about two—was of drawing designs on a frosted window from inside a snowbound house. Still, he loved the moment in the year when the snow began to slide off the sloping roofs, because it meant that the light of summer was coming soon. He did not fear the dark, but he loved the light.
On most summer nights he was asleep long before the sun set, so all his waking hours were in the light. But sometimes, when he was allowed to stay up later than usual (after a dinner at one of his relatives’ houses, say, or an evening spent in the park), he would get to see what happened to the summer light late at night. In those last long hours of the gradually fading day, the sunlight would turn gold. His shadow, everyone’s shadow, would grow longer and longer, and there would be an intense difference between the shady places—under the trees, next to the walls, in his own stretched-out shape on the cobbles or the dirt or the grass—and the increasingly golden areas lit by the last rays of the summer sun. At such times, the dividing line between shadow and light was so strong you almost felt you could touch it as well as see it.
The sounds of the town on a summer night were almost as entrancing: the gulls and other seabirds calling to each other, the soft wind in the trees, the clopping of horses’ hooves on the cobbled main street, and sometimes even a bit of music drifting over from the bandstand near the Kursaal. His mother, a talented harpist, loved music, and he felt that because of this he loved music too. She would sing him songs from her own childhood, and when he sang them back to her word for word, she would praise him for his excellent memory.
* * *
STUDENT QUESTIONER: It seems to take forty to fifty years to become an architect. Why does it need to take that long?
LOUIS KAHN: Why not? You want to die earlier?
STUDENT QUESTIONER: How long did it take you?
LOUIS KAHN: It took me since I was three years old.
He had always felt the strength of his mother’s attention. She seemed to take a special delight in being with him, and even after his little sister was born, he still felt he was the most important one: the oldest child, the boy, his mother’s dearest companion. Recently, though, he had felt a slight slackening in her focus on him. She was distracted by many worries, including all this talk about his father possibly going to America. He could also see that her stomach was growing larger and larger, and when he asked about this, she told him he was soon going to have another little sister or brother. This did not strike him as necessarily a good thing, but he kept this thought to himself. After all, he was getting to be a big boy now, and he felt he would soon be old enough to take charge of his own life. He had recently turned three.
It was cold out still, so the fire in the hearth was kept burning at all hours. The stacks of wood that had been piled up outside in the summer months kept it fed, day after day. Whenever the fire burned low, someone would bring in more logs to keep it going. Somehow, though, the fire had been allowed to burn very low. It was down to a few smoldering embers now. And those coals, licked by a few tiny flames, were not the usual red or orange or even blue color. For some reason, the color they gave off was a strange, entrancing blue-green.
The little boy was used to seeing fire: it was a daily presence in his life, especially in the winter. But he had never seen a fire burn this color before. The individual coals were like something that had grown outdoors in the ground—a fresh green shoot, a startling blue flower—except that this blue-green was a much more intense color than anything he had ever seen in nature. It was as if the coals were lit from within, as if they were creating a magical new form of light that began at their center and glowed outward. If the color that showed through on the surface was this bright, this beautiful, what must the inside be like?
He sat himself down next to the hearth to get a closer look. Normally he was not permitted to sit this near the fire, but no grown-up was nearby to bother him this time. He stared for a while, and then he adjusted the apron of his pinafore so that it made a little cloth basket in his lap. Just looking at the green-glowing coals was not enough. He wanted to capture them, to play with them. He wanted to make them his own.
He leaned forward and quickly scooped a few of the embers into his lap. Before he even had a chance to examine them, they burst into sudden flame. He saw the fire leap upward toward his face, and instinctively, though the pain itself had not yet had time to reach him, he put up his hands to cover his eyes.
EPILOGUE
“Louis I. Kahn, whose strong forms of brick and concrete influenced a generation of architects and made him, in the opinion of most architectural scholars, America’s foremost living architect, died Sunday evening, apparently of a heart attack, in Pennsylvania Station,” began the front-page obituary by Paul Goldberger that appeared in The New York Times on Wednesday, March 20, 1974. Goldberger briefly recounted the strange circumstances surrounding the death—the body picked up by the New York police and tentatively identified on the basis of Kahn’s passport (which showed that he had just returned from London and Bombay), the teletype sent to the Philadelphia police, their failure to notify the widow, her search for her missing husband—but soon moved on to six columns largely devoted to Kahn’s buildings, philosophical theories, and personal characteristics. Like the calmly smiling picture that accompanied it, the text presented an eminence grise of the architectural world, “a small man whose white hair and bow tie were often in disarray, but whose modest physical appearance was in sharp contrast to the vastness of his influence on architects both in America and abroad.” The person described here was someone who clearly knew his own mind and had made his respectable mark upon t
he world—a solid, revered, if perhaps slightly mystical figure with a strong list of tangible achievements to show for his seventy-three years on earth.
And while this was true, it was far from the whole story. Even as this prominent and fully laudatory obituary reached the newsstands, the hidden difficulties and conflicts were beginning to surface privately. For decades Lou had managed to hold things together by the sheer force of his magnetic personality, but soon after he died, they started to fall apart.
Esther Kahn, worried about the half-million-dollar debt he had left, felt pressed on all sides, and when David Zoob, Lou’s lawyer, went to her and asked her to make some provision for Lou’s other two children, she vehemently refused. “She became angry,” said the architect Peter Arfaa, to whom Zoob had appealed for help in overcoming Esther’s recalcitrance. Her response, according to Arfaa, was “They’re bastards. They’re not entitled to anything of Lou’s.” And when, a month after Kahn’s death, the Philadelphia AIA organized a memorial service for him at Trinity Church in Rittenhouse Square, Esther told Peter Arfaa not to invite the other mothers and children. “She didn’t want them—she was adamant,” recalled Arfaa, who, in his capacity as head of the local chapter, politely informed the widow that the organization could not and would not prevent them from coming.
For Esther, it was as if all those years of tolerating Lou’s bad behavior had come to nothing in the end. Her patience had finally been exhausted, and since Lou was no longer there to stanch her anger, she gave in to it. And Philadelphia, or at least her friends, relations, and acquaintances in Philadelphia, abetted her. The secret which had once been widely known—the fact that Lou had two other families—now became hushed up and covered over. Lou’s curious personal life had never been written about or made public in any way, and now it was rarely even mentioned, as Esther began the process of reconstructing her position as the one and only Mrs. Louis I. Kahn.