Lee Krasner Read Online Free PDF Page A

me as You saw fit.’” 23
    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. 24 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. 25
    Esther later told her grandson stories of their arduous childhood. 26 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. 27 “I was brought up to be independent,” she recalled. 28 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.” 29 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 neighborhood 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). 30 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.” 31
    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.” 32 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.” 33 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