Lee Krasner Read Online Free PDF

Jewish girls. An intense rivalry developed between Lena and Ruth, who shared a bed with theirolder 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. 34 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. 35 East New York was originally called Oostwout by the Dutch. 36 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.” 37 This love of nature would stay with Krasner her entirelife. 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.” 38
    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.” 39
    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. 40 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. 41
    Lena’s school was on New Lots Avenue between Schenck and Livonia Avenues, also close to her house. 42 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