Lee Krasner Read Online Free PDF Page B

whitefish—packed in heavy wooden crates chilled by ice, haul it by horse and wagon to the small stall at the market, and try to sell out by late afternoon before all the ice melted and the fish spoiled. 43 Managing the business left little time for the Krasner parents to attend to their children, and with time and money in short supply, Anna and Joseph struggled to provide their children with the basic necessities.
    At school Krasner came into contact with new ideas and the ideal of personal goals and dreams. This differed from what she saw at home, where her mother was a model of stoicism and self-sacrifice for her family. Lena described her mother, exhausted from the family business, as “loving but not demonstrative. She would back what I wanted.” 44 The contrast between her new values and those of her family would remain a source of inner tension for much of her life.
    P.S. 72 had about 1,500 students in classes from kindergarten through eighth grade. 45 There were more girls than boys in Lena’s class, presumably because so many of the boys attended private cheders. Though the school introduced Lena to the idea of art, she later said that she did not yet draw. 46 Her sister Ruth recalled, however, that Lena found and copied fashion advertisements in the newspaper: “She used to draw clothed women figures all the time. We were all aware of that—how marvelous it was to be able to put her pencil to paper and get a figure.” 47 It was one of the few nice things Ruth ever recollected about Lee.
    Lena also began going to the library to look at the art in books, such as the illustrations in her favorite fairy tales. 48 Krasner recalled that the only art in their home hung in the parlor. It was a print that depicted Columbus receiving jewels from Queen Isabella. The Brooklyn Museum, though already established, was too far for her to venture alone, and apparently no one in the family or at school took her there.
    At the same time, East New York also offered a station on the Long Island Railroad’s Manhattan Beach Branch, which ran from Long Island City in Queens to Manhattan Beach, the part of Coney Island east of Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn. The route had been built in the nineteenth century originally as one of several summer beach railways. There was, however, no subway service until 1922, miraculously finished just in time to fulfill Lena’s desire to travel to Manhattan for high school.
    Krasner enjoyed her neighborhood—there was still a villageatmosphere, even in Brooklyn. She knew all her neighbors and felt very much at home. Her friends were diverse, like the neighborhood: Sissy (Adelaide) Rhodes, who lived next door was a mulatto; Margaret Williams was French and Margaret Lehmann was German. 49
    As Lena was growing up, Brownsville welcomed radical social movements and philosophies including anarchism, socialism, and communism. There also were secularists and Zionists and leftist-oriented schools. Many different types of candidates ran for local elections. Some mounted wooden soapboxes on street corners or in the nearest park to deliver speeches against capitalism to whoever would listen. The district elected socialists to the New York State Assembly from 1915 to 1921.
    During this time, women’s activism became important and accepted in her immigrant community. 50 Women initiated protest movements, starting with the kosher meat boycott of 1902, in which 20,000 Jewish women on the Lower East Side broke into kosher butcher shops and rendered the meat inedible to protest rising prices. Many women led rent strikes and participated in the garment strike of 1909, which lasted for fourteen weeks and won for workers improved wages, working conditions, and hours.
    Additionally the women’s suffrage movement was growing, and it gained more support from Jewish immigrant groups than from any others in the state elections of 1915 and 1917. 51 Jewish women worked hard to get out the