And in the 1950s, if you were interested in modern art, New York was the place to be.
There had been American schools of art before: the Hudson River School in the nineteenth century, with its magnificent landscapes of the Hudson Valley, Niagara and the West; the American Impressionists, who’d often gathered in France, around Monet’s place in Giverny, before returning home. But good though they were, you couldn’t say they’d invented any new kind of painting. And indeed, the huge movements of modern abstract art, from cubism onward, had all been European.
Until now. Suddenly, a crowd of artists with huge, bold abstract work, unlike anything seen before, had burst upon the New York scene. Jackson Pollock, Hedda Sterne, Barnett Newman, Motherwell, de Kooning, Rothko—“the Irascibles,” people often called them. The name of their school: Abstract Expressionism.
Modern America had an art that was all its own. And at the center of it all was a small, indefatigable lady, born into the world of New York private schools, and summers in Newport, but who preferred the company of the most daring artists of her time: Betty Parsons. And her gallery, of course.
It was a group show. Motherwell was there, and Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock too. Charlie brought Sarah over to meet Pollock. Then he and Sarah looked at the work.
The show was magnificent. One Pollock they particularly liked—a dense riot of browns, whites and grays. “It looks like he rode around the canvas on a bicycle,” Sarah whispered.
“Perhaps he did,” said Charlie, with a grin. Yet it seemed to him that, as usual, in that apparently random, swirling mass of abstract color, you could find subliminal repetitions and complex rhythms, which gave the work amazing power. “Some people think he’s a fraud,” he said, “but I think he’s a genius.”
There was a fine Motherwell, one of his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, with great black glyphs and vertical bars on a white canvas. “It feels as if it’s resonating,” Sarah said. “Like an oriental mantra. Does that make sense to you?”
“Yes,” said Charlie, “it does.” It was funny, he thought, it hardly mattered whether someone was older than you or half your age, when there was a real meeting of minds. He smiled to himself. Money and power were supposed to be the biggest aphrodisiacs, but shared imagination was just as strong, it seemed to him, and lasted longer.
They both saw people they knew, and drifted apart to talk to them. He said a few words to Betty Parsons.
He liked Betty. When he looked down at her neat New England face, with its small square jaw and broad brow, and brave spirit, he almost wanted to kiss her—though she probably wouldn’t have welcomed that.
An hour had passed when, glancing across the room, he saw that Sarah was deep in conversation with some young people of her own age, and with an inward sigh, he decided he’d better slip away. He went over though, to say good-bye to her first.
“You’re going home?” She looked disappointed.
“Unless you’d like to eat? But you should stay with your friends.”
“I’d like to eat,” she said. “Are you ready?”
They decided on Sardi’s. It was still early, long before the after-theater crowd would fill the place. They didn’t even have to wait for a table. Charlie always liked the theatrical decor of the place, with its cartoons of actors all round the walls. Out-of-town people might go to Sardi’s because it was so famous, but it was still a lot of fun.
They ordered steaks and red wine, and soon needed a second bottle. They didn’t talk about the show. Charlie told her about his outing with his son, and then they discussed the city in the thirties. He told her his feeling about Rockefeller and Roosevelt, and the ancestral New York spirit.
“But don’t forget Mayor La Guardia,” she reminded him. “He saved New York too.”
“That is absolutely true.” Charlie grinned. “Thank God for the Italians.”
“La Guardia wasn’t Italian.”
“I’m sorry—since when?”
“His father was Italian, but his mother was Jewish. That makes him Jewish. Ask my family.”
“Okay. How do they feel about Robert Moses? Both his parents are Jewish.”
“We hate him.”
“He’s done a lot for the city.”
“That’s true. But my Aunt Ruth lives in the Bronx, and he’s just destroyed the value of her property.” The great Cross Bronx Expressway that Moses was carving across that borough was the most difficult project the masterbuilder had ever undertaken. A lot of people were being displaced, seeing their property values go down, and they didn’t like it. “She says she hopes he breaks his neck.” She grinned. “My family’s close. We support her. Moses will eventually be destroyed.”
“You have a big family?”
“A sister, two brothers. My mother’s family all moved out of New York. Aunt Ruth is my father’s sister.” She paused. “My father had a brother, Herman, who used to live in New York. But he went to Europe before the war and then …” She hesitated.
“He didn’t come back?”
“We don’t talk about him.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, then changed the subject.
“So, your son lives on Staten Island. Does he have a mother?”
“Yes. My ex-wife.”
“Oh. I guess it’s not my business.”
“That’s okay. She and I get along.” He smiled. “You know, when the gallery said you were going to organize Keller’s show, I wasn’t too certain about it.”
“What changed your mind?”
“What you said about Keller’s work and Stieglitz. Of course,” he added, “I still have to discover if you’re competent.”
“I am. And I’m a big fan of Alfred Stieglitz, by the way. Not just his own photography, but all the other shows he arranged. Did you know he organized one of the first exhibitions of Ansel Adams in New York?”
The show of Adams’s astounding photographs of the huge American landscape had been the highlight of Charlie’s year, back in ‘36, shortly before he went to the Spanish Civil War.
“I was there,” he said.
“I also admire his personal life. A man whom Georgia O’Keeffe marries must be pretty special.”
In Charlie’s view, the affair and marriage of the photographer and the great painter had been one of the most significant partnerships in the twentieth-century art world, though it had been quite stormy.
“He wasn’t faithful,” he said.
“He was Stieglitz.” She shrugged. “You’ve got to hand it to him, though. He was nearly fifty-five when he started living with O’Keeffe. And he was sixty-four when he took up with that other girl.”
“Dorothy Norman. I knew her, actually.”
“And she was only twenty-two.”
“Hell of an age difference.”
She looked at him. “You’re only as old as you feel.”
On Friday afternoon, Sarah Adler took the subway to Brooklyn. She had a new book to read. The Bridges at Toko-Ri was a short, fast-paced novel by James Michener about the recent Korean War. She hardly noticed the stations go by until she got to Flatbush.
Sarah loved Brooklyn. If you came from Brooklyn, you belonged there always. Partly, perhaps, it was the basic geography of the place. Ninety square miles of territory, two hundred miles of waterfront—no wonder the Dutch had liked it. There was something about the light in Brooklyn, it was so clear. The English might have come and called it Kings County. Huge bridges might link it to Manhattan—in addition to the Brooklyn Bridge, there were the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges now—along with the subway. Seventy years of growth might have covered much of its quiet, rural space with housing—though huge parks and leafy streets remained. Yet on a quiet weekend morning, walking along a street of brownstone houses with their Dutch stoops, you could still almost think, in that limpid Brooklyn light, that you were in a painting by Vermeer.
It was still light as she made her way from the station. The whole of Flatbush was
so full of childhood landmarks, from the modest pleasures of the soda fountain where you had egg creams, the kosher delicatessen and the restaurant on Pitkin Avenue where you went for a treat, to Ebbets Field itself, that cramped but sacred holy ground where the Brooklyn Dodgers played. She went by the candy store where all the children used to hang out, then entered the street where they used to play stoop ball.
The Adlers lived in a brownstone. When Sarah was very young, her father had rented his surgery under the stoop. Wanting to secure good tenants during the Depression, the landlord had soon offered her parents the two floors above, with three months rent-free. It was an excellent accommodation and they’d lived there ever since.
When she arrived, her mother met her at the door.
“Michael’s ready, and your father and Nathan will be down in a moment. Rachel was coming tomorrow, but she says they all have colds.”
Sarah wasn’t too dismayed about her sister. Rachel was two years older. She’d married at eighteen and couldn’t understand why Sarah hadn’t wanted to do the same. Sarah went to kiss her brother Michael. He was eighteen now, and getting to be rather handsome. Then she went up and knocked at Nathan’s door. His room was just the same as ever, the walls covered with photographs of baseball heroes and Dodgers’ pennants. Nathan was fourteen and a good student, who studied hard at yeshiva. But the Dodgers were still the biggest thing in his life. “I’m ready, I’m ready,” he cried. He hated people coming into his room. Then she felt her father’s hand on her shoulder.
Dr. Daniel Adler was short and round. His head was nearly bald on top, and he wore a small, dark mustache. If he regretted that he was a dentist and not a concert pianist, his comfort lay in his family and his religion. He loved them both—indeed, for him, they were one and the same. Sarah was always grateful for that. It was why on Friday afternoons, whenever she conveniently could, she came home to Flatbush for Shabbat.
They gathered in the living room. The two candles were ready. While the family stood quietly, Sarah’s mother lit them, and then, with her hands covering her eyes, she recited the blessing.
“Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam …”
It was the duty of the mother to perform this mitzvah. Only then, to complete the mitzvah, did she uncover her eyes and look at the light.
Sarah appreciated the ritual, the whole idea of Shabbat: God’s gift of a day of rest to His chosen people. The family gathering at sundown, the sense of intimate joy—she might not be a very religious person herself, but she loved coming home for it.
After the lighting of the candles, they walked in the dusk to the synagogue.
Sarah liked her family’s religion. People who didn’t understand these things sometimes imagined that the nearly million Jews in Brooklyn all worshipped the same way. Nothing could be further from the case, of course. Over in the Brownsville area, which was overwhelmingly Jewish, and where the streets were pretty rough, people were mostly secular. Plenty of Jews there never went to services at all. In Borough Park, there were a lot of Zionists. Williamsburg was very Orthodox, and in the last few years a number of Hasidim from Hungary had arrived there, and in Crown Heights. With their old-fashioned dress and their rigorous adherence to Jewish laws, the Hasidim really lived in a world apart.
Coming mostly from Germany and Eastern Europe, the Jews of Brooklyn had been Ashkenazim at the start. But in the twenties, a large group of Syrian Jews had moved into Bensonhurst. That Sephardic community was completely unlike the others.
As for Flatbush, it varied. There were Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews all living on the same street. A few of the Hungarian Hasidim had come into the area too. Everybody seemed to get along, though, so long as you supported the Dodgers.
The Adlers were Conservative. “To be Orthodox is good, if that’s what you want,” her father would say to his family. “But for me, it’s too much. Yeshiva is good, but so is other education. So, I am Conservative, but not Orthodox.”
A few doors down the street was a family who went to a Reform temple. Daniel Adler fixed their teeth, and Sarah had played with their children as a little girl. But even then, she understood there was a difference. “The Reform Jews go too far the other way,” her father had explained. “They say the Torah is not divine, and they question everything. They call this being enlightened and liberal. But if you keep going down that road, then one day you have nothing left.”
Most of Sarah’s friends in the city were Liberal, or secular. They were her company during the week. Then she’d come home for the weekend. So far, she liked living in two worlds.
After the brief Friday service, they all walked back. At home, they gathered round the table, her parents blessed their children, her father recited kiddush over the wine, the prayer was recited over the two loaves of challah, and then they started their meal.
All through her childhood, Sarah had known what food she would eat. Friday was chicken. Wednesday lamb chops. That was the meat. Tuesdays meant fish, and Thursdays egg salad and potato latkes. Only Monday was unpredictable.
The rest of Shabbat passed quietly. The Saturday-morning service was always long, from nine to twelve. She used to find it burdensome, but strangely she didn’t any more. Then the pleasant, leisurely family lunch. After that, her father read to them for a while, then went to take a nap, while she and Michael played checkers. Sarah and her brother always enjoyed each other’s company. Michael was musical, and on Sunday afternoon, he and his father were going to a concert at the Brooklyn Museum. There was no television allowed until the end of Shabbat, but on Saturday evening, her father asked her if she’d like to listen to a record he’d just acquired. It was an RCA recording of Bernstein conducting his own First Symphony. So she sat on the sofa beside him, and watched affectionately as her father’s round face relaxed into an expression of perfect happiness. They turned in early after that. It had been a perfect day.
On Sunday morning, however, when Sarah came into the kitchen, things weren’t so good. Her mother was alone, making French toast. Downstairs, she could hear the sound of her father practicing on the piano, but when she started to go down to say good morning to him, her mother called her back.
“Your father had a bad night.” She shook her head. “He was thinking about your Uncle Herman.”
Sarah sighed. In the year before the Second World War began, Uncle Herman had been based in London. But he spoke French well, and he’d been spending time in France, where he had a small exporting business.
If they didn’t hear from Uncle Herman for a year, they weren’t surprised. “He never writes letters. He just shows up,” her father used to complain. But late in 1939 they did get a letter. It came from London, and said he would be going to France. That had worried her father. “I don’t know how you get in there,” he’d said, “or how you get out.” Months had passed. No further word had come. They hoped he was in London. When the Blitz came, her father said: “Maybe I should hope he’s in France.”
The silence continued.
It was more than four years before they finally learned the truth. It was the only time Sarah had seen her father truly outraged, and inconsolable. It was the first time, also, that she had understood the power of grief. And seeing her father’s suffering, young though she was, she had wanted so much to protect him.
Then the Adlers did what a Jewish family does when it loses a loved one: they sat shiva.
It is a kindly custom. For seven days, unless one observes a less strict practice, family and friends come to the house bringing food and comfort. After saying the traditional Hebrew words of condolence as they enter, the visitors talk softly to the bereaved, who sit on low boxes or stools.
Sarah’s mother had covered every mirror in the house with cloth. The children all wore a black ribbon, pinned on their front, but their father ripped his shirt and sat in a corner. Many friends came by; everyone understood Daniel Adler’s grief and sought to console him. Sarah never forgot it.
“The days we sat
shiva for your Uncle Herman were the worst in my life,” her mother said. “Worse even than the day I got fired.”
The day her mother got fired had always been part of family lore. It had been long before Sarah was born, before her mother married. She’d gone to work in Midtown, and got a job as a secretary in a bank. Her father had warned her not to do it, but something had prompted her to prove him wrong. With the reddish hair she had then and her blue eyes, people didn’t usually think she was Jewish. “And my name’s Susan Miller,” she said. “It was Millstein, once,” her father said. He could also have added that Miller was the third most common Jewish name in America.
But the bank had employed her without awkward questions, and for six months she’d worked there and been quite happy. True, it had meant that she didn’t observe Shabbat, but her family weren’t religious, so they didn’t mind too much.
It was a chance remark that had let her down. One Friday, she was talking to another girl who she was quite friendly with. They were talking about one of the tellers, a bad-tempered fellow who had been complaining about her friend. “Don’t mind him,” she’d told the girl, “he’s always kvetching about something.” She’d said the Yiddish word quite without thinking, hardly even realized she’d said it, though she did notice the girl looking at her oddly.
“And do you know, I can’t prove it, but I believe that girl followed me home to Brooklyn. Because the next Monday morning, I saw her talking to the manager, and at noon that day he fired me. For being Jewish.”
The incident had changed her mother’s life. “After that,” she’d declare, “I said to myself, enough of the goyim. And I went back to my religion.” A year later, she’d married Daniel Adler.
These memories were soon interrupted, however, by Michael and Nathan arriving for their breakfast. Sarah helped her mother dish up, while her father continued his piano playing downstairs.