ONE

Beyond the Pale: A Brooklyn Childhood, 1908–21

Lena Krasner (right) and her younger sister, Ruth, posing for a snapshot on their front stoop when they were about seven and five, wearing identical coats and boots as well as short, cropped straight hair. Unlike their older siblings, they were so eager to be American that they hardly bothered to speak Yiddish or Russian.

LENA KRASNER WAS BORN ON OCTOBER 27, 1908—NINE months and two weeks after her mother, Chane (Anna) Weiss Krasner, had arrived in New York from Shpikov, a shtetl located in the southern part of the Russian region then known as Podolia, now in central Ukraine, about thirty-five miles south of the city of Vinnytsia. Shpikov was then part of the Pale of Settlement, the area where the Russian Imperial government restricted Jews.¹ Anna had sailed on a Dutch liner, the Ryndam, out of Rotterdam and had arrived at Ellis Island on January 14, 1908, to join her husband, who had reached America in September 1905, traveling out of Liverpool, England.

In Shpikov, Jews were predominantly Hasidic, followers of a mystical revival movement that began in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. Lena’s father had, along with Anna, worked for a rabbi, helping to manage ritual observances, including dietary laws, kosher slaughtering of animals, services on religious holidays and Sabbaths, weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and circumcisions. Joseph Krasner had left behind his wife and four surviving children so he could earn money for their passage—a strategy that was painful, risky, and only too common among those who wanted to flee the Russian empire in the early years of the century.² But Anna’s younger unmarried brother, William Weiss, had emigrated earlier, and his reports of life in America gave Joseph the confidence to sail. To the Jews oppressed by the tsar, America appeared to offer endless opportunity and the prospect of prosperity.

Before Joseph’s departure, the entire family posed for a photograph before a landscape backdrop. The staid adults and four solemn children look well dressed, even elegant—typical of what a couple would want to remember of each other while being forced apart by the ordeal of emigration. Anna is carefully coifed and dressed with a ruffled and belted blouse, the children neatly accoutered and groomed, their father dressed in a modern secular style, wearing a dapper bow tie and white collar, with no sign of Hasidic or Orthodox garb. In the photograph, the edge of the painted landscape is visible. This imaginary background must be one of the first painted scenes that Lena ever saw.

The hints of prosperity visible in the photograph—and that it was commissioned—suggest that poverty was not the reason the Krasners left Russia. The motivations may have been more grave. There was a massive flight from Eastern Europe, and especially from Russia, around the turn of the century, when Jews suffered anti-Semitism, oppressive taxation, and enforced conscription of their sons.

The Jewish population of Russian Podolia began to emigrate in the aftermath of the March 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, which was blamed on Jews, causing anti-Jewish riots or pogroms. Pressure to emigrate grew more urgent after the Krasners heard the ominous news of a pogrom at Kishinev, a town in southern Russia. In the spring of 1903, anti-Semitic propaganda from reactionary local journalists led to bands of rioters staging an organized attack on Jews, looting and destroying their shops and homes while police and soldiers stationed on the streets stood by without interfering. The next day, the looting turned to savage violence—the police and soldiers raped women, destroyed the local synagogue, and tortured and killed forty-nine people. Nearly six hundred others were injured.³

“There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Orthodox Easter,” the New York Times wrote. “The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘Kill the Jews,’ was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.”⁴

The Krasners did not need much more to imagine that this could happen elsewhere, including Shpikov. Just after Joseph left for America, a new wave of anti-Jewish pogroms swept the Pale of Settlement. In response to the pogroms, Tsar Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto in 1905, which granted fundamental civil rights and political liberties to Jews, which in turn sparked ethnic and political tensions and hostilities that exacerbated popular unrest. Pogroms were directed not only at Jews but also at students, intellectuals, and other minorities. In Odessa alone, at least 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews were killed and approximately 300 people, mostly Jews, were injured. Many Jewish homes and stores also suffered damage. Anna, alone with the children and eager to join Joseph, must have anxiously waited for him to send her enough money to escape. When Joseph arrived in America, he was among the thousands of Jews (77,544 in 1904 alone, almost double the number that fled in 1902)⁵ who left Russia at this time for the New World, many in response to the Kishinev pogrom. The impetus for Jews to flee the Russian empire had only intensified by the time Anna and the children were able to join Joseph.

The desire for freedom had already inspired some Jews to promote socialist revolution. Jewish socialists stressed that social justice had a tradition in their religion: the moral commandments of the Torah (the five books of Moses read each year from start to finish) and the Talmud (authoritative body of law and commentary), and the customs of tsedaka or righteousness and justice toward others, community responsibility, and mutual aid. The radicals, who joined an underground labor movement that organized massive strikes, also took the innovative step of praising women as comrades and intellectual equals. These actions were in sharp contrast to traditional Jewish men, who reinforced ancient customs that seemed misogynistic to many women.

As conditions deteriorated in Russia, some Jews became fixed on the idea of finding a Jewish homeland, but many like the Krasners turned to America, though even there asylum was far from settled. Prejudice toward the new Jewish immigrants meant that a family like the Krasners had to struggle to earn a living, educate their children, and obtain an improved standard of living.

At the time, controversy about the massive numbers of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and about the issue of race itself pervaded American society. President Theodore Roosevelt had even been criticized for asking the African American educator and author Booker T. Washington to the White House for lunch. The problem of what it meant to be Jewish in America and in the world at that time concerned United States Senator Simon Guggenheim of Colorado (the son of a Swiss-Jewish immigrant peddler). He asked that “the Immigration Commission cease to classify the Jews as a race,” opposing W. W. Husband, secretary of the Immigration Commission, who wanted census enumerators to classify Jews as a race. “The Jew is a native of the country in which he is born, and a citizen of the country to which he swears allegiance,” argued Rabbi T. Schanferber. “We are only differentiated from others as respects religious beliefs.”⁶ “It is a great question as to whether there is such a thing as a Jewish people,” the noted rabbi Dr. Emil G. Hirsch agreed, saying. “Our blood is mixed with that of almost every other nationality.”⁷

Others such as Rabbi Leon Harrisson of St. Louis, who had a specific problem with intermarriage, took issue with this point of view. In a 1909 speech in New York, he said, “History and experience have shown us that unless we keep our race separate from others our religion also will soon cease to be…diluted to extinction.”⁸

At the same time, popular accounts of work by a Harvard professor, William Z. Ripley, warned in “Future Americans Will Be Swarthy” that “racial heterogeneity, due to the direct influx of foreigners in large numbers, is aggravated by their relatively high rate of reproduction after arrival, and, in many instances, by their surprisingly sustained tenacity of life, greatly exceeding that of the native-born American.”⁹

Surrounded by these conflicts over the meanings of race and religion, a highly vocal and visible fraction of Jewish immigrants put forward their belief in social justice and political reform. They found in America such harsh working conditions that they felt compelled to continue the struggles begun in Europe, often becoming strike leaders and union organizers. This kind of Jewish militancy no doubt reflected disillusion with the stories of a better life in America. At the time of Krasner’s birth, United Hebrew Charities, led by Jacob H. Schiff, tried to raise funds to support the Jewish poor, especially some of the more than 170,000 immigrants who had arrived in two fiscal years. He spoke of “a condition of unparalleled distress” during a year of “financial and industrial depression” and declared that “the Jewish community was not doing its duty.”¹⁰

Impoverished and often radicalized Jewish immigrants thronged the Krasners’ Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn. Lena’s birth just over nine months after her mother’s landing provided the reunited family with a child who was by law immediately a citizen of their adopted country. Her father was thirty-seven and her mother was twenty-eight.¹¹

At the time of their arrival in America, Krasner’s four siblings included three sisters—Ides (also known as Ida, later changed to Edith) aged fourteen, Esther (Ester, later changed to Estelle) aged nine, and Rose (also known as Rosie) aged six—as well as one older brother, Isak (also know as Isadore or Izzy, later changed to Irving), who was then eleven.¹² A fourth sister, Riva, had died in Shpikov when she was just three or four years old.¹³ Isak’s situation had been especially precarious in the Old World because he was nearly the age when military conscription took Jewish sons away from their parents, often for periods of up to twenty-five years. Many times the children were as young as twelve. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 had put Isak at greater risk.

Though Joseph was an Orthodox Jew, he had not followed the Hasidism of many of his neighbors in Shpikov. Instead of their search for spirituality and joy through Jewish mysticism, he favored the disciplined study of religious texts. Among the Orthodox, the most prestigious life for any man was to be a religious scholar. Women were excluded from such scholarly circles and expected to serve their families as both homemakers and breadwinners, enabling their husbands to devote themselves to study. New World realities tempered that tradition in many immigrant households, including the Krasners’, although Joseph was said to be sensitive and introspective.¹⁴

Their father was greatly loved by his children, and Lena adored him, even though, according to her, “he was very remote.”¹⁵ She loved to hear him tell stories to her and her siblings: “Marvelous tales! About forests. Beautiful, beautiful stories, always like Grimm. Scary things. The sleighs in winter going out with the dogs, and there would always be someone standing in the road to stop them. The forest, and always the snow, and sleighs. A foreign world to me.”¹⁶ These stories of romance and of life in the Russian empire entered into the children’s collective memory. Lena liked to snuggle up close to her father and listen. She felt afraid of the dark and remained so all her life.

Her father’s stories fueled her imagination. He spoke of his mother Pesa’s magic. Just before Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the shtetl neighbors visited the old woman and asked her to perform the folk ritual known as shlogn kapores, which involved her waving a chicken over the head of someone who wanted this act to transfer their sins to the fowl—three waves of a hen for women and one wave of a rooster for men. Afterward the applicant, now sin-free, hoped to be inscribed in the metaphorical “Book of Life” for the coming year.¹⁷ Shlogn kapores, opposed by various rabbinical authorities since the Middle Ages, continues to exist among some Orthodox Jews as a folk practice.

Lena particularly cherished the story about her father’s old aunt, said to have come from the city to the shtetl in the forest to help celebrate her parents’ wedding. The aunt was so significant that “the bridal couple had to give up their bed to her. She was tough, dominant and nearly immortal. When she died at 103, she had outlived four husbands.”¹⁸ Krasner’s memory of the aunt as “tough” and indomitable mirrors how she liked to think of herself later in life.

As an adult, Krasner remembered that when she was about five years old, she was alone in their home’s dark hall when something that was “half man, half beast” seemed to vault the banister and land on the floor by her side. She cried out—a childhood enigma that resurfaced during psychoanalysis and made its way into a painting.¹⁹ Though we know that the adult Krasner remained traumatized by this early experience, she did not elaborate on what sort of monster she experienced. Though she picked up her mother’s fears and superstitions, Krasner longed to be strong like her legendary great-aunt and adopted that persona whenever she could.

Joseph’s religious books with their elaborate decorations and Hebrew script also fascinated little Lena. There were also newspapers in Yiddish, a Germanic vernacular language that utilized Hebrew letters. Lena started Hebrew school when she was about five years old, but instruction focused on shaping letters instead of thoughts: “I learned to write but I couldn’t read it…. Visually I loved it. I didn’t know what it meant. What they’re teaching, they will say—they’ll give you the alphabet, identify it—I could follow that to a certain point. What I couldn’t follow was actually reading. I was slow there, if you will. So that visually I could stay with it.”²⁰

At home her parents spoke Yiddish and Russian, but her older siblings also spoke English, which she learned at school. She recalled later that she also spoke “a bit of Yiddish, but if [her parents and elder siblings] went off and spoke real fast [she] couldn’t even get that.”²¹ By her own admission, languages were not her forte, and that kept her out of some of the family’s interaction.

Through memorization, she learned to recite the daily morning prayer in Hebrew when she got up each day, though she never understood what it meant until much later in life. “Well I didn’t know what I was saying; I had to say it or God would strike me dead.”²² She later referred to this prayer as “my own shattering experience,” explaining that when she finally “read a translation of the Prayer, which is indeed a beautiful prayer in every sense except for the closing of it; it said, if you are a male you say, ‘Thank You, O Lord, for creating me in Your image’ and if you are a woman you say, ‘Thank You, O Lord, for creating 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 Jewish girls. An intense rivalry developed between Lena and Ruth, who shared a bed with their older 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 entire life. 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 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 village atmosphere, 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 vote. Many of the immigrants had already been radicalized after fleeing oppression in Eastern Europe. Although the historian Daniel Bell has argued that “European enthusiasms were tempered” after immigrants accommodated to their new environment in America, it appears that the immigrants’ American-born children often not only acquired an instinct for radical politics but also their parents’ sense of social justice.⁵²

Krasner was among those who developed a vigorous sense of social justice. The suffrage campaign must have been gripping for Krasner. Unlike her older siblings, she was American-born, and when American women achieved the vote in 1920, she only had to wait to come of age to enjoy that right herself. It is unknown what Krasner’s mother knew about the suffrage campaign, but her elder sisters must have been aware of it.

Though she received a typical indoctrination in religious ritual and belief at home, like many of her contemporaries, Krasner felt an even stronger pull to separate from the Old World ways of her parents, especially from the household and family burdens placed on her mother and her elder sisters. Like so many first-generation Americans and immigrants who arrived as small children, Lena began to question traditions that were identified with the old country. Krasner’s inclination to independence was supported by popular culture, even Yiddish cinema, which featured rebellious “jazz babies,” who renounced the backwardness of their parents, adopting instead dreams of being American and individual.⁵³

Lena’s role models at home were her father and brother, both of whom she favored over her sisters and her mother. Her brother Irving, who studied chemistry, introduced her to all kinds of cultural pursuits: he went to the library and brought home books by the great Russian authors, such as Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorki, and Turgenev. Even though he could read in Russian, he probably read aloud to Lena from the English translations. There was also the Belgian francophone dramatist and poet Maeterlinck. And he listened to the music of Enrico Caruso, then the leading male singer at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.⁵⁴ Irving liked the visual arts; he never married, and as an adult, he even collected art.⁵⁵

When Irving read to Lena from the translations of Maeterlinck, she would have found encouragement for her love of nature. Maeterlinck’s News of Spring and Other Nature Studies, including The Intelligence of Flowers, which was published in an American edition in 1913, could have reinforced the young Krasner’s love of flowers.⁵⁶ Not only do the irises, roses, and daisies that she recalled from her childhood all appear in this volume, but there is also an elaborate discussion of the lettuce leaf’s remarkable ability to defend itself against slugs, recalling the unusual metaphor of a lettuce leaf, which she drew upon to explain her art in the statement for her first retrospective in 1965: “Painting, for me, when it really ‘happens’ is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon—as, say, a lettuce leaf. By ‘happens,’ I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspect interlock.”⁵⁷ In Maeterlinck, Krasner would also have been introduced to his use of symbols used to stand in for ideas and emotions.

In one of Maeterlinck’s best-known plays, the fairy tale The Blue Bird (1908), the fairy Bérylune, a hunchbacked crone, sends the two children Tyltyl and Mytyl out to find the Blue Bird of Happiness for her sick daughter. She gives Tyltyl the visionary diamond: “One turn, you see the inside of things…. One more, and you behold the past…. Another, and you behold the future.”⁵⁸ Tyltyl rotates the diamond, and the fairy becomes a princess of extraordinary beauty. The subsequent adventures take the children to the graveyard in search of the Blue Bird, to the Land of Memory, the Palace of Night, and the Kingdom of the Future. Years later Krasner would emphasize her interest in “time, in relation to past, present and future,” recalling Maeterlinck’s imagery, which appears to have contributed early on to the shape of her artistic imagination. She later affirmed: “All work has psychological content.”⁵⁹

In Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, Irving and Lena could find analogies between Gogol’s treatment of the inequities of an unjust social order and their own poverty in immigrant Brooklyn. Krasner would feel too, as with so many modern writers, the power of Dostoevsky’s depictions of the human condition. Perhaps Irving read her both Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov and imparted ideas that anticipated psychoanalysis and existentialism. Turgenev’s most widely read novel in America was Fathers and Sons, featuring themes of conflict and love between generations.⁶⁰ This spoke powerfully to an American-born child growing up in a family of immigrants.

Lee Krasner’s sister Rose, six years her senior, shared a bed with Lee and their youngest sister, Ruth. American born, the two youngest sisters vied for attention from their parents and older siblings, all of whom were immigrants.

Lena’s favorite teacher at P.S. 72 was male. She was probably about eleven or twelve when she had Mr. Philip L. Walrath as her teacher. She recounted that he was “eccentric enough” to believe that girls should be allowed to play baseball with the boys: “Togetherness like that was my kind of thing!”⁶¹ While it is not clear what art instruction this school offered, Krasner recalled the craft aspect of making a map of the United States: “Every time I see a Jasper Johns map, I remember how crazy I was for doing that thing. We had to figure out what each state was known for. I got tiny empty capsules and filled them with wheat or whatever and glued them onto a piece of beautiful blue paper. I had drawn the states in colored crayon. And I just loved that blue.”⁶²

Lena could never say why she chose art as a career. “I don’t know where the word A-R-T came from; but by the time I was thirteen, I knew I wanted to be a painter.”⁶³ She once commented, “All I can remember is that on graduation from elementary school, you had to designate what you chose to do, in order to select the right high school. The only school that majored in art which is what I wrote was Washington Irving High School. On applying for entrance I was told that they were filled and as I lived in Brooklyn I couldn’t enter. It led to a good deal of complication as I had to go to a public high school.”⁶⁴

She had already envisioned a better life, a creative career outside of her home, and she also wanted to become economically self-sufficient. Dreams of a husband might have been part of the picture, but certainly not the responsibility and burden endured by the mother of a large family.