Architect, founder of Studio Daniel Libeskind
(1946– )
We came to America from Israel on the SS Constitution on a voyage that was very long and very rough. After maybe fourteen days on the ship, my sister and I were awakened at five in the morning by my mother. “Get up. You’re going to see the Statue of Liberty!” It was very powerful and moving. And then we were looking at the skyline of Manhattan. To see the cluster of skyscrapers—I was thirteen years old and had never seen these buildings before—was like a fata morgana. It was not just the massiveness of the buildings, but that people made them. It was like something out of a dream. That stuck with me. It was unbelievable in every sense.
As we got off the boat, what struck us was how friendly people were to us. Why were people so nice to us? When we went to Israel from Poland, Israel was only eight years old. It wasn’t like it is now. It wasn’t so easy to live there. Even jobs were hard to get.
We were probably some of the last immigrants to arrive in New York by the Statue of Liberty like that iconic picture of the immigrants on a ship. And then we went straight to the Bronx. We went to the Bronx and that was it! We went straight from the boat, literally. We didn’t speak English. None of us. Not a word.
Before the war my mother was an anarchist. She didn’t believe in government. She knew the founders of the cooperative apartment buildings in the Bronx, the Amalgamated. Some of them were old anarchists from Emma Goldman’s time, but there were also Socialists, and Social Democrats, and so just through the grapevine our name, through my mother, was why we were able to get an apartment there. In the beginning, we lived in the Sholem Aleichem houses. In Israel, at that time, Yiddish was neglected and not very well tolerated. Hebrew was and still is the official language. They didn’t even want to talk about Yiddish. Can you imagine what it meant to us that there were buildings named after Sholem Aleichem, the beloved Yiddish writer? Then we moved to Building Number 1, the first residential cooperative building in the Amalgamated Houses, the oldest middle-income co-op in America.
Mr. and Mrs. Straus, very elderly Jews who were our friends, lived in a small apartment there, but in it they had the complete works of Goethe, Schiller, the music of Bach. They were highly intellectual people even though they were working class. The people in the Amalgamated all worked in factories, but when I look back they had more books and literature than any Harvard professor would have today. The love of learning of music and art—how lucky we were. There was a cultural program every week, a small performance, or a poetry reading. There were gatherings. There were places where painters could paint. We adapted easily because we could speak Yiddish and Polish with all the people around us. We thought that we had come to Utopia.
My mother would say to me, Never worry about what other people tell you. Don’t ever buckle to authority. Don’t think that if you’re getting good grades that means you’re doing well. Don’t be under the illusion that everything that is being fed to you is the truth. My father was also very strong. He was very mild, very quiet, but he was very principled. We were not practicing Jews, even though my mother came from a very prestigious Hasidic dynasty, the Gerrer Rabbis. They were like the popes of Poland. People used to fall on the ground to kiss the ground, literally. My cousins are all in Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Israel, with their fur hats and their payes. My cousins—first cousins—have sixteen kids each. My parents rejected this. My father was completely unreligious. Even to his dying day, when religious people came to his hospital room to speak to him or to say prayers, he’d say, Don’t come in. And yet when he died he saw Hebrew letters. He saw aleph, gimel. He was a Yiddishist.
In Poland, where I was born, I started playing music on the accordion, very early on. My parents were afraid to bring in a piano because of the neighbors and their anti-Semitism. Even though it was after the war, my parents were afraid of bringing attention to themselves. The accordion is like a piano, but it’s portable. I wound up playing that strange instrument and I wound up playing in classical venues because I played only classical music, which I transcribed myself. Mostly baroque music, Bach and so on. Even though I was very short I had this very large accordion with four octaves.
When we were in Israel, I won a competition sponsored by the American Israeli Foundation, which brought me to America with my family. Itzhak Perlman won that same year. I remember that Isaac Stern was the head of the jury. Stern said to me, “Why are you playing this small piano?” But, you know, it’s strange, when you play vertically, like on the accordion, it’s hard to play horizontally, like on the piano. Then my interests drifted, because I loved art. I loved painting.
One of the first people I met in America was an Italian American, Tony Roccanova. I met him in junior high school. I didn’t speak a word of English. He was sitting next to me, so I’d pick up something. What is this? It’s a pencil. What is this? It’s a bottle. What is this? A cup. So I had a list of all these words, and that’s how I learned English. What do you call this? I had this list, which I memorized. We became friends and he became an architect as well. I’m still friends with him.
I found that people were not fake in the Bronx. I never met anybody with pretentions there. I never met anyone who was phony. People were very down to earth whether they were Jewish or Irish or Italian or African American.
If you’re born here, you take what you have here for granted. My father was a Holocaust survivor. Until the day he died, and he was ninety when he died, he said, “If Americans knew what they had here, they would kiss the ground.”
My father was very talented in art, but he never had a chance to explore it. He never had any education. When I was in the Bronx High School of Science, there were a lot of bright kids, doing experiments in genetics and physics. You had to bring in a project that you were working on. This was the height of the Cold War, so I decided to build a perfect model of an ideal nuclear shelter. I don’t know why I thought that would be a great project. My father was a brilliant miniaturist and he built these exact replicas of cans of soups, which he painted and which I then used to stack the shelves. I also had a miniature mother, a father, and their two kids in the shelter.
Our apartment in the Bronx was small, and when I went to Cooper Union we had to make models and drawings often using a T-square. In our kitchen, there was one Formica table, with large rounded corners. I never knew if my T-square was on the right angle or if it was on the curve of that table. Those rounded edges began to play a big role in my thinking about architecture. Everyone always talks about the straight edge. Why are other angles so neglected?
I loved the Bronx. Maybe once I went on a trip to Brooklyn. That was like going to a place as far away as Africa. Even Manhattan seemed to be a distant country, but of course the subways were very cheap and the city offered so many ways to educate yourself. Museums were free. You could go to lectures. You could go to concerts. My education was in this cultural arena. Before that explosion of culture in the city, I remember being in the Museum of Modern Art virtually alone. I was also in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in these huge rooms, where I would sketch. I loved the building itself. I thought I was in Rome.
My upbringing was totally influenced by the fact that my parents were Holocaust survivors. Totally. I grew up in the void. I was born in Poland after the war. There had been millions of Jews before the war and there was no one left. I was walking with my father when I was a little boy in Poland. We would meet somebody who he didn’t know and he would say in Polish, “Are you Amhu?” using the Hebrew word for Jewish. If they were, they’d immediately break into Yiddish. It was like a password. A secret code to find out if the person was a Jew.
We’re now finishing a building in Warsaw. The tallest residential tower on the site of a former Stalin-era Palace of Culture building. It’s right next to where my mother was born. It was an old Hasidic neighborhood and of course it was all bombed out. My new building is right across the street.
When we used to go to Warsaw, that Palace of Culture was the dominating symbol of the city and it was such an oppressive symbol, because it was built by Stalin to oppress the Polish people. And now my building is a totally different form. It has nothing to do with what was there. It’s something free. And right near there is a memorial to my mother’s family, a memorial to Rabbi Alter of that Gerrer Hasidic dynasty. It’s a significant memorial. It means a lot to me to be able to come full circle.
Architecture isn’t about stones and concrete. It’s more about storytelling. Everybody has a story. Architecture beyond its being a science, an art, is a storytelling profession. Every building that’s meaningful tells you a story. Only late in my life I discovered from my father that his father was an itinerant storyteller. He went from village to village telling stories. That was his job. He walked from shtetl to shtetl sitting in the market, telling stories.
I’ve had four lifetimes. There was a lifetime when I was a musician.
And there was a lifetime when I was a student and theoretician.
The third lifetime was when I was in Berlin for the Jewish Museum.
And the fourth lifetime was when I won the competition to oversee Ground Zero. Four lifetimes.
It’s not a fake idea, America, New York, the Bronx. It’s not some myth. It’s a reality.