Photographer unknown. Berliawsky Family, ca. 1900. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
“This child is destined for greatness.” —Sholem Aleichem
A few days after she was born in the ancient Ukrainian city of Pereyaslav, Leah Berliawsky had a visitor.1 Sholem Aleichem, the renowned writer of Yiddish tales, had come to visit his sister and stopped in at the Berliawsky home next door to greet the new baby.2
“This child is destined for greatness,”3 the famous man declared when he saw her. Not surprisingly, the prophecy became legendary in the Berliawsky family, and Leah’s mother repeated it to her often. It became a talisman for the young woman decades later when she worried about her future success as an artist.
Because birth records of Jewish children in Russia in the late nineteenth century are difficult to trace, it is impossible to know exactly when Leah Berliawsky (later Louise Nevelson) was born. She knew very well where she came into the world, but the girl who became Louise Nevelson reckoned that, while few people outside Russia would have heard of Pereyaslav, everyone would know Kiev. So in her thirties, she claimed that she was born in Kiev—and in the year 1900. When did she come to the United States? More prevarication. She repeatedly said, “When I was four and a half.” But it is more likely she was five and a half. Either way, she was a young child when she arrived in America.
Entering school in Rockland, Maine, at approximately six years of age, Louise Berliawsky would have been confused about her birthdate as well as the fact that at birth she had a different given name. The effect was profound and lifelong. “I don’t remember names, I don’t remember dates,” recalled the artist in her mid-seventies. “I’ve always had a block about names, and I think it was the whole [lack of knowledge about my] background.”4
During her first retrospective—the acclaimed show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1967—Nevelson told a reporter “Art was all that mattered to me … right from the very beginning. My father and mother thought this was wonderful.”5 Her parents’ hopeful vision of what was possible for immigrants in America was an important part of her heritage. She told this version of the story of little Louise:
I was an artist when I was four. (Artists are born, you know. They have to have the right equipment. Once you know you have it, life is not easier; but you are working on the positive side.)6
We were a very handsome family. My father was tall, slender. My mother was beautiful. I adored her. She was God to me. Her greatest pleasure was dressing us four children cleanly and fashionably. We were very free and uninhibited.7
I remember going to the library … with another little girl. I couldn’t have been more than nine. The librarian was a fairly cultivated woman, and she asked my little girlfriend, “Blanche, and what are you going to be?” And she said that she was going to be a bookkeeper….
The librarian asked me what I was going to be, and of course, I said, “I’m going to be an artist.” “No I added, … I want to be a sculptor. I don’t want color to help me.” I got so frightened, I ran home crying. How did I know that? When I had never thought of it before?8
Louise was the oldest of the three Berliawsky girls and the only one who remembered that their mother had lain in bed crying all the time when they first arrived in Rockland. Sympathy for this always unhappy, always unwell parent marked Louise Nevelson for the rest of her life. It forced her to grow up fast and to accept that she would have to find her own way in the new world. “Her own way” would always be an original creation—whether it was when and where she was born or how she rearranged the living-room furniture as a child, made a hat for herself as a teenager, or produced one of her brilliantly composed walls as a mature artist.
“She had all the confidence in the world in herself,” Anita recalled.9 No one in the family, least of all Louise, doubted her ability and drive to be an artist. Her siblings also recalled that, “She was never discouraged about her art. In everything else, in people, the way they acted, what they did—but never in herself as an artist.”10
The turn of the twentieth century saw millions of Jewish families coming to America from central Europe, especially from what was then called the Russian Empire.11 What gave Louise Berliawsky the belief in herself and the determination to overcome the many obstacles she would face on her path to success as a woman artist in a new world, a man’s world? Some of the answers may be found in a careful study of her first years in America. But we must go back even further, to her parents’ youth, the heritage they shared with their children, and how they themselves adapted to their new home. Like all children, but especially children of recent immigrants, perception of their parents’ way of being in the world had great significance. Louise Nevelson, née Leah Berliawsky, was always an intense observer of the world around her. What she saw and absorbed as a child she would eventually transform into the art that made her famous as an adult.
Photographer unknown. Berliawsky Family, ca. 1900. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Louise’s father, Isaac Berliawsky, was born in 1870 in Pereyaslav, sixty miles south of Kiev in the Kiev province of central Ukraine. He was one of the middle sons in a Jewish family of thirteen children, seven of whom died in childhood, either from epidemics or pogroms. He came from a well-educated, middle-class family, not wealthy but comfortable. His mother was a merchant’s daughter. His father was the town scribe and a dealer in vodka and lumber, which involved buying stands of trees and then processing and transporting the lumber to market.12
Jews were not always allowed to own land in some parts of the Russian Empire, but according to Louise’s sister Lillian, their “father’s father owned woodlands in Russia,” and their own father “had worked with him in the woodlands.” The Berliawskys “owned land in my mother’s town. That’s how my parents met. So wood has always been our thing.”13 This version of family history accords well with the high status the family had in Pereyaslav during most of the nineteenth century. As can be seen from photographs taken in Russia, the Berliawskys were urbanized “enlightened Jews” who did not wear traditional dress. They did not follow Orthodox practices or have Chassidic mystical beliefs. Unlike the majority of the Jews in Ukraine, they were part of a growing number of “forward-thinkers,” who sought assimilation with Russian culture and a secular education.
For many hundreds of years Jews had lived in the Russian Empire, specifically in Ukraine, where the Berliawskys lived, and for the most part, relations between Christians and Jews were satisfactory. Jewish communities in the Russian Empire were allowed to govern themselves, and they had developed a rich and complex culture: Yiddish-speaking, pious, and proud of their cohesive culture as the chosen people of God.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Catherine II (the Great) conquered the territory that became the Pale of Settlement—“dozens of large cities, hundreds of small towns and thousands of villages”14 in specific territories in Lithuania and Ukraine. The actual borders of the Pale and the regulations applying to the Jewish populations within it changed many times over the next 125 years. While movement was not restricted for the other cultural groups who also lived in the area, Jews were generally not allowed to travel or live “beyond the Pale.” Depending on the czar and the year, Jews were either forbidden or allowed to live in rural areas, forbidden or allowed to own land, forbidden or encouraged to study or to serve in the military. Jews in the cities seemed to fare better than those in the shtetls or rural villages, where life was hard and often dangerous.
Subsequently Czar Nicholas I, who reigned from 1825 to 1855, curbed the rights of many Jews, whom he considered to be “an anarchic, cowardly, parasitic people, damned perpetually because of their deicide and heresy … best dealt with by repression, persecution and, if possible, conversion.”15 He ordered the expulsion of Jews from some areas bordering Austria and Prussia and imposed severe restrictions on the large and dense Jewish population in Kiev. His government enacted over 600 anti-Jewish decrees. His order for the conscriptions of 70,000 Jewish soldiers included the selection of 50,000 Jewish children, wrenching boys aged six to eighteen from their families for the standard term of twenty-five years.16 The poor and unemployed, who were most likely to be conscripted, were set against the more successful members of the community who often helped their children evade the draft. Instead of holding together against a common enemy as they had from the beginning of the exile, Jews were being divided from one other.17
Traditional, cohesive Jewish life became less and less secure as the burdens of massive conscription and exorbitant taxes were combined with the weakening of the autonomous governance of Jewish communities. In addition, from the end of the eighteenth century until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, members of the Haskalah movement, many of whom saw the Chassidic tradition and the Kabbalah as unnecessary and destructive anachronisms, sought to educate Jews to fit into modern society.18
Ironically, the efforts of the Russian government to undermine Jewish communities, combined with the spread of the Haskalah and the increase in conversions, led to a rise of Orthodox Judaism and the development of Chassidic dynasties within the Pale. By the mid-nineteenth century, to paraphrase Michael Stanislawski—a professor of Jewish History who has also written about Louise Nevelson—Russian Jewry was split into two new groups: the traditionalists and the enlightened.19 Louise Nevelson’s parents represented exactly this divide.
The Berliawsky family was part of the self-conscious, self-confident Russian intelligentsia who believed that the evils plaguing Jews would disappear if they would only shed their superstitious and outmoded customs. Louise’s mother’s family, the Smoleranks, on the other hand, followed the traditional customs, wore traditional clothing, and embraced Judaic mystical traditions.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, during the enlightened reign of Alexander II (1855–1881), the virulent anti-Semitism that had often characterized parts of the Russian Empire briefly abated. Some Jews were allowed to study at universities, travel outside the Pale—which was now home to five million Jews, approximately forty percent of the world Jewish population—and move to the cities, primarily St. Petersburg and Moscow.20
One of the few treasures Isaac Berliawsky carried with him to America in 1902 was a photograph of his great uncle Issaye Berliawsky from Dnepropetrovsk, southeast of Kiev—“the only Jew ever decorated by the Czar of Russia.”21 Though Isaaye was not unique—a fair number of Jews were actually decorated by the czars—he was exceptional. The photograph, which resided in Louise’s parents’ bedroom, portrayed a bearded man wearing many medals and a sword. Depending on which sibling told the tale, Isaaye was either a sculptor, a musician to the czar, the designer of one of the czar’s palaces and apartments, or one of the painters of the local synagogue.
In fact this extraordinary man was a talented engineer whose specialty was designing and constructing cathedrals throughout Ukraine—an unusual occupation for a Jew in the 1880s. When his work came to the attention of the Czar, he was knighted and given a small private army, which he used to fight Cossacks and their anti-Semitic pogroms.22 Issaye was certainly an icon of the past glory of the family and a significant figure for his great-great-niece Louise Nevelson, who, as a child, would have seen him as a person who had gained distinction through art.
Another Berliawsky uncle was visible in a different, but equally prized, family photograph showing a distinguished man in a Cossack uniform wearing a silver star and carrying a sword. He was, according to Louise, “a so-called governor; he had the highest honors and position that our people could have in Russia at that time.”23 Nevelson’s father had told the family that his uncle had been in charge of all the banks for the czar.24 Her son, Mike Nevelson, had heard that he was one of the guards of the czar.25 Since this Berliawsky relative had no children, he “adopted” each of his nephews (allegedly a hundred) so that they could live on his estate and avoid the dreaded conscription into the army.26 It was another family legend recounted in various and sometimes contradictory ways.
Terrible times for Jews in Russia came back with a vengeance after Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. Peasant riots and pogroms erupted throughout Ukraine and lasted for four years.27 Falsely accused of having assassinated the czar, Jews were attacked in their homes and shops in the bloodiest outbreak of anti-Semitism in Russia in centuries. By the end of the 1800s, it no longer seemed possible that Jews—even middle-class, enlightened, Russified artisans and intellectual Jews like the Berliawsky family in Pereyaslav—could expect they would fare well in their homeland.
Between 1881 and 1914, in the largest migration of modern history, millions of frightened but hopeful Jews left the Russian Empire for America—the new country that welcomed the tired, the hungry, and the poor.28 Most went to New York (690,291); many others went to Massachusetts (66,023) and Pennsylvania (108,534). Only 1,835 moved to Maine.29 The hopeful immigrants spread around the world—millions to America, a much smaller number to Palestine.30
Not always allowed the luxury of owning land or any material objects, Russian Jews knew that their only secure possessions were those hidden away in the mind and heart. Intellectual brilliance, ingenuity, cultural knowledge, and aesthetic taste, along with any portable skill, could make the difference between survival or failure wherever they would wander. Many, if not most, of these young emigrants brought with them a deep respect for the arts, especially music, as well as an awareness of the importance of appearances. How one looked to strangers could shape one’s destiny. Louise Nevelson held true to this precept to the last day of her life.
By the end of 1901, five of Isaac Berliawsky’s siblings had already left Pereyaslav for the United States. Two brothers—Nathan and Hyman—had moved to Maine via Canada. Another brother married a gentile and was henceforth no longer considered part of the family. One sister, Mindel, the eldest child, moved to Fall River, Massachusetts, where her younger sister, Sadie, eventually joined her. Isaac was the last son to leave Europe. He had stayed in Pereyaslav to care for his parents, and once his father had died of cancer, he too could emigrate. He left for America in the spring of 1902, along with his mother, who would live with his sisters in Massachusetts. It would take him two years to save enough money to send for the rest of his family—his wife and three young children.
Isaac ended up in Rockland, Maine, where he started his new life from scratch. He thought his stay would be brief, just long enough to get himself to New York City, but he adapted well to Rockland and remained there for the rest of his life.
It had not been part of his plan to marry before leaving the Old World, but he fell in love with a beautiful young girl from a rural village. The story took on mythical proportions when it was passed down to the children. Louise Nevelson recalled the tragically romantic story in her autobiography:
My mother lived in the country in a small town near Kiev where my father’s family owned land…. He was a bachelor in his twenties … and he was on a white horse. And he sees on the street this beautiful girl. She was only sixteen…. He never wanted to marry, but he took one look and he found out who she was and where she lived and he fell desperately in love with her. Nothing on earth could stop him.
She liked another boy and she didn’t want to get married [to my father]. He pursued her so desperately, he just was not going to take no for an answer. She had an older sister who lived in another small town [Rzhyschiv], and the Dnieper River was between them. That river usually froze so they could go over the ice. And this was the one year in one hundred years that the river didn’t freeze, so she couldn’t get over on the other side [and get away from my father].
So she married my father and then was unhappy with him. He was a handsome man, but he didn’t suit her, and also I think it’s hard to be happy when you’re making a transition.31
The childhood of Nevelson’s mother Minna was very different from her husband’s. She was a farmer’s daughter—a peasant really—brought up in Shusneky, a village on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River. Shusneky was typical for many Jews in Ukraine during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite ongoing external dangers, village life was warm and embracing: a jumble of wooden houses clustered closely together around a lively marketplace where Ukrainian peasants brought their fish and hides, wagonloads of melons, grain and garlic to sell. In exchange, Jews sold them “city produce” in the form of hats, shoes, lamps, and dry goods of all kinds.
Photographer unknown. Maternal grandparents Irving and Golde Smolerank, in Shusnecky, not dated. Courtesy of Barbara Fishman
The outside world of gentiles meant hostility and sacrilege. But within the confines of village life everyone was connected to one another through an unsettling combination of constant fear of external attack and closeness to a mythical past and redeeming future. A common language—Yiddish—and a common faith with its familiar rituals held Jewish inhabitants together.
Following the Torah’s 613 commandments for pious Jews brought a sense of security and intimate connection with God. They had survived persecution and exile for thousands of years and were convinced that ultimately their Messiah would come. Each day brought that event closer. Only a jubilant faith and sense of being the “chosen people” could mitigate the unrelenting poverty and dangers of everyday life.
Those dangers were a living memory for Louise Nevelson’s maternal aunt, Eva Smolerank, who was born in 1870. She remembered Cossack pogroms and, specifically, how the marauders stabbed and killed her neighbors as they rode through her town of Rzhyschiv (population ca. 1,600).32 Her younger sister, Minna, born in 1877 just across the Dnieper River, could have experienced the same horrors during her childhood—Jews throughout the Pale were vividly aware of the menace stalking every Jewish community.33
Minna Smolerank was four years old when Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, and the scourge of violent anti-Semitic pogroms erupted throughout the Ukraine. In cities and villages, Jews were attacked, homes destroyed, families killed, and women ravished. From April 26 to May 4, 1881, the most severe attack was a pogrom lasting several days, leaving 762 dead in Kiev, only 60 miles from Shusneky. Throughout that spring and summer over thirty villages and hamlets were attacked. “By the time the violence triggered by Alexander II’s assassination began to subside in 1883, thousands of Jewish homes and businesses had been devastated by roaming mobs, several dozen Jews murdered, and unknown numbers assaulted and raped.”34 A childhood marked by constant danger was the traumatic foundation on which Minna’s later life would rest.
Golde, Minna’s mother and Louise’s grandmother, was thirteen when she married, shaved her head, and for the rest of her life wore a wig, like all wives in the Orthodox Jewish households of Ukraine. Her first babies were stillborn so she followed the advice of her rabbi when she was once again pregnant. He had told her to collect metal and have it welded into a hoop through which her babies should pass in order to come live into the world.35 Golde’s daughter, Minna, would carry some of her mother’s tradition of Chassidic mysticism and magical thinking, as well as her superstitiousness, into the New World.
From this insular life, Isaac Berliawsky snatched Minna because of her beauty. After their marriage in 1897, he took Minna home to his family in Pereyaslav, a city with a Jewish community that dated back to the early seventeenth century. By comparison with Shusneky, Pereyaslav—whose population numbered some 5,800 Jews, nearly 40 percent of the total population—was a large metropolis.36
Shortly before leaving for America in the late spring of 1902, Isaac took his wife (again pregnant) and their two young children back to her parents’ home in Shusneky. There seven months later, Minna gave birth to their third child, Anita, née Chaya.
Minna’s stay there coincided with the Kishinev pogrom only three hundred miles away in April 1903. News of that horrendous three-day event spread fast and far. A report was even published in The New York Times. On Easter Sunday over eight thousand teenagers and adults rampaged through the Jewish quarter of Kishinev—where fifty thousand people, a third of the town’s residents lived.37
When the pogrom had ended nearly fifty Jewish men, women, and children had died, nearly five hundred were wounded, and over two thousand were homeless.38 In the dispatch from St. Petersburg, The New York Times reported that the “anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia, are worse than the censor will permit to publish.”39
Not long after her father left for America, Louise Berliawsky refused or was unable to speak for six months. It has always been assumed that her muteness was a direct result of her father’s departure. What has not been considered are other factors, such as the move from a comfortable home in a city to a more crowded home in a small village; the birth of a new sibling; the death of her paternal grandfather; and the loss of her paternal grandmother, who had gone to America with her father.
Just as important as any of these factors, the little girl may well have witnessed pogroms and even attacks by Cossacks on the village where she lived with her mother and siblings for three years, beginning at age two and one-half. Even if she didn’t witness it herself, she surely would have heard first-hand reports about the violence from neighbors and relatives, including her aunt Eva who lived just across the river. In her very young life, Leah Berliawsky had almost certainly absorbed the fear of the adults all around her. So much had happened so quickly that all the separations and fear may have tipped the toddler into a traumatic reaction. By not speaking, she had found a way to control one of the very few aspects of her life that was within her power.
Louise Nevelson never mentioned a word about any of those early events in her autobiography.40 Nor did she tell either of the two people closest to her during the last twenty-five years of her life, Arne Glimcher and Diana Mac-Kown.41 Louise Berliawsky’s dramatic response to the loss of her father, paternal grandparents, and “safe” home presaged her later denials of painful experiences. She did not go to the funeral of either her mother in 1943 or her father in 1946. And shortly before she died, she herself stopped speaking again. Shutting out unpleasant reality had become a way of life—an archaic way of dealing with loss, binding overwhelming sadness and anger.
According to his youngest daughter, Lillian’s recollection, Isaac Berliawsky “had gotten to Rockland by accident. Everyone liked him and he loved Rockland. First he got a little store, then a bigger one, he bought some real estate with a partner—the mayor’s wife—and at one time he owned half of Rockland.”42 The family story about how their father succeeded in America was classic. But, as usual, the reality was different.
Quarreling with his brother Nathan, who had come to America before him and become successful in Waterville, a thriving town in central Maine, Isaac Berliawsky decided to go it alone in his adopted country. After saving enough money and learning enough English, he allegedly gave his hard-earned cash to a train conductor or a ticket seller and said that he wanted to go as far from Waterville (and his brother) as the money would take him.43
Whatever the truth, he got off the train sixty miles away in Rockland. With his restless and independent nature, strong work ethic, resourcefulness and, especially, his expectation that with his background and education he would survive and eventually prosper, Isaac did exactly that.
In early 1905, twenty-eight-year-old Minna Berliawsky and her three young children set out for America. Leaving the home of her childhood for the last time, she must have believed that she would never see her parents again, a wrenching separation from which she never recovered. However terrifying her childhood and adolescence, she had been surrounded by familiar faces and reliable religious rituals. Though she was now going to a much safer place, it would never feel like home.
The Berliawskys went via the standard route for Ukrainian Jews—by train through Kiev and on to Hamburg, from there by boat to Liverpool, and finally on to Boston, a three-month voyage to the new world, a perilous and difficult journey marked by crowding and deprivation, including a six-week period of quarantine in Liverpool because of an outbreak of measles. Yet, for the bright and very visual five-and-a-half-year-old Louise it was an adventure that impressed her with many new sights and sounds.
In her autobiography, Nevelson claimed that her “earliest memory” dated from that momentous trip—a candy store in Liverpool: “There on the shelves I saw every color of hard candies in jars. And then the lights—it was glass that had reflection. So it looked like heaven…. It was very magical…. An impact that even now, seventy years later, still thrills me.”44 Evidently the candy store in Liverpool was not her actual first memory, because Louise had a vague earlier recollection of her maternal grandmother, Golde Smolerank, in Shusneky, dyeing wool: “Different colors with vegetable dyes … a faint recollection of the house … the stove … built in the wall.”45 The knowledge of her maternal grandmother’s talent was carried to the New World, since Minna Berliawsky often said to her children that her own mother “had the most beautiful sense of color.”46
Earliest memories tend to be composites of important early experiences. Always significant and rarely actual, they provide a revealing glimpse into an individual’s early life and major concerns. Freud’s observations on the subject of childhood memories are instructive here:
It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess.47
[C]hildhood memories … are only elicited at a later age when childhood is already past; in the process they are altered and falsified … so that generally speaking they cannot be sharply distinguished from fantasies.48
Indeed, it usually happens that the very recollection to which the patient gives precedence, which he relates first, with which he introduces the story of his life, proves to be the most important, the very one that holds the key to the secret pages of his mind.49
Color played a strong role in Louise Nevelson’s earliest visual memories; the lights and reflections in the glass she so vividly recalled as a five year old would much later become a central theme in her formal vocabulary, and yet she almost completely eliminated color from her mature and signature style, which fit her pattern of denial and reversal. Perhaps more remarkable is the fact that at both the beginning of her career and at its end Louise Nevelson turned to work in color.
Another pleasant recollection in Liverpool involves playing with children in the street and her first encounter with “a doll that shuts and opens its eyes.” “That was almost the first thing to make me an artist…. Because of the wonder of it.”50 It must have seemed like magic to the little Russian girl. The black bristled eyelashes reappeared many decades later as her own furry fringe of false eyelashes, an important part the public persona the artist developed in her mid-sixties.
The six-week stay in Liverpool could have been quite frightening, not only because of the danger of illness but because a quarantine had the potential to put the entire trip in jeopardy. Yet, of this time Louise Nevelson recalled only pleasant memories. Perhaps by comparison to the two-and-a-half years in the village of Shusneky, Liverpool felt safe.
Joseph Dondis, a Russian-born relative of Isaac’s, met the newcomers at the boat in Boston. He christened the Berliawsky family with Americanized names, “Nathan,” “Louise,” and “Anita.” Then Dondis put them on the last stage of their journey to join their father—an overnight steamship trip to Rockland, Maine, where Isaac Berliawsky had settled three years earlier. They arrived, dressed for the important encounter, wearing Persian lamb coats and hats.51 Isaac greeted them at the wharf and transported them to the rooming house on the rough waterfront Sea Street in which he was living. The area was known for its brothels and bars catering to fisherman and sailors. The Berliawskys’ fellow roomers were from the humble working class in Rockland—servants, sailors, a mason, a waiter, and a rabbi. For at least five years the family lived on Sea Street.
The location on the water gave the children a chance to play near the shipyards and watch the big boats being built—sometimes as many as four or five at a time.52 Rockland was not a sleepy village but rather a lively town of 8,000, the biggest American port next to San Francisco, according to tonnage and numbers of ships, sending lime, wood, and granite all over the world. Mining, smelting, and fishing were the major industries of the day. Not far away was Bangor, Maine, then known as “the lumber capital of the world,”53 no doubt making the whole region a draw for a young Russian whose father and grandfather had been lumbermen.
Even after they moved to their next home on Linden Street at the corner of Tillson Avenue, the Berliawsky family was still only a few blocks from the water, and the children recalled sitting with their mother watching ships trying out the Rockland breakwater. “Look and see how beautiful everything is,” Louise’s sister, Lillian, recalls her mother saying to the children.54
The four new arrivals in 1905 were transported into a community whose climate was much like the old country, and whose landscape was not so different, except that Rockland bordered the ocean. But the crucial shift was away from a warm, closely integrated community where everyone was familiar and spoke Yiddish, the common language, and shared a common culture. In Rockland, Maine, Minna was a foreigner—as was anyone not born and bred there—and she felt unwelcome in her new home, despite the presence of twenty-two other Jewish families living in the town, some of them also recent immigrants.
Not long after his wife and three children had arrived, Isaac Berliawsky collapsed. As Louise recalled: “I remember my mother saying that he was never lazy in Europe, yet when we first came, he lay in bed for months. He went through transition, not knowing what to do.”55 The arrival of his unhappy peasant wife and three young children, combined with the loss of his freedom, must have stopped him in his tracks. Whether her father’s depression lasted weeks or months, his oldest daughter knew that he had not been available to help her newly arrived, non-English-speaking mother for what must have seemed like a long time. But once he recovered his equilibrium and settled his family into the humble housing he could then afford, he went back to work with a will. He was up at dawn, back for lunch and then not back until late at night, when he ate his dinner after the family was done, making do with leftovers.
When he first arrived in Rockland, Isaac lived in the house of a Russian-speaking young widow, Mrs. Bloom. According to his grandson Mike Nevelson, he had a child with her.56 Another of his conquests, also a rich widow, was a Mrs. Brown, who introduced him to the Jewish community and helped him get work.57
Thirty-one-year-old Isaac began by doing any job he could find. He was a paper-hanger; he had a grocery store; he made bullets from scrap metal during the First World War; he bought and sold property; he bought and sold timber—coming in spring to “wake people out of their winter sleep,” to pull out the logs and sell them to lumber mills, and in winter he chopped wood.58 Always ambitious, he started small but thought big. He went back and forth in his varied jobs, always resourceful. He prospered first in the Jewish community and then, in time, in the general community.59
Like many other recent Jewish immigrants, especially those from the Pale, he also worked as a peddler, walking door-to-door, selling whatever he could find—scrap metal, rags, and old clothes—at a profit.60 Later he began to collect antiques, recognizing their aesthetic appeal before most others did. Eventually, he had barns full of antiques and turned what had started out as a sports palace into yet another warehouse for his goods. His youngest daughter Lillian noted that Louise was “just like her father—always collecting things, keeping pebbles and marbles, anything she’d find. She would put it on the floor, or anywhere.”61 The same aesthetic impulse that had him collecting antiques propelled Isaac Berliawsky to buy the town’s first Victrola—as the early record players were called—and recordings of the most famous opera singers of the time—Enrico Caruso and Amelita Galli-Curci. He was sensitive to beautiful objects and loved art and music. Better educated with a greater appreciation of culture than many other Jews in Rockland, he taught his children to look for quality.
When Anita and Louise were ten and twelve, respectively, he would send them “to look at a house he was thinking of buying and tell him what it’s worth—that’s how he taught us to value.”62 Lillian recalled her father’s always saying, “ ‘Isn’t this house beautiful? Look how it was made.’ That’s why architecture is second nature to Louise.”63 The family’s favorite houses were the big palatial ones on Beech Street, and Louise knew every one of them. “For her, the bigger the better. Our father wanted to buy one for us, but my mother raised such a ruckus that we didn’t buy it.”64 His daughter Anita recalled: “He always wanted to move into another house, better, better, better.”65
Isaac “Belofski” was listed as a grocer in the 1906–07 Rockland Directory, a junk dealer in the 1910 national census, and a peddler in the 1912–13 and 1917 editions of the directory. As he grew accustomed to life in America, he gradually moved toward work that repeated his family’s success in the old country—owning land. His previous education helped. “He was admired for his knowledge of Hebrew by Mr. Rosenberg [a wealthy realtor] who lent him money to buy land when most banks were not lending money on land.”66 In 1907 he bought his first parcel of land on Linden Street in the South End of town and after that he never stopped. By 1912, with the help of his son, he had built a home for his family on that plot. He built other houses, using his own lumber and land. His one grocery store turned into five, and his early land purchases led to his owning most of Main Street. Between 1910 and 1920, he bought fifty-one parcels of land in Rockland. He went into partnership in a real estate firm with his one-time companion Mrs. Brown; Brown, Blaisdale and Berliawsky became successful, and Isaac became one of the largest landholders in Rockland and the fourth-highest taxpayer.67 His pride was evident in the heading on his stationery: “Isaac Berliawsky, Real Estate Dealer and Broker, est. 1907.”
Though he prospered, he was never rich, since all his property was mortgaged. As his daughter Anita recalled, “With twenty dollars, he would borrow another twenty dollars and buy yet another house.”68 It was as if he had to make up for all the generations of Jews who hadn’t been able to own their own land.
Isaac was widely known for his generosity and honesty. His grandson Mike Nevelson recalled stories he learned growing up in Rockland: that his grandfather “never collected rent and was tender-hearted, giving anyone anything they needed,” Jew and Gentile alike. “When his lessees were hungry he would bring chicken soup, and he would keep people on even when there was no work for them.”69 He wouldn’t use chainsaws, because they not only made too much noise and “disturbed the trees,” but also because they would deprive men of work. During the Depression, even though he lost much of his money, he took care of the poor in Rockland.70 He was also very generous with his girlfriends.71
Isaac was a colorful character to his family. Mike Nevelson recollected the sight of his grandfather, “pockets stuffed with deeds, the biggest trader of real estate, bottle of whiskey in one pocket, deeds in the other, or/and sardines and crackers.”72 He had to carry the bottle in his pocket because, “my grandmother used to break them whenever she found where he had hidden them in the house.”73 His taste for simple food (sardines and crackers) as well as alcohol was carried down to his oldest daughter, Louise.
His children also remember him for being outspoken, stubborn, and having “a bad temper—a real Russian.”74 All the children knew of his angry outbursts and were scared that their mother would complain to him about their misdeeds.75 But Louise recognized the fragility underneath his ferocity: “If you did this [knocking wood], he jumped.”76 In retrospect we can imagine the stress Isaac Berliawsky must have felt making his way in his new world. Louise recalled: “When he came home it was like an engine. I always felt like it was a furnace downstairs going chuga-chuga-chug. So we didn’t communicate much.”77 He used to run to work “because he didn’t have time to get into a car and drive.”78 His son called him “high-strung and very eccentric.”79 His grandson described how he could be “troublesome, a kind of radical.”80 For example, he refused to become a passive part of the small Jewish community in Rockland. In a quarrel with some members of the tiny local synagogue he went so far as to refuse to be buried next to them, donating a plot of his own land for a separate family cemetery—Berliawsky-Small Cemetery—in 1931, and joining with a few friends to start a new synagogue. A year later the split was healed, and Isaac was named president of the Adas Yoshurun Synagogue in 1932. But the separate cemetery remained.
Like many first-generation immigrants, all his ambition was for his family and their future. He wanted the best for them and never complained when his wife spent money shopping for clothes for herself or the children. “He was very proud of his girls and the fact that so many people in Rockland would stop him on the street and tell him, ‘You have such beautiful children.’ Or: ‘Lillian and Louise are gorgeous.’ ”81 He himself was tall and handsome (according to Louise he weighed 140 pounds and was “dashing”). But despite his good looks he cared nothing about clothes or spending money on himself. His wife had to buy him new clothes and burn the old ones lest he try to wear them yet again.
All in all, Isaac Berliawsky had made an excellent adjustment to his life in the New World. As Louise recalled: “He thought he would be the one who wouldn’t like a small town and that we’d all move to New York. But he was much more contented than my mother.”82 “He adjusted, but my mother never did.”83
Like all children, Louise Berliawsky identified with both parents; just as all children feel ambivalence for both parents. “I always thought my father was a piece of genius,” Nevelson later wrote. “That has given me my strength.”84 From Isaac she learned to stand on her own two feet, to work hard and play hard, to appreciate culture and creativity, to look carefully and use her eyes to assess value and beauty, to speculate, to always aim for the highest and best, to be generous, to not worry about money, and to ignore deprivation. Most of all, from her apparently fearless father, she learned to be a fighter and not to fear controversy and to have confidence in herself over time. But she also learned from him how to deal with depression—by working maniacally and drinking too much.85 The admiration Nevelson felt for her father was mixed with ambivalence. He had, after all, abandoned her when she was very young—leaving her behind when he went to America. He could be difficult, irascible, and angry, and she must have noted that he was not faithful to her mother and that there was little affection between them.
