Photographer unknown. Berliawsky family portrait, ca. 1907. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
“It is how you shine in your own family first that makes you a star…. I was the star because I wanted to be.”
—Louise Nevelson. Vogue, June 1976
Whatever Minna Ziesel Berliawsky had seen or known in Russia, coming to Rockland, Maine, she was thrust into a kind of loneliness that never abated and sealed her off from making connections in her new home. It seemed as though she felt no safer in New England than in the Ukrainian village in which she was born. She was totally unprepared to deal with life in Rockland, and as a result she didn’t. She had not only lost her entire family when she left Russia, she had lost her bearings. Within a month of her arrival in Rockland, Minna was again pregnant. On January 13, 1906, her last child, Lillian, was born. From that time on she avoided intimacy with her husband. She was done with childbearing and done with sharing a bed with a spouse, whom she soon learned was a philanderer. Their marriage further deteriorated. The children were aware of their parents’ incompatibility, though Louise was the only child who could recall her mother’s daily tears, which went on for months after they arrived.
“I don’t think she was too much in love with my father,” Anita explained, “and when she knew she was leaving her mother for good, she became like an invalid neurotic. She cried in bed.”1 Anita recalls that she was “always in bed. She used to have severe headaches and backaches and only came down for Friday [Sabbath] dinner if she felt well enough.”2 She was calm and slow and rarely spoke above a whisper, a characteristic of the depression she suffered and the control she used to hide it. Her grandson recalled, “She was a very unhappy woman, always sick, neurasthenic I think. But she was very kind. She used to cook and bake and wash my socks by hand so that they would be soft on my feet. But I hated living in that house.”3
Photographer unknown. Berliawsky family portrait, ca. 1907. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
These eyewitness accounts of Minna Berliawsky’s sad and lonely life describe a kind of paranoid isolation. It could have been the result of survivor’s guilt or post-traumatic stress due to the violent pogroms in her childhood, or to the rupture of the intense bond with her parents and extended family in Russia. All of these could have been exacerbated by her husband’s infidelities and the vast difference in status between them.
In another interview, Mike Nevelson told a revealing story about her personality: “My grandmother never liked anyone. She would march down to the store like a general. She had no friends but grand airs…. She saw most people as beneath her. She was overtly polite to merchants but scorned them behind their backs. She could be coarse and put the evil eye on merchants, giving them the finger…. She always felt she was being robbed but never argued and wouldn’t discuss prices.”4 Bearing the burden of feeling both inferior and defensive, Minna Berliawsky armored herself with sardonic humor, defiance, and silent superstition, in which she had been schooled by her mother and her upbringing in Shusneky.
Even though many of the Jewish families in Rockland had also emigrated from the Pale of Settlement and spoke her native Yiddish, Minna held herself aloof from them and did little to make herself at home in the welcoming community or adapt to the ways of her new country. She made almost no friends, “would not mix with the WASPs,” rarely ventured out except for necessary errands and was “almost a recluse,” Louise recalled.5 “She didn’t communicate with the community. She retreated, staying more at home with the house and her children. She probably always dreamt of flying away but never quite made it because she married young and had so many children. I think she probably lived a great deal in her fantasies.”6 By turning her back on everyone in Rockland—except her children—Minna could establish her superiority and defend her injured pride.
This was one of the principal lessons Minna Berliawsky taught her children and one that Louise took to heart because she, too, lived “a great deal in her fantasies.”7 Louise had “great sympathy” for her mother, because she knew she was “misplaced socially … misplaced in every conceivable way…. Marriage made her very unhappy…. And she was sick all her life…. She was so ill-adjusted and so beautiful.”8
Like many daughters of depressed mothers, Louise felt her task in life to be her mother’s mother and to take on both her mother’s sorrows as well as her hopes. “I never saw her happy. But I always felt so sympathetic to her that I was determined to open every front door…. And to walk right through the door[.] I didn’t care if I had to build the house myself.”9
Whatever happened outside the house was beyond her control, but inside the house Minna was lord and master. She wouldn’t allow her husband’s antiques into her house. Her son recalled: “She didn’t like antiques and wanted everything new.10 She was an old-fashioned woman who liked overstuffed furniture—nice to look at but don’t sit on it.”11 She also became a fanatic housekeeper. Her daughters reported running home from school on Fridays to wash the floors before the beginning of Sabbath at sundown. (And this was in addition to a cleaning woman who came twice a week.) They recalled she was so particular that they could not use mops to clean but had to be on their knees using hairpins to pick dirt from the corners of the floor.12 Minna aimed to banish every last speck of dust. Her anger, her disappointments, her past pain and present sadness—all could be channeled into a whirlpool of making perfect household order.
Her daughter Louise carried on her mother’s tradition of fanatical housekeeping, and to the end of her long life she could be found sweeping the street in front of her building or mopping floors inside it early in the morning before her helpers were even awake. But, unlike her mother, she found a way to make a creative new order in her studio.
Did Isaac Berliawsky know how badly his wife was faring in her new home? Did he care? He may have been aware of how much harder it was for women whose life was centered around home and family to adapt to a new community, but he could not have realized that without a strong mother to guide and protect them, his daughters would always be at a disadvantage in that era, especially in a rigidly Protestant New England community. The Berliawsky females were obliged to mutely accept social separation in Rockland, where the prejudice against outsiders was silent but certain. “If you tried to break in, you would not be successful—even if you just came from the offshore islands…. Rockland society was completely closed, even to a person from Massachusetts,” remarked a schoolmate of the Berliawsky children.13
Minna not only failed to help her daughters break through the social barriers, she wasn’t even able to help them at school. Anita, the most academically successful of the three sisters, was upset when, at age twelve, she was not skipped a grade at school though she was convinced she deserved it. Knowing that she couldn’t expect any help from her parents, she wrote directly to the school principal, telling him that she was “smarter than Grace Norword, and if she skipped I think I ought to skip. The next day they skipped me.”14 Anita knew that when she got home her mother would probably be in bed and usually turned to Louise for help and encouragement. “Louise made me study and take drawing lessons from her teacher.”15
A staunch believer in equal rights for women, her husband may have hoped that Minna would be less stuck in her old ways and more like the venturesome widow Brown. He masked his disappointments with his wife by putting her on a pedestal (one of his daughters said he “adored” her), but he feared her displeasure and conceded most domestic decisions to her. The children never turned to him for advice, knowing that he would automatically second whatever she said.
With its deep harbor and nearness to the elegant summer resorts on Mount Desert Island, such as Bar Harbor and Seal Harbor, Rockland was a tourist town in the summer when wealthy families from Washington, New York, and Boston arrived by yacht, steamship, or private train on their way to the luxury hotels or palatial summer homes along the coast. “We were really conscious of their wealth.”16 Frequently the wealthy families and their many maids (according to Lillian, some families had as many as “sixty”)17 stopped for breakfast on the wharf. The Berliawsky family was well aware of another world—broader and richer than Rockland and very exclusive—and Louise especially noted the elegance and extravagance of the wealthy summer visitors. Though she knew she could never be invited to socialize with the upper-crust families coming though Rockland, much less the old local families in town, as a young girl looking in from the outside, when a realistic entry into the majority culture was not an option, fantasy took over. Whether or not she was conscious of her wishes, Louise Berliawsky dreamed—even as a child—of wealth and an extravagant lifestyle, of becoming a princess and living in a palace. In her autobiography Dawns + Dusks—compiled transcripts of recorded interviews made by her personal assistant Diana MacKown—Nevelson said about her mother: “A woman who should have been in a palace. I think that’s my idea for myself.”18
According to Louise, once her father was successful, her mother shopped for herself and her daughters at Fuller Cobb, the most expensive department store in Rockland, frequented by New York’s elite on their way to Bar Harbor: “We’d go into the stores in town that catered to the Morgans, the Vanderbilts who summered there—and they had the best of everything. I was the oldest daughter, and no dress was too expensive for me.”19 Dressing up her pretty daughters became Minna’s “art, her pride and her job…. My mother wanted us to dress like queens.”20 That was one of Minna’s few ways of feeling superior.
She had always been aware of her own beauty and seems to have relied on it for comfort and strength. Emerging rarely from her house, she made a resounding splash when she did—reminding everyone how truly different and attractive she could be. Despite the characteristically understated Yankee fashion in which American women in Rockland clothed themselves, Minna Berliawsky always appeared in public dressed magnificently—fashionable, her face rouged (which, according to Louise, was “something of a scandal in town”), and on her head an elegant hat. That was the way they did it in the old country, especially in Ukraine.
Her grandson’s version of this story: “She didn’t like the people in Maine at all. She had delusions of grandeur so she would dress up in a fur coat and march down the street and she wouldn’t look right or left or talk to anybody…. She didn’t like anybody—very Russian. Russians are paranoid and suspicious.”21
“When it came to buying clothes, she didn’t buy many, just once in a while … she would go and buy the best and the most expensive. But it would last for years. She had to have the best, otherwise, she didn’t want anything.”22 Her oldest daughter learned the lesson well. Whenever Louise Nevelson was looking for a hat, a teacher, an art dealer, anything of importance, it would have to be the best. Nothing else would do.23
Preparing for her infrequent forays into downtown Rockland, Minna Berliawsky would take her time. “Before she’d get dressed it would take her five hours,” recalled Anita.24 Louise later commented, bemusedly: “When she dressed up, it would take her a month.”25 But the final effect was astonishing. When she walked down the street, “Everyone came out to look,” Lillian remembered.26 Louise added, “People would say, ‘There goes the most beautiful woman in Rockland.’27 When it came my turn to be the star, I just took what I felt was my heritage.”28
While Louise may have been embarrassed as a young girl by her mother’s need to put on a front of fancy finery, she absorbed the lesson her mother’s conduct conveyed. No matter how you feel inside, what you show to the world is what counts. “[M]y mother knew fashion. She knew the line. And that gives me a feeling of rightness to do what I did,”29 recalled Louise. Like her mother, she developed a taste for fashion that often made her notorious—while her mother’s style was conventional, her oldest daughter’s style was always original. In both cases, reliance on how one looked could hide how one really felt.
Louise’s taste for ingenious improvisation started early, and throughout childhood she tended to extemporize, wrapping fabric around herself in novel ways, pinning white embroidered aprons or linen yard goods in remarkable ways, or creating hats out of unexpected items. Though Minna was a fanatic about never using pins to hold anything together, she was tolerant of Louise’s ways and referred lovingly to “Leykah mit di schmattes” (“Louise with her rags”).30
Like many immigrants, both Berliawsky parents knew that their children had opportunities in America undreamed of for Russian Jews. “When we came here, my father and mother were very aware that it was a new world. Each one … had an equal opportunity…. So my parents believed the children, no matter what sex, should be educated …. and they felt we had the same opportunities that anyone had.”31
A factor supporting the idea that women had a right to lead independent lives was the significant number of gifted female teachers in early twentieth-century America. Professional opportunities for women were limited, and many of the most talented young women taught school precisely because it was known to be a woman’s profession where they were not likely to be jeered at or discriminated against.
“When I told [my parents] at an early age that I wanted to be an artist,” Louise declared in her autobiography, “he was as proud as he could be. And she was [too]. And so they helped in every possible way…. I didn’t feel being a female was any handicap. I felt it was one’s ability that counted. And I just thought I had it.”32
Isaac Berliawsky’s choice of Rockland, Maine, as a base from which his immigrant family could rise was fortuitous—especially for Louise, who found so much support and so little direct opposition to her youthful ambitions. Part of that good fortune was the fact that the principal of Rockland High School was an ardent suffragette. The early recognition of her artistic ability by her art teacher, Miss Lena Cleveland, bolstered her innate self-confidence: “In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life. I drew in childhood and went on painting and moving everything daily. I felt that that was my strength. And my good fortune was that even in a small town in Maine, every teacher knew it too. All the way through school I was fed by these art teachers. I was the gifted one,” she continued. “I was considered to be A plus, so that gave me great confidence and built me up to know that [art] was my natural direction.”33
Louise’s sisters remember: “In kindergarten Louise was fighting with the art teacher who didn’t believe her half the time that she was doing things freehand.”34 Apparently the young girl soon won the confidence of that same art teacher. Nevelson’s recall of her earliest recognition by her teacher is rather glorious:
When I was about seven years old our art teacher … brought in her own crayoned drawing of a sunflower … and … wanted each of us to make a sunflower drawing for … the assignment. I drew a large brown circle for the center and surrounded it by tiny yellow petals…. She picked mine and held it up to the class and said it was the most original because I had changed the proportions of her drawing.35
At the time of this event the young girl did not know what original meant, but hearing her teacher’s praise made her “feel very good.” Miss Cleveland, the small school system’s one and only art teacher, became Louise’s principal cheerleader throughout her thirteen years as a student, and the triumphant overturning of her initial doubts about the girl’s talent set a precedent. Louise would overcome the same hurdle three more times as she proved herself to her future art teachers. This helps explain the foundation of her belief in herself as an artist in the face of future discouragement.
As Nevelson recalled in her autobiography:
So I loved this particular teacher…. I think she also went to Pratt. A woman about fifty-five. Never married. Conventionally she certainly wasn’t beautiful, she was an old maid and behaved like it…. And what appealed to me even then was, she had a beautiful purple hat and purple coat…. And so I said, “Miss Cleveland, you have a beautiful hat and coat.” So we started to talk about it … and she said, “Well, I bought the hat because I liked it. And then I found the coat.” … So that pleased me.36
Nevelson followed this story about her mentor with one about herself when she was fourteen.37 She tells of buying a hat frame, some linen, and then stenciling butterflies and painting them onto the linen. “I wore it to school every day, and no one said a word about it. I was the only one in Rockland who ever thought of doing it…. What made me do it? I think it’s the funniest thing I did. I wore it to school every day, and no one said a word about it.”38
It seems clear in retrospect why the shy fourteen-year-old girl would have done something so “funny.” Miss Cleveland’s example of non-conformism had inspired her. Twenty years later, still identifying with her most significant childhood heroine, Louise Nevelson would be known in the art world as “The Hat.”
In high school Miss Cleveland continued to tell Louise that “she would make a name for herself as an artist.”39 Edgar Crockett, a high school classmate, recalled that, “She surpassed us in color. She found that art came naturally to her.” He also recalled that she always won the competitions for being the best artist.40
In another passage of her autobiography Nevelson recalled that all the art teachers in her school had gone to Pratt: “And they all seemed different from the rest of the teachers, more human. They looked different and behaved differently. And they had a distinction about their clothes.”41 Again Nevelson makes a glancing reference to the humanity of her art teachers—teachers, though she had only one—but she quickly reduces the depth of her admiration by switching to a more superficial topic—their clothes and general appearance. Throughout her life Nevelson turned to fashion or to observations about an individual’s appearance when confronted with a dealer, potential buyer, or art writer who had a genuine interest in her and her talent. It was a safe, familiar, and comforting association. Similarly, increasing the alleged number of supportive art teachers was a confirmation of her childhood talent.
Apart from getting top grades in art, Nevelson did not do particularly well in her other classes. She had difficulty with numbers and names and did badly in grammar, earning C’s on her report cards. Because she was a slow reader, she read only the minimum required. Her own fantasies were always more interesting than anything she had read.42 Louise Nevelson’s odd speech patterns, which became evident later in her life, might have originated from an identification with her mother, an uneducated immigrant, who spoke heavily accented English and never learned to read it. Her parents never pressured her about school, and the whole family seemed to acknowledge that her strength would always be in art. Excelling there made her lesser abilities in other areas acceptable. “I knew that I was going to be an artist,” she told an interviewer. “As long as I wasn’t so smart, I was going to be great! What else could I do?”43 But she actually was “so smart.” It just wasn’t evident during her school days.
Louise’s sister Anita (nicknamed “Books” by her family), who was an outstanding student and went on to college and graduate school to study English literature, explained that Louise “wasn’t dumb, she was smart. I’m literary, she’s visionary.”44 Their older brother, Nate, was also not academically inclined. He was outgoing, resourceful, highly energetic like their father, protective of his younger sisters, and athletic. He saw his job as always watching his siblings, making sure they didn’t get into any trouble.45
Throughout her school years, Louise Berliawsky was self-conscious and socially uncomfortable. “I sat in the back …. My hand didn’t go up too much. Why was I shy? … Partly because I was the tallest. Partly because … I was the most attractive girl in Rockland. But I wasn’t a WASP. So I couldn’t get the prize. Every year we had a Lobster Festival. There was a Lobster Queen. And every year, everyone said, ‘Oh, you’re going to be Queen….’ Every year they said that, since I was a little girl.”46 And because she was never selected, she suffered every day. “I wanted to commit suicide.”47 Decades later when Nevelson became the charismatic art world star, afraid of no one and supremely poised, she would recall her early diffidence and how hard she had to work to overcome it.
At the same time she saw herself as the prizewinner. Though as a child Nevelson was very shy, and looked different from the other local girls, she nevertheless won many prizes and was the captain of the high school basketball team.
Not being a reader, not having a mother who could instruct her in the ways of the world, not trusting her father, despite their shared love of music and culture, moved Louise Berliawsky to turn to Lena Cleveland for comfort and support. “I always thought the art room was warmer than all the rooms in the school,” she wrote. “And so I couldn’t wait to get [there]…. We generate heat toward the thing we like or the thing we are close to…. I knew all my life that that’s where I wanted to be.”48 The girl recognized the “different behavior” and “graciousness” of her art teacher and realized that she had “something that no one around me had.” Perhaps her art teacher recognized how alone and sensitive the shy, talented, young Jewish girl was. Perhaps she saw Louise’s otherness and identified with it, having herself been “other” by virtue of being “creative” and “artistic” and having grown up in the nearby and equally Puritanical town of Camden, Maine.
Throughout childhood Louise Berliawsky’s absolute conviction about her artistic talent is understandable. Indeed, her earliest known work is prescient, at least about the content of the image. Furniture, carefully drawn and arranged on the page, outshines the image of the little girl seated on a big chair. Nevelson would make her name and fame as a mature artist using furniture—broken into bits and pieces. Louise’s early ability is especially evident in her studies from nature. One of the most remarkable is a watercolor of a forest scene with the tree bark as the starring attraction. The subtle gradations of brown, beige, and silver shimmer along the surface of the birch trees portrayed in this work from her teenage years. Likewise, the textures of the bark—sometimes smooth, sometimes broken with shadowy dark patterns that are entirely persuasive—are witness to the young girl’s already highly refined aesthetic perceptions. So too is the complex and vital composition she has created with the leaning tree trunks that crisscross and yet hold tautly together. That she could make the large, long forms of the tree trunks harmonize with the configuration of surface textures seems well beyond the usual gifts of adolescent artists.
When she was far along the road to artistic success, Nevelson gave her adolescent drawings to the Archives of American Art, the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of visual art in America. She must have had some notion of what they would reveal to a discerning eye. Was she as certain as she liked to think about how good she was at art during her childhood and adolescence? Maybe. But she did know that she was ambitious, creative, and in a hurry to get out of town. And she hated being ignored.
Her adolescent drawings—at least the ones she saved and gave to the Archives of American Art—all appear to be work done for her art class at Rockland High School. They include landscapes, detailed drawings of antique furniture (several of which are labeled and historically defined), four interiors, and some small watercolor miniatures of exotic landscapes, which seem to be copies. In addition there are several figures copied from Leonardo, Rubens, and Dürer; a Chinese sculpted figure; and the image of an unidentified sailor. None of the drawings shows the hand of a highly skilled young artist. They are carefully done—after all they are school assignments—but some awkwardness and lack of linear elegance are visible. However, her watercolors demonstrate that she had a fine color sense and a gift for composition.
The interiors show several rooms of the Berliawsky house on Linden Street in exquisite detail. Each is an idealized interior landscape in which the artist has the last word on where every item in the room will be placed and from which angle the viewer is invited to see it. The earliest of the set—drawn when Nevelson was about sixteen—shows the kitchen (1916), with its large commanding stove given pride of place. She created a fairly daring composition in the spatially odd kitchen, which should feel constricted but doesn’t. The linear patterns set up by the in-and-out weaving of the ceiling molding, door edge, and window frame create a sense of movement.
Her depiction of the library of the Berliawsky home done a little bit later reveals a more complex composition, though not much improved in linear elegance. The curved staircase leading upstairs with its rhythmic lights and darks allowed the young artist to open a door into another space. Miss Cleveland had certainly taught her students about the dramatic value of cropping objects, and both the table and the brightly patterned easy chair in the front part of the watercolor are cut drastically on a diagonal as though they were a Japanese woodcut.
Louise Berliawsky was probably better at art than other children in her class, perhaps better than most children in the Rockland school system. But it is likely that her most important artistic gift was not yet apparent in her earliest drawings or paintings. It was, however, evident in the way she moved things around. She may have been drawing as soon as she was able to hold a pencil, and she may even have drawn and painted during all her free time in childhood, but her siblings recalled that “every five minutes she rearranged the furniture in all the rooms of our house.”49 This hint of Nevelson’s future gift for composition seems to have remained mostly under the radar of her own consciousness, too fragmented to be understood clearly.
That she had a strong drive to move everything daily may not be as remarkable as the fact that her very particular mother allowed her to do it. Minna Berliawsky was passive about her children’s activities outside the home, yet she was a fanatical housekeeper. How did her oldest daughter persuade Minna to let her constantly reposition the furniture in the house—including the furniture in her parents’ bedroom?
This activity was not restricted to the Berliawsky household—Louise Berliawsky practiced it in her imagination on the many occasions when she would look through the windows of the nearby homes to figure out better arrangements of chairs, tables, and sofas. Her sister recalled that, “She was always interested in knowing what was inside, how the neighbors had the house decorated, what kind of furniture they had.”50 Did her compulsively neat mother’s concern with cleaning encourage her eldest daughter’s lifelong fascination with order, particularly the masterful sense of order that exists in many of her later sculptures and is notable even in her high school watercolors?
However skilled she was or was not as a result of her school classes, Louise Berliawsky realized early on that she was “a very visual person.” “As a young child,” she said, “I could go into a room and remember everything I saw. I’d take one glance and know everything in that room. That’s a visual mind.”51 In her autobiography she tells of several incidents in which she was deeply moved by what she saw “going to school [around ten or eleven years old] … I saw a black horse. It … had a big torso…. It seems to me that the torso was just bigger … than most of the horses I’d seen. And this color of black against nature of green … everything was in foliage, everything was in bloom … and this horse was right for this environment…. It had the energy of all of nature and had symmetry in its body…. I never forgot the image.”52
Though this forceful memory of a powerful visual experience sounds exciting and dramatic, it took place in nature, and Nevelson often claimed that she had never much liked “nature,” and everyone who knew her well agreed.53 It could be that her dislike was a transmutation of feelings of outside versus inside. Inside her home—however troubled her parents’ marriage—she was respected and loved; she was the leader. Outside, she might face many kinds of hurts and insults—terrors even.
Every morning, lunchtime, and at the end of the school day, the Berliawsky children walked or ran the mile or so between home and school through forested roads. Nevelson saw more nature during her childhood and adolescence than ever afterwards.
In spring, I remember, the trees were so rich, the foliage was so rich that when we were running through it, practically all we could see was this green, above our heads like umbrellas. Big umbrellas, weighing down. And you recognized that if a branch fell, it would kill you. There was a sense of insecurity about it. We accepted it, but I always felt a kind of terror.54
Could Louise Berliawsky have been transmuting the many insecurities of the outside world, especially the ones related to the community—in between the warmth of the art room and the known world of her home—into a view of terrifying nature? Or could it be that her memories of life in the rural village of Shusneky from age two and a half to five and a half were traumatic but repressed, emerging primarily as “a kind of terror” of the forest and of all raw nature? These two experiences that Nevelson recalls from her childhood of being in nature and being either excited or frightened suggest a powerful conflict. Sometimes what she saw was wonderful, exciting, and life-enhancing. At other times a powerful visual experience could frighten her half to death.
The one time Louise Berliawsky recalled being very emotional during her young life in Rockland was when, at age fourteen, she saw five hearses go past as she was returning from school. She had read in the local paper that a distinguished Englishman, whose adored wife had recently died, was so devastated that he killed his four children and himself. When she got home she “shed a ton of tears,” surprising her mother who “was overwhelmed to see the power of her daughter’s feeling.”55 The depth of sorrow unleashed suddenly at the sight of so many hearses drawn by so many black horses would be an upsetting experience for any child who knew that the father had been the agent of these deaths. But an additional weight of sorrow on a child whose traumatic early experiences were usually repressed could have been burdensome.
Given that Isaac Berliawsky loved music and that a musical education was an essential part of their Russian Jewish heritage, all the Berliawsky children—especially the girls—learned to play an instrument and sing. Well-brought-up girls of that era, whether immigrant Jews or Protestant Yankees, were expected to provide musical entertainment for the family. Anita learned to play the violin, and all three girls played the piano. As adolescents they participated in concerts given at the elegant home of their music teacher, the aristocratic Miss Madeleine Bird. The early schooling in public performance was intended to make the Berliawsky daughters more comfortable in their new world and would serve Louise Nevelson well in years to come.
“There was no elocution teacher in town but my mother agreed to let me take singing lessons [which would include elocution]. For two years I passed the voice teacher’s house almost daily but was afraid to go in to see her. It was a very painful experience but one day I broke through it. She began to teach me some of the rudiments of opera singing, especially breathing techniques.”56 This story illustrates Louise’s tendency to break through the crust of her nervousness after a long period of wanting and waiting to do something—skittishly avoiding it and then suddenly plunging forward—which became a pattern later in her life. When she left Maine for New York, both her sisters knew that she would do something and become somebody. At the time they thought of her as a singer who would make her name and fame on stage. Her brother later recalled, “She had a great drive in her. She wasn’t going to be an average idle person.”57
Against the background of being “the gifted one,” “the star pupil” in her art classes, the feeling of alienation as the daughter of lower-class Jewish immigrant parents—as the Berliawskys were considered by the locals, despite her father’s success in business—was ever present. According to the seventy-six-year-old Louise Nevelson: “[Rockland] is a small town. It was eight thousand when we got there. Eight thousand now…. [It] was a WASP Yankee town, and look, an immigrant family pays a price. Even if you were Jesus Christ Superstar, you were still an outsider…. So I was an outsider. I chose to be an outsider and I knew what I had.”58
Turning passive into active, Nevelson recalled her painful childhood and adolescent experience of social exclusion as something she herself determined. But it was not so. The town’s anti-Semitism and snobbish rejection of anyone at all different was deep-rooted and thoroughgoing. It was not life threatening as it had been in Russia, but its effects were searing, sufficiently so for her sister Anita to tell me: “Louise never felt part of America.”59 The warmth Louise Berliawsky felt in the art room contrasted markedly with the cold she felt elsewhere in school and the community. Because of her admittedly different ways, her religion and her foreignness, she felt like an outcast. “I was never accepted. I was always on the outside. We never went to Sunday school like the rest.”60 Years later Nevelson recalled: “I never made friends because I didn’t intend to stay in Rockland, and I didn’t want anything to tie me down.”61
Louise was the only “foreigner” in her high school class of seventy. She was outstanding in three areas—art, basketball, and singing. She experienced her height—five feet seven and a half inches—as both an asset and one more feature that made her different from everyone else. She claimed that she identified with “the wonderful neoclassic colonial houses in Maine, like the captains’ houses that had four big columns that were white. I felt that I was related, that my arms and legs related to those columns.”62 And indeed, columns later played a significant role in her work. Her height and high energy level made Louise a natural basketball player: “All I had to do was take the ball and throw it in the basket—I never missed.”63 She was captain of the high school team. She was also vice-president of the glee club. Both activities opened doors.
As captain of the basketball team she was invited to an end-of-year social event, but when a boy from her class was told that he would have to be her partner, she overheard his complaining about having to take “that Jew” to the party.64 She felt similarly humiliated when she overheard Helen Snow, a member of the class in-group who was giving a going-away party for the team, explain that she had to invite Louise because, despite her being Jewish, she was team captain.
Anti-Semitism was part of the fabric of the town, and there had always been an inbred suspicion of people who seemed foreign.65 Though the Ku Klux Klan was not present in Rockland and Maine until 1921, the year after Louise Berliawsky left for New York, its appearance was a spark that rapidly lit the ready tinder of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism that had long roots in Maine history. The hated targets of the local citizenry who so readily joined the KKK were foreigners and other outsiders, like all the Russian Jewish immigrants, including the Berliawskys. Knowing how many of the town’s “leading citizens”—businessmen, doctors, Protestant ministers, theology students, politicians, and even university professors—were part of the organization must have added to the fear of all “outsiders and immigrants.” In May, 1923, the Boston Herald reported that twenty thousand Klan robes had been sold in Maine. Cross burnings and racial and religious discrimination were all ways the Klan worked to protect the white Protestant supremacy in the state.66 As of 1925 Maine had more than 150,000 enrolled Klansmen—more than in any Southern state.
Fifty years after the fact, Louise’s younger sister, Lillian, described her experience of anti-Semitism in Rockland as a first grader: “I remember as clear as day having to stand in the corner and kids throwing things at me.”67 Anita recalled: “I never feel as if I belong[ed] here.” Lillian recalled, “I don’t think Nate felt the same way, because when I tell him how they didn’t like us and how they used to throw apples at me, he tells me that it wasn’t true—that I never did experience those things. So, I don’t think he had to deal with as much anti-Semitism as we girls did. He would fight his way through. He was a fighter even at five years of age.”68
For Louise as the oldest daughter, the rejection and prejudice was the most difficult, as she was the first girl in the family to brave her way.69 According to Anita: “She was very beautiful. If she were gentile, she would have been the queen of Rockland. But being Jewish, she was different. She was made to feel different, and she couldn’t express herself or spread herself out …. She always felt like a stranger there. She has no love for Rockland because there was no love given her there.70 Anita reiterated, “She could have been popular, but she was Jewish.” And Lillian chimed in: “Jewish people were separate. They were not invited to the homes of their classmates, even in elementary school.” As time went on, the ostracism waned a little and Lillian, the youngest girl, who was born in Rockland, was most accepted. While their brother could and did model himself after their gregarious father, the girls were more isolated because without their mother’s help they couldn’t forge friendships with neighbors. The result was a closeness between the three sisters that endured their entire lives. “We stuck together, all of us.”71
Louise Nevelson almost never spoke about the anti-Semitism of her youth and its effects on her. “I recall that I didn’t get too involved emotionally with local color,” she stated, on one such rare occasion. “I knew I was very emotional, but I guess my emotions were in another place. I was interested in art. I was interested in music…. Somehow I was removed as I was growing up.”72 Herein is a perfect description of an effective way of defending oneself against pain. “Being removed” from the daily insults by living in a fantasied and glorious future in a faraway place achieved through her beauty and talents was easier to bear than the everyday reminders of her reality as an outsider. And perhaps her lifelong interest in metaphysics—in connection, on another plane—emerged from the same desire to belong to a larger community that was denied her during her childhood.
Jews were not the only or even the lowest outcasts in Rockland. As noted earlier, Irish and Italians immigrants also faced fierce discrimination by New England Protestants and fear-mongering by the KKK, because of their origin and their religion. Many decades later, Nevelson spoke about her identification with Native Americans and how it traced back to her childhood and the Indians in Rockland. The Indians in Rockland were a few proud individuals who were different and looked different. They were in America first, and yet they were shunned and belittled by the latecomers, the Yankees of Rockland. “They weren’t the highest. They were already the poorest,”73 as Nevelson recalled. It seems natural that a shy recent immigrant living in the poorest part of Rockland would identify with them—and have them be “a personal image of this country.” “I somehow felt I knew these people as if they were as close as close can be…. I only know that when I look at them they’re related to me. They’re not apart. They are in me … if I had to choose a reincarnation, I probably would say I’d like to be American Indian.”74 Not surprising that the minority girl would look at fellow outcasts and see their strengths and the injustice done to them.
The Native Americans in Maine did not live in the town but would show up in the summer and sell their wares in the fields next to the elegant Samoset Hotel. In the caste system of WASP New England, the Indians were well below the Catholic and Jewish immigrants, but they were still on a rung higher on the ladder than the itinerant “gypsies.”
Tribes of gypsies had been showing up every summer throughout Maine for over a century. “From the middle of the 19th century to just after World War II gypsy caravans were a common sight in Maine.”75 Their gaily painted carts and wagons came down the main streets of town, headed often to settle for a while at seaside resorts until they were chased away. The women wearing long colorful “gaudy dresses, jewelry and spangles”—necklaces of gold coins—earned money by telling fortunes. The men bred and traded horses and entertained crowds with their dancing bears. A late nineteenth-century account of “Gypsies in Maine” notes that, “Just how large the tribe was we were not able to ascertain, though we saw that it comprised 50 at least. Nearly all the horses … were fine animals, for the Gypsies are sharper than the cutest Yankee in a bargain, and hamper themselves with no cheap stock.”76
A book on “the Romanies of the United States” published in 1924, provides a vivid image of their sensuous allure: “girls dressed with all the radiance of the autumn landscape—orange and green gowns, scarlet silk kerchiefs over their smooth black hair, and against their golden skins necklaces of gold coins.”77 We can be certain that one very visual youngster in Rockland, Maine, never forgot the sight. Whether Nevelson would have acknowledged their influence is uncertain, but a comparison of her outfits after 1970 shows remarkable similarity.
Photographer unknown. Gypsies, Biddeford Pool, ME, 1917. Collections of McArthur Public Library, courtesy of www.VintageMaineImages.com
