Ben Shahn An Artist's Life

The Early Years: Kovno and Vilkomir In 1906, shortly after Ben Shahn arrived in the United States from Lithuania, he became aware of what he later called "the whole business of the Mayflower and ancestry." He was eight years old and had been taught that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the great biblical figures, were his ancestors, and they seemed unquestionably more directly related to him than did Columbus and the Pilgrims. It was puzzling. He recognized that he had parents and two sets of grandparents and many aunts and uncles, but he knew nothing of the kind of ancestry that appeared valued in his new country. In an attempt to establish this lineage, he nagged his father incessantly. He knew that his father was a woodcarver, as were his father's father and his father's grandfather, but he wanted to know more. Finally, exasperated, the young boy's father answered by drawing a picture of a man on a gibbet. When Ben wanted to know who that was, his father angrily answered that the man was an ancestor, a horse thief, adding, "If I ever catch you asking about ancestors . . . ! Only what you do counts, not what your ancestors did." In spite of these words, there is no doubt that many of Ben's characteristics can be traced to his ancestors. His father, Hessel, born in 1871, was a skilled craftsman who loved to work with his hands, as would his son. He taught himself to draw at an early age, as would Ben, and he was a born storyteller, just as his son would become, in his art as well as in his conversation. Finally, Hessel was an idealist, whose liberal political convictions must surely have influenced Ben. Ben's mother, Gittel Lieberman, born in Lithuania in 1872, was descended from a family of peasants, but her father educated himself and became an innkeeper, and later even worked as a schoolteacher. She, too, was a natural storyteller, whose fanciful tales delighted her son. One of many children, she was apprenticed as a kind of indentured servant to a wealthy family of wholesale grocers. Because she was a girl, she wasn't taught to read or write Lithuanian--she was taught these skills by her husband, after their marriage--though she learned to work as a bookkeeper, making out invoices in a language she couldn't understand. Gittel was strong-willed and keenly intelligent, as was her son. She was often described as quarrelsome and angry, as Ben would become. "Most facts are lies; all stories are true," Ben told his friend Edwin Rosskam. And Ben told many stories. If a large number of these were invented, they are still worth recounting; they reveal as much about the artist as would the truth. He was the sum of his stories. Certainly his memories of his earliest years in Kovno, where he was born on September 12, 1898, were, inevitably, confused--and, as he admitted, most likely inaccurate, since he spent only four years of his life there. These early memories include brutal incidents of religious discrimination and political terror. At the time of Ben's birth, Kovno, where more than 25,000 Jews lived (they made up approximately 30 percent of the town's population) was a center of Jewish cultural activity. These Jews lived in their own section, separated from the Gentiles. Crossing the non-Jewish sector was so dangerous that they walked through it hurriedly, never strolling in a leisurely fashion. They were even harassed at home and at work. Many Russian soldiers were stationed in Kovno, and when these recruits, most of them far from home, drank too much, they would smash the windows of the Jewish-owned homes and shops. Ben remembered a rock coming through the window of the Shahn home at least once. His family knew, however, that it would be futile to protest since any complaint to the authorities would be considered anti-czarist and result in harsh punishment. Not all of Ben's memories were unhappy ones, however. On occasion he enjoyed playing with frienGreenfeld, Howard is the author of 'Ben Shahn An Artist's Life' with ISBN 9780679783121 and ISBN 0679783121.