Lee Krasner by Gail Levin Read Free Book Online

to pursue a different kind of life from that of her parents and her elder sisters. As long as Krasner made no demands on her parents, they left her alone and did not try to dissuade her from her educational goals. 10 “I think my parents had their hands full acclimatizing themselves and putting their children through school. They didn’t encourage me, but as long as I didn’t present them with any particular problems, neither did they interfere. If I wanted to study art, it was all right with them.” 11
    Anna’s and Joseph’s gradual openness resembled that of many Eastern European Jews who were now in America. The strain in Judaism that discouraged girls from obtaining all but the most basic literacy had been affected by the Jewish intellectual and literary movement known as Haskalah (or secular enlightenment), which had advanced the idea that Jewish emancipation and equality would come from the reconciliation of Judaism with modern Western ideas and customs. Already by 1844 a Haskalah writer broached the idea of a segregated education system for Jewish women, advocating “the establishment in various cities of special institutes of study, with a six-year program, for girls who are to obtain a strict moral education in these schools. The teachers and educators ought to be females only. In the entire course of the years of study and education, the girls must be strictly forbidden to see men and, especially, to speak with them.” 12
    After Lenore was rejected by Washington Irving, she fell back on Brooklyn’s Girls’ High in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Established in 1886 as a free public high school for girls, the school was housed in a notable building designed in Victorian Gothic and French Second Empire styles. A descendant of the Central Grammar School, it was the first free secondary school in the city. 13
    Girls’ High worked well for some of its students; among the successful graduates who preceded Lenore were the screenwriterHelen Deutsch and the artist Gwendolyn Bennett, whose poster design won the school’s art contest in 1921, and whose art and writing appeared in journals during the Harlem Renaissance. 14 But the experience at Girls’ High was not what Lenore had in mind. She commented later: “Even at school as a kid, I knew I was an artist.” 15 The school did not offer art as a major field of study, and she chose to study law.
    Even Krasner’s second choice of study, the law, attested to her desire to forge a new life, independent of that traditional model of her parents and older sisters. She never envisioned herself as a housewife. The message of suffrage and equal opportunity for women had somehow seized her imagination. She was determined to struggle for those rights.
    It was also a time of rebellion. In class she refused to sing Christmas carols. “Much to my own astonishment, I got up in the classroom and said, ‘I refuse to say “Jesus Christ is my Lord.” He is not my Lord.’ Now you can imagine this caused quite a commotion.” 16 She had probably heard the legendary tale from 1913 when six boys from her own elementary school had protested the singing of Christian hymns. The boys had proclaimed themselves atheists and gone on a “silence strike,” even getting attention in the local newspaper. The reporter noted that the six had “been reading up on science and evolution.” 17 One teacher characterized the students as “free thinkers,” commenting: “We have given up the practice of singing the hymns and are confining ourselves to Bible reading. The district seems to be a hot-bed of Socialism.”
    The teacher lamented that some of the school’s girls had joined in the silence strike, forcing the end of the hymns. The next day Thomas D. Murphy, the school’s principal, announced to the press that after consulting with the district superintendent, he had removed the objectionable hymns