You Say to Brick Read online

  “Her daughters and sons, my mother’s brothers and sisters, went to Riga, where they were very well off and could send a few pennies to my grandmother,” Kahn reported. “I visited the areas of Riga and saw my people. I was very much moved by it.”

  That they were actually “well off” might have been another of Lou’s exaggerations, but certainly the Mendelowitsch children had done reasonably well for themselves in Riga. By the late 1920s they were all living within walking distance of one another in the newer art-nouveau area of the city, where numerous apartment blocks had gone up in the decade before the war. Lou’s aunt Sara (also called Sora-Gita) and her husband, Leib Hirschberg, lived with their two sons, Leiser and Mischa, in a rather cheaply built six-story complex on Matisa Street. Less than five minutes’ walk away, her older brother Abram and his family of seven had an apartment in a somewhat more substantial building on the same street. Ten minutes farther down Matisa and half a block to the right, one came to Benjamin’s flat. Another ten-minute walk from there could have taken Lou to his other aunt, Haja-Mira, or else to his youngest uncle, Isak, who lived in a rather grand apartment building at the corner of Avotu and Gertrudes Streets. Lou had cousins in all five of these households, not to mention an aunt and uncle who were less than a dozen years older than he was; wherever he was staying, he would have seen a great deal of these relatives during his month in Riga.

  He also wandered through the rest of the city. “I recalled the places my mother and father used to speak of,” Lou said, and he no doubt visited the spots in the Old Town and elsewhere that had figured in Bertha’s and Leopold’s memories. But he also saw things that had sprung up in Riga since his parents’ day. It would have been hard to miss the most remarkable new building project in town, the four-arched Central Market that had been under construction since 1924 and was almost finished when Lou arrived. Vaulted in the style of a steel-ribbed Victorian train station, but with a somewhat barer and more modern aesthetic, each of the four linked pavilions rose sixty feet or so from the ground, with massive semicircular windows lighting up the interior space from either end. This Central Market would, when completed, be an impressive riverside palace for shoppers, with separate pavilions devoted to fish, dairy, and other kinds of groceries, all boldly declaring Riga’s architectural entrance into the modern age.

  Architecture once again became Kahn’s major concern when he left Latvia for Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. By the end of September he had seen Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and Munich; he had also visited at least one Tyrolean village, for he collected a postcard on which he wrote (this time, apparently, to himself), “Typical mountain dwellings of Bayern and Tirol. The shutters, windows, balconies are painted in bright greens, white, and siennas. The stones on the roof are to retain the snow in winter and to prevent avalanches.” On October 4, after indulging himself at Munich’s Oktoberfest, Lou crossed the Brenner Pass into Italy, where the longest and perhaps most compelling part of his trip took place. “Compared to other countries, that is to the architect-artist, Italy certainly stands alone,” he wrote in another unsent postcard, this one addressed to people named Laura and Goldie. “I am generalizing before I have seen all but from the first glimpse the rest I can summarize. Up until now I arranged my trip to take in the countries that are going in for the Modern—Now I am in the land that is the source of”

  And there the note abruptly ended. The sudden break is startlingly true to the gap which at that point divided Lou’s experiences of architecture. Emotionally and artistically, he found himself drawn to the ancient and medieval buildings he discovered in Europe, like the castles and cathedrals in England or the palaces, churches, and ruins of Italy. Yet what interested him on a conscious level were the experiments in modernism he found in places like Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands; these were the things he intended to make use of when he returned to America.

  For now, though, he reveled in the Italian landscape, traveling from Venice through Verona, Milan, Bologna, Florence, San Gimignano, Assisi, and Spoleto before arriving in Rome to spend Christmas Eve at St. Peter’s Square. Then it was onward to Naples, Capri, Pompeii, Paestum, and the Amalfi Coast, sketching all the while. Finally, in early March of 1929, he tore himself away from Italy and went to Paris, where he spent the last five weeks of his trip exploring the city, his funds dwindling so low that he was obliged to trade his nightclubby piano-playing skills for a small room above a Left Bank restaurant. On April 12, having crossed to Dover the previous day, he left England aboard the merchant vessel S.S. American Shipper. After a notably unluxurious week at sea, he was back in New York, a bit thinner and much poorer, but richer in exactly the kinds of experiences he had set out to gain.

  * * *

  Before he left for Europe, Lou had worked out a plan for his re-entry into the Philadelphia architecture world. He would venture into private practice, he decided, with a Penn classmate who had also been employed at Molitor’s office, a man named Sydney Jelinek. But Jelinek backed out while Kahn was away, leaving him without a partner and without the means to start up his own firm. Luckily he was able to land a job almost immediately upon his return with his old professor, Paul Cret. Kahn joined Cret’s office in May of 1929, and in the subsequent seventeen months he worked on a number of large-scale projects, including the Chicago “Century of Progress” Exposition, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and some bridges for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

  Stimulated by all the sketches and watercolors he had produced on his trip, Lou also decided to take his artwork more seriously than he had in recent years. In November of 1929 he exhibited four of the pencil drawings he had done in Europe at the annual exhibition put on by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Kahn was to continue showing his work there over the next three years, presenting the public with two landscapes, Danube Country and A Coming Storm, and a portrait of his father that he titled, with Whistlerian simplicity, Black and White. In 1931 he also published an article called “The Value and Aim of Sketching” in the journal put out by the T-Square Club. It was Kahn’s first published piece of writing, and it made his mother proud. “The article interests me very much,” Bertha wrote to him, “and according to my limited understanding of the technique of sketching, I think it is very good. The sketches themselves, I am particularly proud of, for in them I can see your own handiwork.”

  But by that time—a mere two years after his return from Europe—practically everything about Lou’s life had changed. When he first came back to America, he had moved back in with his parents, expecting to resume his old existence as if nothing had altered in his absence. Esther Israeli, however, had moved on. “He didn’t write (Kahns don’t write letters),” she pointed out. “So when he came back I was engaged to someone else.” Lou didn’t find this out until he stopped by her house to see her, and when he heard the news, “he was furious. And I said, ‘Well, how was I to know?’ I didn’t see him after that night,” Esther added, “because Lou had a vicious temper, which he very seldom showed and he certainly showed it that night. He had brought many wonderful things for me from Europe but he gave everything away and naturally I got nothing.”

  But seeing Lou again had made her realize her fiancé’s shortcomings. “You know, you bore me,” she said to him one day, and that was the end of the engagement. Esther’s mother was relieved it was over, since she had never much liked the young man. “But she didn’t want me to marry Lou either,” Esther observed. “That was something that both my parents felt because Lou had those scars, was poor, and his family was different from ours.”

  The Kahns were not just of a lower social class than the Israelis. They were also noticeably recent immigrants. They spoke German together at home, and perhaps even some Yiddish. There was “very little English,” according to Esther (though Bertha’s eloquent 1931 letter about the sketching article would suggest otherwise). “English only was spoken in my family,” Esther pointed out. “My father was a lawyer, my mother did not come from indigent peopl
e. His family came from Russia,” she said of Lou, managing to ignore the fact that her own parents had been born in Russia as well.

  But unlike Leopold Kahn, Samuel Israeli had come to America as a child. His father, formerly in the grain business in Russia, did so well financially as a dry goods merchant in Hartford, Connecticut, that he was able to give all his children excellent educations. One of Samuel’s brothers was a rabbi, another was an architect, and still another was a doctor; even his sister had an M.D., from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Samuel himself, after attending Mount Hermon Boys’ School and Yale University, got a law degree at Penn and was practicing as a partner in his own Philadelphia firm by 1900. In 1902 he married a Philadelphia girl of Russian-Jewish origins, Annie Sinberg, with whom he had three daughters. Esther, born in 1905, was the oldest and in many ways the closest to both her parents.

  Her family life, she felt, exemplified the best of professional-class comfort and civilization. “When you came to my family for dinner, dinner was ready,” Esther observed, underlining the difference between the Israelis and the Kahns. “When you went to his house, they were running around, looking for bread or something.” She praised certain things about Lou’s parents—their “beautiful marriage,” the fact that Bertha “spoke very beautiful German”—but even her admiration was couched in a degree of condescension. “Lou’s mother was very quiet, very much in love with the father. She was not an attractive woman, and she thought he was just wonderful that he would marry her,” she remarked. But apparently the disapproval ran both ways, or at least so Esther felt. “They didn’t like me,” she said of Lou’s parents. “They wanted him to marry someone they could control.”

  Whether or not this was true, it was a moot point, since the wishes of the parental generation ultimately did not figure in this story. Nearly a year after Lou had stormed away from her house, and long after she had broken her own engagement, Esther found herself at a Philadelphia Orchestra concert featuring Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. “I saw Lou there,” Esther recalled. “Later I wrote him a note: ‘I saw you at the concert. I was there with my father, and I thought it was a magnificent performance.’” Lou must have realized, from her purposeful reference to her father, that she was no longer engaged, because he called her the very next day. “We were married three months later,” said Esther.

  Planning the ceremony, though, posed its own problems. Esther wanted a secular wedding, but Lou insisted that for his parents’ sake they needed to be married by a rabbi. This was a bit strange, as Judaism had not featured heavily in his childhood. In fact, he told an interviewer decades later that he had received no religious education, that he had spent a total of one day in Sunday school (family lore had it that his mother snatched him out when the rabbi smacked him), and that religion in his family was “secondary, completely routine.” Yet the Kahns clearly thought of themselves as observant Jews, and they must have wanted to signal that allegiance at their son’s wedding. Esther put up a small amount of resistance but then gave in—though, to judge from the number of times she mentioned this capitulation in later life, it must have continued to rankle.

  About a week before the wedding, in early August of 1930, Esther had occasion to resort to her diary. “This is the first time since Lou and I decided to marry that I felt the need of writing,” she began. “This evening, for the first time, all was not harmony.” Apparently Esther had belatedly realized that there would be thirteen people at the wedding breakfast unless she invited two more, so she called up Lou to tell him of her choices. He was not immediately receptive to the idea; Esther figured he was “either hungry or tired or both and besides I don’t like to talk to him on the phone—we always get into difficulties.” He told her he had to consult someone else and would call her back, at which point she became deeply offended. “Lou is always telling me my faults—perhaps he doesn’t realize that he has them also,” she fumed to herself. He also seemed unaware that “in every instance I have given in to him—having a rabbi marry us, in the matter of the furniture, not getting ‘at home’ cards which is really a necessity and a thousand little things even to luggage and clothes. But I won’t submerge my personality,” she valiantly insisted, “and I won’t change my feelings and actions. Afterall he loved me for them originally and now he wants me to change.”

  Yet this display of resistance was apparently made to herself alone. “Why haven’t I the courage to tell him this?” she went on. “I agree with everything like a meek little lamb—that is what love does to you. I should think he would be happy to have a wife with a mind—not a very stupid one either.” That she was far from stupid, and indeed somewhat unconventional, came through in the observation, “As next Thursday approaches he must feel very odd because marriage is something he wished to fight. I don’t feel any better myself—I am an independent person also who never wanted to actually marry but love—and love makes you change your mind about things.” Then she added wistfully, “I only hope we will not have any differences—they spoil everything and cause a very naked reaction in me—my whole body and mind freezes immediately toward anyone who is not treating me in a respectful way.”

  Louis I. Kahn and Esther Virginia Israeli were married on August 14, 1930, during one of the hottest Philadelphia summers on record. They left immediately on their honeymoon, which took them to the Adirondacks in upstate New York, Montreal and Quebec City in Canada, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, Gloucester and Boston in Massachusetts, and finally Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they met up with Lou’s friends the Osers. Along the way Lou did a great deal of sketching, capturing landscapes he would later put into his paintings. They both relaxed, and Esther’s faith in the marriage was restored: it was a “lovely honeymoon,” she noted in her diary. (About Lou’s feelings one cannot be sure. Years later he told a younger colleague that a week into his marriage, maybe even after the first night, he knew he’d made a mistake. But whether that was hindsight speaking, or possibly an effort to be convivially intimate—and whether even Lou fully believed it—is impossible to say.) On their honeymoon, Esther noticed that he seemed to be less self-conscious about his scars; in particular, he no longer tried to conceal them under a hat. “After we got married, Lou threw his hat away and never put it on again,” she recalled in her old age. “The last time he ever wore a hat was when we got married. I was quite beautiful—you may not have thought it, but I was—and I guess he felt if it didn’t bother me, it wouldn’t bother anyone.”

  When they got back to Philadelphia, their plan was to move temporarily into Esther’s parents’ house, a gabled, brick-and-wood three-story row house at 5243 Chester Avenue in West Philadelphia. The place was spacious enough for them to have a bedroom, a bathroom, and a study all to themselves, plus a small studio for Lou. Esther was delighted to remain with her family, and her new husband got along well not only with her parents but also with her two younger sisters, Olivia and Regina, who were nineteen and sixteen at the time. The idea was that Lou and Esther would each continue working at their jobs for a year—he at Paul Cret’s, she as a research assistant and administrator for the neurosurgeon Charles Frazier—all the while saving up money for an extended trip to Austria and Germany. Esther, who was interested in psychology, hoped to study with Anna Freud, while Lou wanted to work with Walter Gropius.

  But the plan fell through less than a month after the honeymoon, when Lou came home one day in late September with the news that he was unemployed. The financial impact of the 1929 stock market crash had finally sifted down to the architecture profession, and even Cret’s respected firm found itself unable to get new commissions. “Lou came home, as usual always late, and said to me that he was out of work; he could not stay at Cret’s office and take money anymore because there was no work,” Esther said. “Cret was exactly like Lou became; he never fired anybody. So Lou just walked out.” The European trip was put on permanent hold and Esther stayed on at her job, while the newlyweds continued to live with her parents
, now not in order to save money but because they couldn’t afford anything else.

  It wasn’t as if they had no expenses at 5243 Chester. They had promised to pay her parents $100 a month for their board, and they continued to do this even in the months when Lou was out of work. Esther also set aside at least $20 a month, and sometimes much more, to give to Lou’s parents. And then there were the other recurring costs—for clothes (including Esther’s uniforms), concert and theater tickets, doctor visits, occasional gifts, small but regular “allowances” for herself and Lou, and other incidentals. Esther’s detailed records of income and expenditure, which she kept from early 1931 onward, showed how carefully she had to monitor their financial situation, despite the fact that they were living with her parents.

  Still, this living arrangement had the advantage of allowing Esther to pursue a master’s degree in psychology even as she maintained her day job. “I could go to work and graduate school without thinking about anything else in the house; everything else was done for me,” she observed. Annie Israeli, assisted by a maid, did all the housework, while Samuel Israeli continued to bring in the bulk of the household income through his work as a lawyer. He cast no blame on his new son-in-law—after all, everyone was at risk of unemployment in those early Depression years—and in fact remained one of the staunchest believers in Lou’s talent. “I say there were only two people in this world who knew what Lou was going to amount to, way back in 1927 when I met him,” Esther later commented, “and that was my father, who Lou idolized,… and myself.”