My First House of Worship Was a Museum

( a weekend extra for my subscribers)

I grew up in hilly northern Manhattan with a view of the George Washington Bridge. Life up there seemed quiet as opposed to everything “Downtown.” That term covered a vast territory.  It was where we went to shop at stores like Macy’s at Herald Square and also where we visited museums like the Fifth Avenue Metropolitan, the vast Beaux Arts complex that was a world of riches to me. Knights in armor. Greek and Roman statuary. Egyptian mummy cases. All of it beckoning me to leave my dark, depressed family and venture into other cities, other times.

The Met was my first house of worship. It’s where I did more than fall in love with art of all kinds. I fell in love with something I couldn’t express as a seven-year-old, but felt as a kind of fever: that art was my future, somehow, some way.

In 1961, the museum bought Rembrandt’s painting of “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer” for the unheard-of sum of $2.3 million. My parents took me there one Sunday—when admission was free—to enjoy this work of genius. But crowds lingering in front of the dark canvas typical of Rembrandt’s style were so dense that I actually got on my knees and crawled through the forest of legs to the front so I could marvel up close.

I don’t know what other people saw, but there was something about Aristotle’s thoughtful and even compassionate face that was like balm for my soul. My Holocaust survivor parents were poor, angry, and disappointed with their very difficult new lives in America. Our home regularly resounded with arguments and complaints in many languages. Years later, my father told me that he often imagined heading down to the Hudson River only blocks from our towering Gilded Age apartment house to throw himself in. Gazing at the painting which was so mysterious, so calm, so lovely, I felt a call, I felt a mission, and I felt free. Though I was small and the painting seemed enormous, it spoke to me and told me to create. That would be my reality. That would be my city on a hill.

(from The Braided Way, March 1, 2024)