Chapter 2 Emigrating (1913-1926)
“A strange place allows
one to be yourself by making you a stranger.”
Edmond Jabès
Uprooting
It was in troubled circumstances, to say the least,
that Jacob Rothkowitz decided to move his family to America. Although
their situation could have been a lot worse, like many other Russian
Jews during those years of turmoil he felt that the future was
too uncertain, and preferred to face the hardship of emigration
rather than stay an in his own country. The fact that his two
eldest sons, Moses and Albert, would soon be of age to be drafted
into the Imperial army may have helped him to make up his mind.
Jacob left ahead of the others in 1910, when Marcus
was seven, bound for Portland, Oregon, where one of his brothers
was living. The journey seemed endless. He embarked at the Baltic
port of Libau, spent twelve days crossing the North Atlantic from
east to west, landed at Ellis Island, and crossed the American
continent by train. A family legend has it that Jacob’s brother
had wound up on the West Coast by mistake, having confused Portland,
Oregon, with Portland, Maine.
The following year Jacob sent for Albert and Moses,
Marcus stayed behind with his mother and sister in an increasingly
threatened community. Young radicals were agitating for revolution,
and the Czar’s secret police was attempting, with growing brutality,
to suppress their movement. World War I was approaching and Dvinsk
would soon find itself in the forefront of the Russo-German conflict.
More than ever, the city’s Jewish population was regarded with
suspicion and hostility. Doubts were cast on their patriotism,
and later, when war actually broke out, they were driven from
the city. Many of them died. Indeed only about a fifth of Dvink’s
large Jewish community survived these years.
Marcus escaped this fate when he embarked on board
the S.S. Czar on August 5, 1913, with his mother and sister. They
were able to purchase second-class accommodations and were spared
the spartan conditions--sleeping on deck--of traveling in steerage.
They arrived in New York on August 17 with little more baggage
to their name than their two native languages, Russian and Yiddish.
They stayed with relatives in New Haven for ten days and then
set out on the last leg of their journey--the long train ride
to Oregon. They reached their new home at 538 Second Street in
the Jewish district of Portland a few days later. Here they found
conditions not altogether unlike those they had left a month earlier.
They were in a community of Eastern European Jews with whom they
were able to converse in Yiddish and Russian.
Jacob’s Death
Jacob, who had got a job in a clothing store belonging
to cousins of his, died on March 27, 1914, exactly eight months
after being reunited with his wife, daughter, and youngest son.
The cause of his death seems to have been a stomach cancer, which
was probably worsened by the hardship of emigrating at the relatively
old age of fifty-one. He died at home, in his own bed, surrounded
by his kin.
It is easy to imagine the family’s distress at
his death, their grief made all the more desolate by the fact
that they were strangers in an alien land. Moreover, they had
lost the family breadwinner. Their cousins helped a little, employing
Albert and Moses at odd jobs in their store. Even Marcus was put
to work, wrapping parcels in the shipping department and delivering
newspapers after school.
These were hard times Marcus lived in constant
fear of meeting older boys and being beaten up. All his life he
would remember the humiliation of being treated as a poor relative.
He always seemed to be struggling with poverty. It was only toward
the end of his life that he began to make substantial amounts
of money--and suddenly found himself a wealthy man as the prices
of his paintings soared. His money worries brought out the dark
side of his character and made him feel that he had never known
anything other than poverty: “I
never had a real childhood!” […]
An Exciting Social
Environment
In a way, the social ferment of Dvinsk had its
equivalent in Portland. Thus, on both sides of the world, Rothko’s
childhood was steeped in an atmosphere of militancy. Worker’s
meetings were part of his native element, and he naturally gravitated
toward them in America. Radicalism and radical oratory always
attracted him. He himself was gifted for public speaking and was
considered a proficient debater. He learned the art of speaking
persuasively and passionately on such topics as free speech, workers’
rights, and birth control from IWW organizers and anarchists like
Emma Goldman and William Haywood who visited the West Coast. He
vibrated to the fervor with which social issues were debated at
labor gatherings. While he was. Still in grade-school, he says:
“I
was enchanted by their naive and child-like vision. Later, sometime
in the twenties I guess I lost all faith in the idea of progress
and reform. So did all my friends. Perhaps we were disillusioned
because everything seemed so frozen and helpless during the Coolidge
and Hoover era. But I am still an anarchist.”
Portland was an important city on the IWW circuit.
It was alive with news and rumors about the labor movement and
was often convulsed by strikes which were suppressed with a sort
of military brutality. Pinkertorn agents hired by capitalist bosses
battled fiercely against “wobblies.” Both sides were constantly
filing injunctions in court to stop each other. Portland had a
reputation for being in the vanguard of the struggle for workers’
rights and was something of a haven for free speech. Like many
recent emigrants, Rothko experienced the latent violence of life
in America and the harsh reality of social injustice. The radical
ideas he bad been exposed to from his earliest childhood provided
a frame through which he viewed the social unrest that was one
consequence of America’s rapid industrialization.
Rothko was fourteen when the Bolshevik revolution
broke out in Russia, and like other young radicals he was enthusiastic
about the events taking place in Saint Petersburg and Moscow.
The shock waves of the Russian revolution soon reached every level
of American society, bringing fresh hope to the left and renewed
anxiety to the right. As a result the tension between the establishment,
which reacted with more toughness than ever, and radicals who
were determined to safeguard hard-won worker’s rights, increased
dramatically.
World War I exacerbated these social and ideological
divisions even further. The Portland daily Cardinal spearheaded
a patriotic drive to support the local “boys” fighting on the
front; its editors appealed to readers to write letters and mail
care packages of food and clothes to the war zone. At Lincoln
High School which young Rothko attended students were constantly
under pressure to conform to the establishment’s political ideals
and patriotic sentiments. In June 1918, 260 Lincoln High students
were drafted. “Fight Bolshevism, anarchy and tyranny” was a popular
slogan in those years. Suspecting all recent emigrants of being
IWW members, one current of public opinion favored limiting immigration.
Marcus wanted to organize an open debate on this issue in school.
He hoped to be a labor organizer. Most of his classmates, on the
other hand, thought that the right to dissent ought to be suppressed.
[…]