The World of Steinberg

(6 of 8)

But whatever the pleasures of Milan in the late '30s, the countervailing fact was that Steinberg, a Jew—and a foreign Jew at that—was living under a Fascist regime which grew more anti-Semitic by the week. He graduated as a Dottore in Architettura in 1940; and on his diploma, awarded in the name of Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, King of Albania and (thanks to Mussolini and his bombers) Emperor of Ethiopia, was written "Steinberg Saul... di razza Ebraica "(of the Jewish race). "It was some kind of safeguard for the future, meaning that although I was a dottore I could be boycotted from practicing, since I am a Jew. The beauty for me is that this diploma was given by the King; but he is no longer King of Italy. He is no more King of Albania. He is not even the Emperor of Ethiopia. And I am no architect. The only thing that remains is razza Ebraicar!"

It was time to go. In 1941 Steinberg left Italy for a neutral country, Portugal, and after some altercations with the authorities there, he managed to get on a boat to America, armed with a "slightly fake" passport that he had doctored with his own rubber stamp.

It got him to, but not past, Ellis Island. The quota for Rumanian immigrants was minuscule, and Steinberg was over the limit. While a relative in New York tried at short notice to persuade The New Yorker to sponsor him in the U.S., Steinberg spent a sweltering Fourth of July on Ellis Island and was deported to Santo Domingo on a cargo boat.

After a year, his visa came through: the editor of The New Yorker had agreed to sponsor him. In July 1942 Steinberg landed in Miami and caught a bus to New York, enjoying the "noble view, as from horseback," of America as it rolled by. He had come home to his definitive expatriation.

With a steady outlet for his drawings in The New Yorker and the newspaper PM, Steinberg almost at once set out to see the U.S. coast to coast by train. "Driving is no substitute for the view from the sleeping compartment. The window is like a screen. To arrive at a whistle-stop in Arizona and see Indians at the station, even though they don't have feathers—how expected!" It was, in part, a ballet of fables and stereotypes. Steinberg's America, as confirmed by this trip, proved to be as much an invention as it was in Bertolt Brecht's Mahagonny: flat horizons broken by mesas or isolated, rococo-deco movie palaces; the tubular, metallic faces of Midwest entrepreneurs and their massive but wizened spouses, gazing blankly through their horn-rims: blazing signs the size of provincial churches; all-leg girls and cowboys teetering on their long heels like human stilts. The drawings testify to America's unutterable strangeness in the eyes of a young European who could not as yet speak English. "Individuals unmasking themselves only to reveal other masks," Rosenberg notes in his essay, "verbal cliches masquerading as things, a countryside that is an amalgam of all imported styles, an outlook that is at once conventional and futuristic—America was made to order for Steinberg."