Gittel Shahn

Ben Shahn Visual Biography YouTube

Gittel Lieberman, born in Lithuania in 1872, was descended from a family of peasants, but her father educated himself and became an innkeeper, and later even worked as a schoolteacher. She, too, was a natural storyteller, whose fanciful tales delighted her son. One of many children, she was apprenticed as a kind of indentured servant to a wealthy family of wholesale grocers. Because she was a girl, she wasn't taught to read or write Lithuanian--she was taught these skills by her husband, after their marriage--though she learned to work as a bookkeeper, making out invoices in a language she couldn't understand. Gittel was strong-willed and keenly intelligent, as was her son. She was often described as quarrelsome and angry, as Ben would become. Source