A Young Artist
A Young Artist
Ezra Jack Keats was born on March 11, 1916. He was the third child of Benjamin Katz and Augusta “Gussie” Podgainy, Polish Jews who lived in East New York, which was then the Jewish quarter of Brooklyn. It was evident early on that the boy known as Jacob “Jack” Ezra Katz was an artistically gifted child.
Benjamin and Augusta Katz
The family was very poor. When 8-year-old Ezra was paid 25 cents to paint a sign for a local store, Benjamin began to hope that his son might be able to earn a living as a sign painter. But Ezra was in love with the fine arts. A good student who excelled in art, he was awarded a medal for drawing on graduating from Junior High School 149. The medal, though unimpressive-looking, meant a great deal to him, and Ezra kept it all his life. While at Thomas Jefferson High School, he won a national student contest run by the Scholastic Publishing Company for one of his oil paintings, depicting hobos warming themselves around a fire. That award also gave him much-needed encouragement.
Sister and brother Mae and Willie, with baby Ezra
This was during the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time when many, including the Katz family, suffered extreme hardship. Although Ezra’s mother was supportive of his talent, his father wanted him to turn his hand to more practical skills. Working as a waiter at Pete’s Coffee Shop in Greenwich Village, Benjamin Katz knew how hard earning a living could be. He worried that his son could never support himself as an artist. Despite his desire to discourage Ezra, Benjamin brought home tubes of paint, pretending that he had traded them with penniless artists for food. Ezra remembered his father saying, “If you don’t think artists starve, well, let me tell you. One man came in and swapped me a tube of paint for a bowl of soup.”
At his high school graduation, in January 1935, Ezra was to be awarded the senior class medal for excellence in art. Sadly, the day before, Benjamin died in the street of a heart attack. Ezra had to identify the body, and at this moment of loss he discovered his father’s true feelings. In an interview with his friend the poet Lee Bennett Hopkins, he described the experience: “I found myself staring deep into his [my father’s] secret feelings. There in his wallet were worn and tattered newspaper clippings of the notices of the awards I had won. My silent admirer and supplier, he had been torn between his dread of my leading a life of hardship and his real pride in my work.”