Architecture, literature and hebraism: Frank O. Gehry and Isacc Bashevis singer

Abstract

Gehry, like the Singers brothers, hails from a family of Polish Jews. His world has nothing to do with literary architecture; but even we could say with literature in general. Indeed, it is well known that he had always been moreinterested in painting, sculpture and the whole universe that revolves around contemporary art rather than the literary world.

Nonetheless, there is certainly a hidden bond that is transversally linked to this world. That is to say, an understanding based on that conceptual analogy capable of indirectly bringing us back to literature through the parallelism between what Gehry realizes in architecture and the role carried out by the Singer brothers in Yiddish fiction.

The architecture created using the contribution by the artist couple Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen, whose works characterize many of Gehry's works, although we would like to be able to read them as a sort of return in the guise of Pop to that ancient tradition in which the sculpture covered a legitimate function within the architectural work, in fact highlight his great interest in Pop art, which in a certain way he interprets through architecture.

It is certainly true that with the advent of the Modem, architecture had already exposed the "skeleton" of the building and the substance of the materials: yet to sublimate its es- sence.Gehry, on the other hand, by assembling miserable materials, uses the slang of black ghettos to make current truths speak. He does notuse cultured language but the slang of the slums.

Miserable materials, destined for precarious constructions, are no longer relegated to secondary roles but brought into view and assembled with mock haphazardness; The indignant reactions that aroused the contents of Singer's first novels,makes us understand just how much these were similar to the reactions that punctually accompanied the projects of Frank Gehry. Indeed, with regard to the latter, they were probably even worse.

However, the feeling of deep aversion that some come to nurture towards him, as those of Singer, is naturally aroused precisely by the peculiarity that characterizes the works of both and which conceptually is what unites them in some way. That is to say, theaudacity to put into play with coherent lucidity, in different fields, unconventional topics and materials; so much so that we can say that the latter does in architecture what Singer had done many years before in literature.

In fact, even if Gehry, sublimating, inserts "trash" into his works, we cannot forget that it was precisely the Singer brothers who introduced into Yiddish literature, which was always characterized by moral teaching and a romantic vision of the Ashkenazi Jewish world, with uncomfortable themes such as sex, criminals, and the outcasts of society.

Keyword: Architecture, Literature, Gehry, Singer, Hebraism

Абстракт

АРХИТЕКТУРА, ЛИТЕРАТУРА И ГЕБРАИЗМ: ФРАНК О. ГЕРИ И ИСААК БАШЕВИС СИНГЕР

Его мир не имеет ничего общего с литературной архитектурой, на самом деле известно, что он всегда больше интересовался живописью, скульптурой и всей этой вселенной, которая вращается вокруг современного искусства, а не мира литературы.

Тем не менее, безусловно, существует скрытая связь, которая соединяет между собой и эти два мира.

Именно эта концептуальная аналогия косвенно отсылает нас к литературе через параллелизм между тем, что Гери совершает в архитектуре, и значением, вкладом братьев Сингер в повествовании на идиш.

Архитектурное творчество Гери основывается на импульсах, полученных от произведений двух художников Ольденбурга и ван Брюггена. И именно это объясняет его интерес к поп-арту, в котором он определенным образом интерпретирует архитектуру.

Умение выразить яркие чувства, в том числе и негативные, вплоть до глубокого отвращения, характеризует работы обоих художников и концептуально образом объединяет их.

Смелость использовать нетрадиционные аргументы и материалы в разных сферах с последовательной ясностью, позволяет сказать, что Гери делает в архитектуре то, что Сингер сделали много лет назад в литературе. И если мы говорим о том, что Гери вставляет «мусор» в свои произведения, хотя он и делает это в возвышенной манере, мы не можем забывать, что и в литературных произведениях братьев Сингерна, созданных на идиш, рассматривающих нравственные вопросы и отличающихся романтическим видением еврейского мира, поднимались вопросы ашкенази и другие неудобные темы, такие как секс, преступники, изгои общества.

Ключевые слова: иудаизм, литература, архитектура, Г ери, братья Сингер.

In Frank Gehry's works, we naturally cannot find the sort of intrinsic relationship that linked Aldo Rossi's idea of architecture to Borges's literary thought, nor the narrative aspect that instead characterizes the entire work of John Hejduk. However, despite theobjective differences, at least on one occasion Gehry surely approaches the world of hejdukian storytelling more than can be imagined.

When, for example, in 1983 he proposed a glass pavilion in the shape of a fish and another in the form of a coiled snake as part of an exhibition onarchitectural folliesstaged at the Leo Castelli Gallery, in certain ways his idea recalled very closely in some respects those stories of solitude, of segregation, of observers and of the observed told by Hejduk only a few years earlier.Gehry, in fact, in what remains perhaps one of the very rare occasions in which he lets himself go into a semblance of narration, imagined the snake as a private prison, while the pavilion in the shape of a fish was the observation point from which the recluse could be monitored.

Excluding this episode, which we may certainly consider a fortuitous coincidence, his world has nothing to do with heydukian literary architecture; but even we could say with literature in general. Indeed, it is well known that he had always been morein- terested in painting, sculpture and the whole universe that revolves around contemporary art rather than the literary world.

Nonetheless, there is certainly a hidden bond that is transversally linked to this world. That is to say, an understanding based on that conceptual analogy capable of indirectly bringing us back to literature through the parallelism between what Gehry realizes in architecture and the role carried out by the Singer brothers in Yiddish fiction.

Gehry, like the Singers, hails from a family of Polish Jews. He was bom in Toronto on 8 February 1929 under the name of Frank Owen Goldberg and only in 1954, yielding to pressure from his wife Anita, does he change his surname to Gehry.

According to Gehry himself, he does so with some reluctance, since, considering himself a leftist engaged in/z'&era/causes, hedid not look favourably on such a decision, which seemed to him as yielding to the pressures of anti-Semitism rather than resisting it¹.However, by transforming the search for a new name into a complex design exercise, he succeeded in making an unpleasantissuemore palatable².

As Frank Owen Goldberg, however, he moved in 1947 with his parents and sister to California, where he later graduated in architecture. After some work experiences in the United States and Europe - apparently negligible but which in reality would prove to be fundamental to his professional training because, according to him, they would help him understand both what he wanted to design and what he would avoid at all costs - he returned to Los Angeles to open his own studio.

The architecture created using the contribution by the artist couple Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen, whose works characterize many of Gehry's works, although we would like to be able to read them as a sort of return in the guise of Pop to that ancient tradition in which the sculpture covered a legitimate function within the architectural work, in fact highlight his great interest in Pop art, which in a certain way he interprets through architecture.

The works of the two authoritative protagonists of this artistic trend, such as the cyclopic binoculars containing the two meeting rooms in the portal at theChiat Day Buildingin Venice, California³, or the gigantic hammer with pliers and screwdriver at- theVitra Design Museumm Weil Am Rhein, in Germany, not far from Basel, of course unequivocally explain Gehry's association with the world of American Pop art. Moreover, Frank himself would attest to having spent more time with artists than angeleni architects; however, this would have been during previous works,before reaching the majestic "inhabited sculptures" that made him widelypopular. In other words, in the period preceding the large, deformed and elegantgeometricsolidsand those sinuous architectures that in plastic form seem to transcend utility to offer themselves exclusively as a spectacle belonging to this world - which later will be increasingly delegated to the mere presence of gigantic objects - in this phase the use in artistic style that he makes of ordinary materials is clearly manifested, employing them according to principles certainly in line with Pop art.

When, for example, in the expansion of his home in Santa Monica, California, Gehry relies on the use of those impoverished materials that characterize the American suburbs, such as metal fencing, plywood or corrugated sheets (already used on other occasions), through the exhibition of unexpected pairings he raises insignificant objects and inferior materials to a highly emotional artistic condition. And this, of course, can only bring him closer to what is the essence of Pop Art.Moreover, Roy Lichtenstein affirmed that the characteristic of the latter is first of all the use it makes of what is normally despised; and Gehry, it is interesting to note, had always evincedthe feeling that without Rauschenberg, he might not have had the courage to bring wire nets and untreated plywood into his buildings⁴.

After all, he had learned a lot from the angeleniartistswho he began to meet with regularly in the mid-sixties. At that time, therewere some among them, for example, who continually transformed their works, and such occasions they loved to often leave portions of exposed structures and parts of walls unfinished or in the rough.

It is curious to think that Anne Lacaton and Pierre Vassal, after almost half a century, would do exactly the same thing when, with their intervention, they stripped the interiors of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, tearing away marbles and false ceilings, to lay bare the installations and the structure of the monumental and somewhat rhetorical building of the thirties.

However, leaving this note aside, Gehry remembers being very impressed at the time by how Larry Bell, for example, had peeled off a portion of his studio wall to expose the uprights he then covered with glass. He very much liked those wooden beams because they were like painting.

Billy A1 Bengston, another artist who occasionally erected dividing partitions in his studio and then knocked them down when a new idea matured, even though he admired Gehry deeply, he loved to scold him, and once called him 'the best thief ever', for how he had succeeded in integrating the ideas of artists into his work⁵. But he also called him "the greatest artist in the contemporary world”⁶.

"I wanted people to bring their own furniture, make their homes their own and interact with what I did," Gehry once said, admitting that the confusion wassomething he found agreeable⁷. However,he never considered himself an artist. Indeed, he was repeatedly forced to reiterate that he was an architect, and to better clarify the concept on one occasion hestated that "some artists are offended if you define 'art' as a construction in which there is also a toilet"⁸. And although he found a key component in sculptural principles to solve architectural problems by way of a plastic solution, he was never interested in sculpture as an end in itself⁹.

Therefore, it is manifest that although artistic techniques are clearly appropriated, they are always used for the purpose of responding to what he believed should be the fundamental requirements of architecture.

Gehry, in fact, throughout his life pursues a lucid personal research in order to create a new architecture. An architecture capable of fulfilling its functions with surprising shapes, without being merely spectacular. This of course makes it difficult to be able toapproach it fully within an architectural trend.

On the other hand, just as he does not recognize himself in the postmodern, which in spite of himself comes to touch on the project for Loyola Law School, he much less believes that the principles of Deconstructivism can form a part of it either. In fact, when in 1988 the design of his house was included in the Deconstructivist Architecture Exhibition, organized by Philip Johnson at the Moma in New York, Gehry found the experience problematic, because while admiring some of those other architects, he did not want to be included in their group, as he did not believe that his work challenged the assumptions of order and harmony, but was in fact the opposite.What he believed he was doing rather consisted in the search for another order, demonstrating that harmony could be achieved through something other than the classical tradition¹⁰.

However, the old two-storey building had been topped by a new carapace of heavily sloping corrugated sheet with protruding comers and slanting windows which, however, being lower, left the original house visible in the middle of the enlargement.

The interior of the existing house had also undergone a complete reconfiguration, creating adistribution system capable of creating a sort of continuity with the external space incorporated into the new structure. Many of the walls and ceilings had been removed or "tom" to the frame, while the small pre-existing rooms had been opened to create a larger and more flowing living room; moreover, in the new kitchen obtained from the increase in living space, even an asphalt floor had been laid down.

There is no doubt that after the interventions the house certainly acquired a more functional and spacious environ. It should be remembered, in fact, that in 2012 Frank and Berta Gehry agreed to host the cellist Yo-Yo Ma at home for a small-scale concert in support of Obama's presidential campaign. And Gehry on that occasion wanted the concert to be performed inside the house and not in a marquee that was to be installed in the garden, just to show how the new living room, with wooden slatted ceiling, would work well both from the acoustic and spatial point of view, succeeding, with personal satisfaction, in arranging more than seventy people in the room emptied of furniture and furnished with folding chairs.

It is certainly true that with the advent of the Modem, architecture had already exposed the "skeleton" of the building and the substance of the materials: yet to sublimate its essence. Gehry, on the other hand, when he completes his housedoes not show the skeleton but exposes "bones" piled up. He does not display refined, selected materials implemented with meticulous care, as does Adolf Loos, when in opposition to the ornamental mockery he uses chromatic qualities in a decorative and perceptive function of space. Nor does he" use current writings to make ancient truths speak"¹¹ as Carlo Scarpa does through skilful combinations of precious materials. Gehry, on the other hand, by assembling miserable materials, uses the slang of black ghettos to make current truths speak. He does notuse cultured language but the slang of the slums.

Miserable materials, destined for precarious constructions, are no longer relegated to secondary roles but brought into view and assembled with mock haphazardness; a refined and - borrowing Semerani's words when describing the work of Josef Frank¹² - "very Jewish imposition of sloppiness", which makes them rise to the role of protagonists.

Moreover, it is not difficult to imagine that many high minded people, at the sight of his first works, may have reacted exactly like the two characters in Shadows on the Hudson, one of the novels by the youngest of the Singers, where precisely in a passage extracted from the dialogue between Dr. Solomon Margolin and HerzGrein, the first addresses the other and says: "...'In my opinionall modem art has taken this path and is progressing slowly. In today's novels, topics are addressed and words are used that a generation ago were used only in the shallows. "Modem culture is shallow. I've known it for a while ', interjected Grein ”¹³.

The clear allusion to the indignant reactions that aroused the contents of his first novels,makes us understand just how much these were similar to the reactions that punctually accompanied the projects of Frank Gehry. Indeed, with regard to the latter, they were probably even worse.

Suffice it to say that when, in 2002, the Geryos bought land in the south of Venice to build a new home to where they thought they would move, while they were waiting for building permits, the neighbours began regularly dumping garbage as a clear sign of their little liking the idea of having a house designed by Gehry nearby. And it was not enough to put a fence and hire a gardener to ward them off, since they continued undaunted, so much so that in the end the couple decided to finally give up the project, preferring instead to sell the land¹⁴.

In addition to all this, even in 2012, Justin Shubow, in a report of one hundred and fifty-three pages for th^National Civic Art Society, regarding the project for the commemorative monument dedicated to Eisenhower that had been entrusted to Gehry a few years earlier, came to write that the latter was even driven by the desire to destroy Eisenhower's legacy, adding that his early avant-garde works, because they only celebrated chaos, danger and disorder, were antithetical to anything representing Eisenhower; and furthermore, that his values were not only antithetical to the orderly and harmonious style of the Monumental Core and Capitol, but even to the order and balance of the American form of government¹⁵.

It is true that th^National Civic Art Societywas a private group with conservative political inclinations; however, the feeling of deep aversion that some come to nurture towards him, as those of Singer, is naturally aroused precisely by the peculiarity that characterizes the works of both and which conceptually is what unites them in some way. That is to say, theaudacity to put into play with coherent lucidity, in different fields, unconventional topics and materials; so much so that we can say that the latter does in architecture what Singer had done many years before in literature.

In fact, even if Gehry, sublimating, inserts "trash" into his works, we cannot forget that it was precisely the Singer brothers who introduced into Yiddish literature, which was always characterized by moral teaching and a romantic vision of the Ashkenazi Jewish world, with uncomfortable themes such as sex, criminals, and the outcasts of society.

The descriptions of Isaac Bashevis Singer's characters, writes Henry Miller, are short, cut with an axe, carved with vitriol. Furthermore, he adds: "Onealways has a sense of fulfilment, whether through love or lust, murder or sacrilege. Singer is not afraid of anything, of any topic, not even of menstruation. As for sex, it is always strong and tasty, like a generous wine, and sometimes it is accompanied by love, sometimes it does without it, but it is never hidden or disguised. It would seem that it comes from the pages of the Old Testament... "¹⁶

Even his older brother (Israel J. Singer 1893-1944), perhaps unjustly overlooked and overshadowed by Isaac's fame, as well as having introduced innovative and characteristic elements of his style, such as the different levels of textures, the wide breadth of the events, the continuous overturning of the plans and points of view, or the splendid galleries of the characters, in 1921, in Warsaw, he joins the small group of writers called Khaliastra(literally "the band"), who stood precisely opposed to the social realism and romantic descriptions of the life of Polish Jews.

However, although Yiddish had also been used to spread ideals of progress and to support the socialist and workers' movement among the Jews of Eastern Europe, when in 1933 Isaac Bashevis Singer (who in 1978 would be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature), publisheSiSatonin Goraf¹, his first novel, the choice of Yiddish for a story of magic andqabbalahwiW appear provocative. In fact, the telling in Yiddish of old stories of superstition will be seen by many as a paradox.

But if Singer's novel had aroused these reactions, even Gehry's house in Santa Monica will appear no less paradoxical and provocative to any of his neighbours than to see the old Dutch colonial dwelling surrounded by trapezoidal additions of plywood and corrugated sheet metal; they felt offended, even pretending that it was tom down because it constituted an affront to their quiet suburban street¹⁸.

In any case, the Singer brothers will remain a literary point of reference for the whole group of second-generation Jewish-American writers who, with the due distinctiveness that distinguishes them, goes from Henry Miller, to Bernard Malamud, to Philip Roth, only to name a few¹⁹. Although, it must be said, in reality Malamud did not like to be called a Jewish writer, but wanted to be called an American writer²⁰, and Roth preferred to call himself an American-Jew; indeed, a "Jew of Newark".However, we cannot forget that when the latter in 1969 published Portnoy's Complaint, the book that, thanks to the obsessive presence of sex, had given him great notoriety, he was accused of misogyny and anti-Semitism.Accusations to which the writer replied that he had never thought that Jews should be given only pitiful and apologetic representations, and that he did nothing but tell America as it was, with its women and its Jews.

Paradoxically, even Gehry, during the construction of the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, an institution that was headed by the Jesuits, was even accused of blasphemy for the playful and openly non-denominational character of his project²¹.

Of course, these were not his intentions, just as he absolutely did not want to provoke irritation when he used wire mesh in his homes. While he repeatedly stated that his intent was, rather, to affirm that although the wire mesh was an omnipresent material, most people did not notice it until the context in which it was viewed changed²².

"Yet the hand of a great author can be seen precisely in his ability to bring the expressive means he uses to the limit" writes GiulioBusi, when he talks about Isaac Bashevis Singer²³. And once again this sort of analogy is evident between Singer as writer and Gehry as architect. In fact, when the latter uses ordinary materials to make deformed geometries charged with great emotional strength, in his way he too stretches to the limit the expressive means he uses.

His first buildings were, almost without exception, designed for people on a modest budget, and he was known precisely for his passion for using poor and ordinary materials, such as plywood left unfinished and unpainted, wire mesh, and the corrugated sheeting that soon became a kind of trade markin the formative years of his career²⁴. Gehry, in fact, originally built his reputation on what he liked to call cheapskate architecture, literally lousy architecture, precisely because of the materials used²⁵.

But the idea of showing what one would have liked to have kept quiet, is a reality that, however regrettable, could not be divorced from the Jewish world, and obviously would be represented later also in the cinema. For example, as in Crimes and Misdemeanours, the 1989 film by Woody Allen, in which the philanthropist Judah, a noted eye surgeon who has been cheating on his wife for a while, when threatened by his lover is forced to turn to his brother Jack, an inveterate and unscrupulous criminal who he tasks with having her killed by a hit-man.

On the other hand, even in the \969Take the Money and Run, despite being portrayed in a humorous way, the protagonistVirgilStarkwell, the inept and unfortunate would-be thug played by Allen himself, is a young American Jew. Unforgettable are the hilarious scenes in which Starkwell's parents are interviewed, hiding behind false moustaches and noses for shame of being recognized.

At any rate, although in the case of Crimes and Misdemeanour ^everything happens within the respectable and wealthy environment of upper-class US society, while in Take the Money and Run we find ourselves in certainly a more modest family context, the world is always that of the quiet family of American Jews.

All this naturally shows that although we avoid talking about it, finding ourselves with this kind of kinship, though understandably it may be embarrassing, is not an abnormal condition, nor a rare exception.

In fact, we find there were some criminals also in Gehry's family. One of his father's brothers, for example, was a bartender who worked for a gangster named Mikey Cohen; and even an aunt who sold nylon on the Detroit black market had married an alleged gangster²⁶.

Nevertheless, perhaps it is Once Upon a Time in America, a masterpiece by Sergio Leone shot in 1984, which might help us discover through the story centred on the bond of friendship between Max and Noodles, that the mafia were not only Italian. The difference, as Rich Cohen explains in Mafia Jews¹¹, is that unlike the latter - whose sons, generally, drawing on their lineage, followed in their parents' footsteps - the Jewish mobsters schooled their offspring as lawyers, doctors or engineers, thus 'cleaning up' in one generation.

Naturally, Cohen does not fail to emphasize that the moment he started to write, he himself had to face the dissent of his own family and the implied reproof of many members of the local Jewish community who considered it unreasonable, or at least inappropriate, to divulge such regrettable contexts.

On closer inspection, however, portrayal of criminality and not so much of what is good, in reality is an ancient discourse that takes us far back in time. Luke the Evangelist also liked criminals, prostitutes, tax collectors, collaborators, the handicapped and the rejected²⁸.

Yet at the same time Luke, according to Emmanuel Carrere, is one of the greatest novelists. In him, in fact, one recognizes the taste for the concrete and an interest in men rather than ideas, so much so that it made him the first ancient author to present a religious movement, exposing not its doctrine but its history²⁹.

Among all the Evangelists, continues Carrere, Luke was the only cultured one. While the others were poor Jewish fishermen, he was an educated doctor steeped in Greek language and culture. The Greek in which his books are written, in the opinion of eminent Greek scholars, is the most elegant of the New Testament³⁰, and although founded largely on copies of texts already written, according to Carrere, is undoubtedly the only account written by one person.

Moreover, as specified by the French writer, Luke was not a follower of Jesus. He did not know him, while he was certainly a follower of Paul. But if Paul "was a genius who flew far above ordinary mortals"³¹, and the Acts of the Apostles are largely his biography, Luke was merely a chronicler; a writer who for Carrere becomes a prism through which to represent the art of the story, as Carlo Chatrian explains well³².

The art of storytelling, however, is a prerogative that undoubtedly belongs to Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), one of the most extraordinary New York writers of the 20th century.

With his³³profound knowledge of the torments that plague the soul, writes Francesco Longo, Malamud is a narrator of Jews destined to suffer, and the family environment in which Gehry grows in some ways seems to belong totally to this world. The story that Malamud tells, says Alessandro Pipemo, is always the same: that of Job; and the biblical character, also recounted by Joseph Roth, seems to materialize in the life of Gehry through the paternal figure in which, in fact, the unfortunate Malamudian char- acterstands out perfectly.

Frank's father, Irving Goldberg, was a sickly man who died at the age of sixty-one and was a source of sadness and frustration for his son throughout his life.

Going back over his history, which is perhaps worth mentioning briefly, it will not be difficult for anyone who has read some story by Singer or Malamud to immediately identify a surprising familiarity with the descriptions, settings and vicissitudes that feature among the characters of those novels.

Even its existence, in fact, as if springing from the pen of the great American author, had been a succession of missed opportunities and continuous failures, and curiously, considering this aspect, we discover that not only the work, but even the same biography of Gehry somehow tends to wedge itself into the world of these writers.

Gehry's maternal grandfather, Samuel Caplan, just as might happen in one of these stories, had a bulky hardware store in the small neighbourhood where Toronto's local Jewish community lived.

The life of its inhabitants was polarized around a street that was in fact the urban square of the neighbourhood, characterized by a disorderly succession of stalls selling fish, meat, fruit and vegetables, in addition to the many banks of books and religious artefacts. Moreover, in the streets around there, one could encountemumerous small synagogues, shops, delicatessens and community centres³⁴.

Samuel Caplan, who was the rector of the neighbourhood synagogue, like many other lay people, went to functions regularly, studied the Talmud, and refused to work on Saturdays. His grandfather, recalls Gehry, would give him a favourable impression of Judaism, showing it as a religion that continually asked questions and which appeared certain in at least maintaining that the question was as important as the answer³⁵.

Probably, this is the only link he maintains with the religious sphere, since although he was very sensitive to anti-Semitism and frequently tended to make indirect references to his Jewish heritage, often linked to anxiety and fear, he never felt particularly at ease in a synagogue³⁶; and, "his infatuation with Judaism", the Californian architect recounts, ended abruptly in his teenage years, immediately after his bar mitzvah³⁷.

In any case, this teaching, which Gehry later described as "one of the most significant things we can derive from being Jewish"³⁸, proved to be fundamental to the approach he would later have towards his work.

His paternal grandfather, on the other hand, immigrated to New York from Poland, was a tailor, and when he died, leaving his family in a state of extreme poverty, Frank's father, Irving, was nine years old. Forced to leave school, he found himself mostly living on the streettrying to make doby performing small jobs in grocery stores, funfairs and wherever he could pick up some change to take home to help his mother and brothers. "Industrious, curious, stubborn and indefatigable, all qualities that he would pass on to his son ,.."³⁹, even as an adult he did not stop getting by moving between different occupations without ever being able to find a job that could bring him satisfaction and the economic reward he desired in vain.

At various times he ended up managing a fruit and vegetable stall, led an activity in the slot machine business, became a van driver, a boxer, designed and built furnishing items, and worked in a liquor store. Meanwhile his health was deteriorating and along with his frustration with his failures, his relationship with Frank also deteriorated, against whom he often lashed out violently.

The last job Irving found, at an alcohol beverage store a few blocks away from the modest two-room apartment he occupied with his family, he lost due to an episode that, according to his son, was certainly the result of a gesture of anti-Semitism perpetrated against him by the policeman who "stuck" him. Gehry, among other things, claims to have suffered discrimination related to his Jewish origins on various occasions during his life. Moreover "if you forget you are Jewish, there will always be agoy who will remind you", laments a character in a short story by Bernard Malamud⁴⁰.

However, at the time Irving Goldberg worked until two in the morning and, as Frank remembers, he also got into the habit of drinking. When one of the officers on duty chatted cordially with him after closing time and asked if he could buy spirits, Irving, not realizing that it was a trap, sold him a bottle of liquor a few minutes after the time allowed. As a result the store license was suspended for two weeks, while Gehry's father not only lost his job but was also arrested and put in a cell⁴¹.

In the figure of this poor shlimazl (theYiddishe pit het meaning jinxed, haunted by misfortune), one can immediately see a clear resemblance to the many characters created by Malamud. How can we forget, for example, the protagonist of one of his short novels, Nat Lime, owner of a liquor store in Brooklyn who at a certain point in the story, reflecting sadly, says to himself`T/n's is how things are: I give my heart and they kick me in the teeth ^,A11X is not difficult to imagine that the elderly Goldberg, faced with the umpteenth injustice of life, must have felt exactly like him.

Of course, it is needless to say how much Gehry suffered due to his family situation, but his greatest bitterness will surely always be the fact that his father - by whom he had always been accused of being "a dreamer without art or part" and by whom on more than one occasion as a boy he had been beaten violently for trivial reasons⁴³ - could not envision him achieving the fame andsuccess that undoubtedly made him one of the most authoritative protagonists of the contemporary international architectural scene. With a universally recognized reputation to be valued, he nonetheless expressed extreme disappointment with the nickname archistar, a term that Gehry, although not disdaining fame, had always hated from the beginning, as he said it completely miscast his architecture, suggesting that it entailed nothing but flashy and showy forms⁴⁴.

In reality, Gehry had always pursued an idea - namely that of being able to conceive a new way of configuring space and creating original forms⁴⁵ - but above all, he says, he had tried to find a way that allowed him to express feelings through three-dimensional objects⁴⁶.

He had thus created a completely new architectural language, and in every new building, writes Goldberger, he used that language to say something in a slightly different

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way .

Moreover, even if Gehry recalls taking up the use of wire mesh in his projects because he believed that most people denied the mediocrity that surrounded them⁴⁸, we must recognise that with the realization of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, a swirling curved structure coated in titanium, not only did it make the architecture innovative, but also managed to make it appealing even to that general public that normally would have shown little interest in this kind of thing.

On the other hand, if Isaac Bashevis Singer, who although he had become an American citizen would never depart from his initial choice, living all his years in the United States would continue to use Yiddish to write his stories, even Gehry, for his part, although apparently it does not seem so, with the same perseverance would remain faithful over time to his initial idea of architecture.

It is true that his first houses with wire nets and unfinished materials appear very far from the titanium plates that cover the sinuous shape of the Guggenheim, or the scenographic stainless steel covering of the Walt Disney Concert Hall; but on closer inspection it appears not to be so.

Paul Goldberger, for example, rightly points out that when Gehry completes the headquarters of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, inaugurated on October 20, 2014 in the presence of the then president of the republic Francis Holland, the desire to showcase the "bowels of the building ” certainly refers to his first works; and from many points of view, the American critic affirms, he shows himself to be consistent with the basic idea that governed them.

On that occasionGehry was granted full freedom with regard to the architectural configuration the building would take, the only constraint placed by the client being that the project should include a large amount of traditional exhibition spaces, with rectangular rooms and white and straight walls.

Passionate about boats, Gehry had always thought that sails were capable of creating an architectural space⁴⁹ and perhaps now he had the opportunity to demonstrate it. Therefore, using a particularly elaborate engineering support, he conceives a sort of spectacular sailing ship, the achievement of which would, however, make it necessary to build a complex structural system made of concrete and steel, with huge reticular elements, beams, pillars and support trusses, grafted at an angle into the ground, and nicknamed the "tripod" by the engineers.

To put it in a schematic way, the building essentially consists of a series of box-shaped concrete elements, intended to house the exhibition galleries, and twelve enormous floating curved glass sails that act as roofs and cladding walls.

To make the galleries, 19,000 concrete panels were used, and although they were roughly regular spaced as required, more than half of the panels, to adapt to the imperceptible geometric variations of the rooms, had to be modelled with slightly different shapes.

The sails, on the other hand, are divided into a system consisting of 36,000 glass panels, each with different curvatures, then mounted on a secondary structure of iron and wood connected in turn to the same "tripods".

The resultwould be that of obtaining a juxtaposition of elegant surfaces and rough structures, thus reconciling a deliberate coexistence between the pure and refined object and the work that still seems to be under construction. A combination of this, which together with the elements of the galleries, defined as “icebergs” that in a certain way evoke the composition of boxes stacked in an apparently random manner as in many of his earliest projects, seems to link conceptually to his first houses and the passion for the unfinished.

Despite his prestige and established international reputation, even in this case however, as happened in almost all his projects, things went slowly and, due to a long bureaucratic process caused mostly by the objections raised by the inhabitants of the area, Gehry would have to wait almost twelve years to see his finished work.

According to Goldberger "... it is not an exaggeration to say that while he was designing, Frank was able to wrap the first Gehry and the middle Gehry into the late Gehry, managing to look at the past of his career and at the same time project it into the future”⁵⁰.

That of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, in fact, is a mature Gehry who, however, has not lost the taste of "playing" with his customers, as he liked to define the purposeful relationship that was created with the client in the design phase.

Just a few years earlier he had built an apartment tower in Lower Manhattan, and on March 19, 2011, Bruce Ratner, the project developer, decided to inaugurate the building by organizing a party for his architect's eighty-second birthday and for the occasion he had prepared a huge cake that represented a playful simulacrum of gehryan architecture.

The reception was held on the top floor of the building, a large loft that enjoyed a spectacular view of Manhattan, and Gehry, after Ratner's speech, the ritual toast, and the applause that followed, took the floor. He thanked Bruce Ratner, and without any polemic allusion reminded those present that the building in which they were located, due to a series of vicissitudes, not least the economic recession, had been reduced in height and therefore was lower and more squat compared to his original idea. However, he did not fail to praise Ratner who, despite economic uncertainty, had not given up the project; then, pointing his finger towards midtown Manhattan, said: "Here we are not far from where my father was bom, and here it is difficult for me not to think of him". Then, with his voice broken with emotion, he added: "If only he could be here to see what I built in the city where he grew up. My father never saw my buildings, and he thought I was just a dreamer. I think he would have been proud of me. If he could see this building. I would like to think that if he had seen this building he would have felt that I had done something good”⁵¹.

It must be said that Frank Gehry had often tried in vain to look for reasons to be proud of his father⁵², yet in spite of everything he never held any grudges against him, because in the end he realized that he was not bad but only a man tried by the adversities of life, just like certain characters of Malamud.

What is certain is that regardless of what their relations were, Gehry first visited his father's grave only thirty-two years after his death, on the occasion of the burial of his mother Thelma, going to the funeral at the cemetery together with his four children who only rarely met all together. While there, one of the boys, who had brought a small fish-shaped sculpture with him that day, placed it on his grandfather's tombstone. Fish was an important symbol for Gehry, not only because Fish was the nickname that Frank had as a child⁵³, but above all because the fish, present in the most varied forms, materials and dimensions in many of his projects and design objects, had now become an icon that represented the symbol of his success.

That gesture, relates Paul Goldberger, struck Frank deeply. "It was a significant gesture because it made it clear to Irving, who had always thought of himself as Goldberg, the full scope of being a Gehry, and gave him the post-mortem role of patriarch that he had never fully assumed in life"⁵⁴.

In conclusion, we would like to recall The Assistant, another splendid novel by Bernard Malamud, which describes a scene in which Frank Alpine, the protagonist of the story, "to fight nervousness, picked up a book he was reading. It was the Bible. Sometimes Frank thought that certain parts he could have written himself^⁵.

Probably even Irvin Goldberg, retracing the episodes of his life with his mind, at least sometimes might have had the same thought.