Vivien Cohen / Chaya bat Hershel ve-Rella

by Rabbi Harry Levin

When does change seem most often to emerge within Jewish tradition; that is: change which finds intellectual ground, and liberating inspiration, within the ancient texts, and within the rules which shape the authentic power of Torah commentary? When does genuine inner change come to the Jewish soul? When intellect and inspiration themselves are genuinely at stake. When learning for the sake of learning and dreaming for the sake of the Divine get lost in what’s literal, then the Jewish imagination reshapes reality. Then, what’s literal becomes more plainly, and more elaborately, real.

Vivien Greenberger Cohen was an artist, a pioneering artist in her own time. To teach human beings the beauty of being human, she infused the literal, the clinical accuracies of our form, with her tender vision of the soulful heat which enlivens our torso and transforms biology into ethical being. Vivien devoted her artistic maturity to the human body, and in the ways she depicted form, Vivien cultivated the soul as a kind force in service of others’ true needs, and she shaped this physical life, in stark detail, as a mystic spark of the Divine intent.

To prepare the moment for a pioneer can take thousands of years. That’s true Jewish time. We know that both sets of the Ten Commandments, in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy 5, prohibit the creation of statues and pictures. But in Deuteronomy 4, in language building toward the negative commandment, the warning against explicit form seems much more explicit:

“For your own sake,” says the Torah, “be most careful, since you saw no shape when the Lord your God spoke to you at [Sinai] out of the fire. Do not act wickedly and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatever: the form of a man or a woman.”

The apparent plain sense of the Torah’s warning is to establish boundaries against idolatrous worship. But stricter Jewish interpreters, functioning within the rules of our interpretive system, expanded the prohibition against depicting form, beyond the fashionings of idols, to any depiction, no matter the purpose.

More lenient interpreters, also functioning within the rules of our interpretive system, approved the third century CE murals of the Dura Europos synagogue (unearthed in Syria), approved speculative likenesses of Abraham and Moses and David and more. What could have been the textual grounds for such leniency and what could have been the purpose?

Surely our Torah’s text seems to ascribe physicality to God. God’s anger is portrayed as an enflamed nose. God is called ish milchama, a man of war. The Torah’s anthropomorphic moments are meant to open a gate of understanding for those not intellectually able to live, loyally, by the revolutionary concept that you cannot say what God is—you can only say what God is not. God is not limited. God ain’t got no body. To draw closer those people who needed (and who need) to see in order to grasp, the Torah, the divine document for all who would seek its teaching, seems to encourage the imaginings of form.

To the lenient interpreters, who made legal decisions within the rules which shape the authentic power of creative Jewish commentary, the literary strategies of the Torah text, encouraging the imaginings of form, became the approved visual strategies of those third-century synagogue murals, and of the mosaic floor uncovered in the sixth-century synagogue at Beth Alpha in Israel’s Jezreel Valley. The Torah’s anthropomorphic literary strategies gave intellectual ground for the halakhic endorsements granted to medieval Jewish artisans who worked in miniature, whether in ceramic or metal or paint, and who, because of the fractional size of their creations could not be perceived, pursuant to lenient interpretation, as violating the laws of creating likenesses.

And they made a living, those artisans. Learning for the sake of learning and dreaming for the sake of the Divine are most often at stake in times when it is hard to make a living. The halakha—Jewish law—and the rules governing the evolution of halakha, can be enormously pragmatic. Pragmatic: just like the human form.

Still, the gut-level Jewish rejection of form, especially sculptural form, endured. Greek sculpture served religion, and Christianity readily absorbed that Greek sensibility. Jewish rejection of the artistic representation of human forms in three-dimensions was a formal way to reject the parameters of Christianity. God ain’t got no body. On that Jews agree. In two dimensions, say the lenient judges, a body ain’t a body.

As the anthropologist and historian Raphael Patai affirms: “A people worshipping a God who has no form, [a God] whose very essence is antagonistic to form, cannot relate to form in the same positive manner, cannot develop the same sense of form, cannot devote itself to a study of the harmonies and the enjoyment of the beauties of form as can those peoples who are used to seeing their gods represented in beautiful, appealing, touching, moving, or awe-inspiring visible and tangible forms. The underdevelopment of the sense of form,” says Patai, “was but one of the minor prices the Jews had to pay for their adherence to their unique concept of God.”

But, building on the authoritative lenient interpretations which emerged from within the halakhic system, within a traditional stream of Jewish legal evolution, two-dimensional art became more plausible, so that Jews of the Englightenment did not have to be religious rejectionists to become prolific painters.

From the ancient texts on, our people have learned that human bodies, and human sexuality, within settings defined by pursuit of the commandments, are beautiful—a sensibility only intensified as a reaction against Christian visions of the human body as originally sinful, and human sexuality a defilement of the soul.

So Jews have wrestled to pair the ideas that the human body is beautiful and, though God commands you to bring beauty to the fulfillment of each commandment, you are commanded not to attempt to match the beauty of the body. Unless God is a partner.

When you see the drawing of Vivien Cohen, you know that God has been her partner. You know that within settings defined by pursuit of the commandments—to be fruitful and to nourish, to love respectfully, and to respect lovingly—Vivien’s dream, when she set graphite to paper, was to serve the Divine intent .

To reach that point, limits in the sensibilities of more than Jewish tradition, more than just Jewish culture, had to be restructured. And the new realities would lose their moral stature if not suffused with the urgency of teaching essential tenets, if not invigorated by the patient discipline of earned craft.

Vivien Cohen was shaped at the crest of centuries of sociocultural turmoil regarding the plain sense realities of the human form and the sensual forms of the human imagination.

Vivien was born on February 11th, 1915, in New York City. Her name was spelled, in a French tradition, V-i-v-i-e-n, illuminating the connection to her Hebrew name, Chaya, the life force.

Her parents had come, separately, from Austria-Hungary. Her father, Hershel, Herman in America, had perhaps been part of the Galveston Project, a program fueled in part by the sense of German Jew Jacob Schiff, true founder of the Rumson Golf Club, that turn-of-the-20th century Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe should be settled anywhere but on America’s east coast. Galveston seemed a good idea. But Harry ended up on the east coast, and became a prosperous roofer, who roofed most of YaleUniversity.

Vivien’s mother, Rella, was her father’s second wife. She suffered with scoliosis, and barely managed to surpass the health standards of the immigation service. With his first wife, Harry had had three children, Sidney, Eddie and Lillian, and when Vivien was born, her siblings, though close to her heart, seemed in stature more like an aunt and two uncles.

And Vivien was pampered, by the siblings, by a life of relative affluence in Derby, Connecticut, where the family had moved. Rella was a superb dressmaker. Rella would not let Vivien in the kitchen to help. This restriction did not enhance Vivien’s culinary skills. In later years, Al would say to his beloved Vivien: “I would rather you paint our food than cook it.”

In high school, Vivien was involved in drama. In the course of idyllic summers, the family would canoe up the HousatonicRiver. But Vivien told Sam, her singular grandchild, that living in Connecticut bored her to tears. She was at heart a cosmopolitan girl, who loved to be around museums.

When her father died, Vivien and her mother moved down to a brownstone in the Bronx, on Tremont Avenue. She attended college, at Pratt Institute, studying art. Medical art, the technical rendering of the human form, became a focus of Vivien’s training. She sought a summer job at the hospital which came to be known as Sloan Kettering. But in the nineteen thirties, anti-Jewish thinking influenced hiring even in medical institutions. Vivien Greenberger was tipped by a friend to change her name for the interview, and as Vivien Green, she got the job. On lunch breaks she used to run over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue.

When she graduated from Pratt, Vivien, still livingin the Bronx with her mother, took a job doing medical art at BellevueHospital. Under pressure of a deadline, Vivien had to finish drawings of an arm. So she brought the arm home with her, on the subway. It was wrapped, in butcher paper, as Harvey notes. And Vivien was working at home on her drawings of the arm when suddenly she heard her mother coming. Rella was a finicky housekeeper, and would not have responded positively to an unattached arm in her brownstone. Vivien had one choice. She opened a window, and carefully leaned the arm on the sill. The only thing worse than her mother finding the arm would have been for it to topple from the sill into the early evening traffic on Tremont Avenue.

Eventually, Vivien got out of the medical art business. Nervewracking. After hours in the morgue, cadavers lined up on gurneys, Vivien was working away on her drawings when suddenly she felt icy cold hands slowly encircling her neck. A co-worker with a spooky touch had dipped his hands in cold water and then snuck up behind her. That was the end of that line of work.

But Vivien’s life was still formidably influenced by the details of the human form.

Al Cohen had a friend, Roy Garn, his best friend. Roy one summer was working as a camp counselor, and he had a girlfriend at a camp nearby. The season was closing, and Roy was returning to his camp on a bicycle. Al never knew whether Roy had been in an accident on that bicycle, or if he had been attacked, but Roy was found staggering along the road, bleeding, the form of his forehead irreparably smashed in. Roy survived, and later evidenced his brilliance in a book he wrote entitled Magic Power of Emotional Appeal. He would lecture on emotional appeal, but the man who had been handsome before that summer day, now projected to the world a brutally mangled face. The girlfriend eventually married Roy, perhaps motivated by sympathy, surmises Al, because Al, too felt deep sympathy for Roy.

Al was living in Brooklyn, with his parents, in BoroughPark, and he invited Roy to come for dinner with his girlfriend, who lived in the Bronx. Logically, someone determined that the twosome should bring a girl along to meet Al. That girl was Vivien.

On the subway down from the Bronx, Roy and his girlfriend spontaneously decided to put Vivien on, to tease her. SoRoy’s girlfriend turns to Roy and says casually, “For a fellow who is in this country only one year, Al doesn’t have an accent, though when he gets excited he certainly does stutter.”

Now Al had been born in the good old USA, and his speech patterns, whether calm or pressured, were eloquent.

“Oh,” said Roy’s girl to Roy, “do you think that Al is any taller than Vivien?” On her tallest day, Vivien stood four foot eleven.

When they reached Al’s building in Brooklyn,Roy’s girl, usually dignified, surprised Vivien by running ahead up the stairs, and when Al opened the door, she quickly instructed Al to speak with an accent and to stutter. Vivien came around the corner.

“This is Vivien,” said the woman.

“P-p-p-p-plizzed to mitt you,” said Al.

But after awhile, entranced by the beautiful woman in his home, Al forgot he was supposed to speak with an accent and a stutter. Vivien whirled around to see Roy’s girl motioning hurriedly to Al to start again with the accent and the stutter, and the put on was over.

What Al did not yet know was that Vivien’s sense of humor had the potential to be more sly than his own. Roused by her positive response to his humor, Al took Vivien’s phone number, and they began to date. Three years later, on June 22, 1941, just before the war, Al and Vivien were married.

The ceremony took place in June, in Brooklyn, hot and humid. But the couple had decided to dress formally, Al bundled up in wool tails, a cravat with a pearl stick pin, all rented. Al’s Uncle Tanya, a cantor, did the service, and Tanya really got into the swing of things. In the Brooklyn heat he went on and on and on, and finally Al, sotto voce, threatened his uncle with the pearl stick pin.

“Enough is enough,” he told him, reaching for the weapon in his sweat-soaked cravat. “No air conditioning. Genug.”

A couple of superb good humor, Al and Vivien, but the frightening uncertainties of war influenced their conscious decision to delay having children until the years of violence would end.

In the meantime, in Woodbridge,New Jersey, Al and Vivien got involved in a linen store. Vivien’s half-sister Lillian was married to a businessman, who suggested that they go into his linen business in Perth Amboy, as partners. With bales of fabric going to clothe soldiers, Al soon sensed that one of the material deprivations caused by war rationing was diapers. People were coming into the linen store asking time and again for diapers.

The linen business was sold, and in Woodbridge, Al and Vivien found a storefront, which used to be a bakery, about ten feet wide and sixty feet long, and there they opened Vivien’s Kiddy Shop. For a time they had boxes on the shelves, and the boxes had labels on the outside, but nothing inside.

Thingswere that tight. But soon they were blessed to find a jobber, a supplier in New York City, and business began to grow.

Vivien was terrific in retail. They started out selling small sizes, for kids three years old, and even the most bizarre looking baby Vivien would greet with, “What a baby that is!” She had an honorable charm and that sly sense of humor. She referred to Al as her favorite husband. Sam, her only, was her favorite grandson

When Sam was born, Harvey talked to him the way Vivien had always talked to Harvey (for at least the first fifty years), a language heavily laden with sweethearts and lovey faces, overdone love language. Soon Harvey’s friends at work insisted on being addressed in the same way Harvey was addressing his precious son.

In recent times, even in the hospital, Vivien would treat the nurses and aides the same way as she handled the customers in the store. Everyone was her favorite, each one beautiful, special. If, when a nurse was working with her, Vivien grimaced in pain at a nurse’s touch, once the pain subsided, Vivien would quickly apologize. When Vivien Cohen couldn’t say something nice, she said something funny.

Remember that Vivien had spent decades illustrating books with titles like Changes In You For Girls: A Beautifully Illustrated Simply Worded Explanation of the Change of Puberty, and How Can You Tell If You’re Really In Love, and Facts About VD For Today’s Youth.

The first time that Sam came to visit Vivien in the hospital, she was crying out in her sleep, and Sam tried to comfort her and he said, “Grandma, Grandma. I’m here. Are you pain?”

And she opened her eyes, gazed at her grandson and said, “You think I’m having an orgasm?”

Another volume she illustrated was called The Family Book About Sexuality. Vivien continued drawing until the last of her eighty-seven years. And clearly, even after she stopped drawing, she kept right on illustrating.

Not long after Pearl Harbor, Al felt compelled to enlist in the Signal Corps, and was sent to school for eight months at a branch of Rutgers. He remembers riding on an old steam train with the members of his outfit, sitting by an open window, and realizing his face had been blackened by the soot from the train’s smokestack. Soon Al was learning to string telephone wire and climb poles. And he wrote a column for the base paper about the fellas in the outfit. He was invited to do a radio broadcast, and there he met Alan Funt, later of Candid Camera fame. There was a script for the broadcast, and Al had a part. One word. Today he says he doesn’t remember what the word was, whether it had four letters or not.

The army neglected to make proper lenses for Al’s gas mask, and when his unit was shipped off to the Pacific, Al was left behind. His destiny was to serve in Europe. For more than two years he did not see Vivien.

At the end of the war, by then a sergeant, Al was stationed in Germany, in Munich, and he went to Rosh Hashanah services. The services were held in a theater in Munich. In a theater because no synagogues had survived. On the stage of the theater, the Jewish military chaplain spoke of the terrible plight of the Jewish survivors, and he addressed the horrific issue in considerable detail. Jews had no home to which they could return. In displaced persons camps Jews were surviving on two meals daily, on bread and coffee and soup and beans, and there were hunger riots. Many were still wearing the striped suits of their concentration camp imprisonment. The Red Cross had promised four cases of soap, for fourteen thousand people, and ended up sending two.

The Jews had managed to smuggle food into the harshest ghettos, but the American army, with all its resources, as the war ended, couldn’t figure out how to help the survivors.

Deeply moved by the chaplain’s message, Al sat down and wrote a letter to Vivien detailing what he had learned, and setting out a plan of action, astute in its priorities: clothing for the impending harsh winter. New clothes, he insisted. No rags. Toilet and sanitation articles. Then intellectual and recreational items, and then religious articles, all in order of importance.

“Haste is paramount!” wrote Al. “Send them as much as you can. Let’s not finish the job Hitler started!”

“Don’t fail these people!”

“With all my love, Al”

Vivien read the letter to the local Hadassah. She typed his handwritten text and submitted it to the New York Post, which printed the entire letter. Vivien organized a collection effort in her children’s clothing store, receiving and packing parcels. Vivien and other Woodbridge merchants also used monetary contributions sent in response to the Post article. They bought goods wholesale and added them to the shipments.

Al’s brother, Morris, was a military policeman on troopships sailing between New York and Scotland. Morris took some shipments with him personally to Scotland, where arrangements were made to send the goods on to Europe. In America people volunteered trucks to take the cartons to the docks. On board ship, a sympathetic official made sure that there was room in the hold on each vessel for the packages which Al had urged and which Vivien had delivered.

Growing up, Harvey had a sense that his parents were a team, and their teamwork became Harvey’s mental model for a marriage, for any meaningful relationship.

Harvey was born in 1947. Seven years later Bob was born. Bob is learning disabled, and learning disabled children were definitely not treated in the nineteen fifties with the attentiveness of current educational strategies. The team, Al and Vivien, bucked the established norms of their era to secure for their son Bob the best possible education.

Vivien and Al organized the New Jersey Association for Brain Injured Children, today known as the New Jersey Association for children with Learning Disabilities. Their primary purpose was valuable schooling, but the schools did not want to have anything to do with children like Bob. Al and Vivien were pioneers venturing across the harsh limitations of New Jersey schooling. The board of education, insisted the Cohens, should pay for appropriate education for the learning disabled. First, Bob was assigned to a school in Highland Park. But the Cohens kept fighting, and, remarkably, the Woodbridge board of education yielded and paid to send Bob to a school in New York City, the AdamsSchool.

The victory was huge, but the first day, Vivien seemed frightened, and followed Bob to school. And he saw her, and Bob said, “Mommy, you don’t have to come with me.”

Bob had a talent for traveling. He knew, the way most New Yorkers do not, the directions north and south, east and west. Eventually Bob got a job that required him to master the subway system, and he never had a problem navigating the city.

Vivien and Al founded a summer day camp in Jamesburg,New Jersey, CampLaurel, for learning disabled children. They were running three four five busloads full of kids from all over New Jersey, a hundred or a hundred fifty youngsters smiling in the sun because of what the loving activist partners, Vivien and Al Cohen, had achieved for them.

When Al had returned hom from the war, he joined his beloved in work at Vivien’s Kiddy Shop. During the fifties and into the sixties, Al and Vivien were active in the synagogue in Woodbridge, Adat Israel. The congregants in those days put on plays, Broadway shows, and Vivian did the flats, the scenery for the plays, the backdrops. She began doing some paid work, murals for people’s homes, portraits in oil. If a friend was kind or hospitable to her, Vivien would create a masterpiece as a gesture of gratitude. Her artwork hangs prominently in many homes.

Dr. Sol Gordon wanted to write a book about children with learning disabilities. As he developed the book, Vivien developed illustrations to amplify his text. That was the beginning of her life as an illustrator. Sol Gordon started writing books, and she illustrated them all. Soon she met other authors who had been impressed by her work and who sought out Vivien to participate in their projects.

Harvey knew that his mother was not like his friends’ mothers. The brand of humor, the cultural sophistication, the social activism, the danger in the kitchen, the fact in those days that she was a working mom, set her apart from most women in suburban New Jersey. By the time Harvey was in his teens, she was illustrating a lot of books on sex. We’re talking the sixties. Sex had special cool, special cache.

Harvey’s sophomore year at Syracuse, the end of his teens, his mother was asked by attorneys for Al Goldstein to testify as an expert witness at Goldstein’s obscenity trial. She was to provide proof of his redeeming social value.

Harvey came home for Thanksgiving vacation, and his mother said, “Dear, you are going into the city to meet a friend tomorrow. Would you please pick up a copy of Screw Magazine for me so I can see if I want to testify at this trial.”

Harvey had a few awkward interactions with magazine vendors—No, you don’t understand...it’s not for me...it’s for my mother—until he found a stash of Goldstein’s porn on 42nd Street. She didn’t testify, but eventually Vivien did illustrate a short video that Henry Winkler produced on sex education. In an illustration which richly expresses Vivien’s rare blend of anatomical precision and radiant humanity, her son and her grandson appear gracefully naked in her book on breast feeding. Her book, Labor and Birth, is used by childbirth classes at RiverviewHospital. The first picture inside is drawn from a photograph of Sam and Harvey and Robbie, taken a minute after Sam was born.

Robbie was, for all practical purposes, Vivien’s daughter, and Vivien was Robbie’s mother on this edge of the American continent. The joking way that Vivien put it after she met Robbie for the first time, which was just after the engagement, sudden; Vivien said, “If you ever get divorced, I’m taking her back.”

The staff in the nursing home remarked on what a tremendously devoted daughter-in-law Robbie was, and then immediately observed that only a special mother-in-law deserved that kind of devotion. Over the last few months, Robbie, with her schedule heavily booked in service to others, enduring her own physical tribulations, went far above and beyond in her service to Vivien, two women bonded in their remarkable strengths.

One of Vivien’s greatest strengths was the tremendous range of her artistic talent. Each year, she would enter examples of her work in a few categories of the New Jersey Senior Art Competition: graphite pencil drawings, oils, acrylics, sometimes illustrations that she was doing for books, artwork in varying dimensions, competing in different divisions. And Vivien managed each year to pull a first in at least one of the cateogires. The family joke was that the then-mayor of Woodbridge, Jim McGreevey, would come to hand out the awards just so he could kiss Vivien. Conservatively estimated, she earned twenty ribbons in the statewide event.

Vivien was definitely a pioneer in bringing ethnic and racial diversity to her published drawings. As Al’s beloved partner of over sixty years, and as a an artist with deepest sensitivity to the forms of human life and to the inner mysteries revealed in form, teaching others how to nourish, teaching others how to love, Vivien Cohen was, in the course of her days, a true force for change.

When does change seem most often to emerge within Jewish tradition; that is: change which finds intellectual ground, and liberating inspiration, within our ancient texts’ repeated commandments to respect humanity? When does genuine inner change come to the Jewish soul? When learning for the sake of learning and dreaming for the sake of the Divine get lost in what’s literal, then the Jewish imagination reshapes reality. Then, what’s literal becomes more plainly, and more elaborately, real.

Vivien Greenberger Cohen was an artist, a pioneering artist in her own time, who taught human beings the beauty of being human, and transformed biology into ethical being, shaping this physical life, in stark detail, as a mystic spark of the Divine intent.