Another Jewish landmark?

In my article in the last issue of Jewish Rhode Island, I asked whether there is something essentially Jewish about making pilgrimages to Jewish sites, as well as other religious and secular sites.  Perhaps a destination in Manchester, New Hampshire, is particularly confounding, for it was the progeny of a Jewish husband and a gentile wife.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), a Unitarian from Wisconsin, associated with a large number of Jews during much of his extraordinary architectural career.  One of his notable employers in Chicago was Dankmar Adler, a son and grandson of rabbis, who built several synagogues and other structures for Jewish clients.

After establishing his own highly successful practice in suburban Oak Park, Illinois, Wright attracted relatively few Jewish clients, although in 1908 there was the Meyer May family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  And at the end of his amazingly prolific career, he designed a bold Conservative synagogue, Beth Sholom, in suburban Philadelphia.

How many Rhode Islanders know that Wright spent a few of his childhood years in Pawtucket?  His father, William, was the minister at the High Street Baptist Church from 1871 to 1873.  And Frank spoke at Brown University in 1933, hoping to recruit apprentices for his new Taliesin Fellowship, in rural Wisconsin.

Wright also received a commission for a home in Warwick, in 1946, but William and Eleanor Slater, the young couple who hired him, told me in 1992 that the cost was too high, so, regrettably, it was never built.

Isadore Jacob Zimmerman, a Jew, was born in New York City in 1903.  Though he was not much interested in religious observance, many of his urology patients and colleagues probably perceived him as religious.

His father, Samuel, had emigrated from Vilna, Lithuania, and worked as a “cutter” in textile factories.  His mother, Lena, had emigrated from Minsk, in Belarus.  Most likely, she took primary responsibility for Isadore’s four younger siblings, who were born in Boston.

Isadore graduated from Boston Latin School, then Harvard College, in 1925.  He studied medicine at Tufts and obtained further training in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.  So was it a lack of opportunity in larger cities that brought him to Manchester around 1940?

Six years earlier, he had married Lucille Cummings, five years his junior, who came from a large family in Louisville, Kentucky.  An aspiring nurse, she had trained at the New Hampshire State Hospital, in Concord.

The Zimmermans never had children, and if the couple affiliated with Manchester’s Reform congregation, Adath Yeshurun, established in 1900, it was probably a loose connection.  Rather than purchasing burial plots in Manchester’s Jewish cemetery, or beside his parents in Boston’s United Hand in Hand Cemetery, Isadore and Lucille would select a resting place in their own backyard.

The couple lived in a conventional, 14-room house at 703 Maple St. for more than a dozen years.  Isadore and Lucille were serious musicians who also enjoyed reading and travel.  They were drawn to nature and had a heightened sense of privacy.

The Zimmermans fired the first architect for the new home they planned to build even before reading about Wright.  In 1949, once they had met and consulted with the master at his idyllic compound west of Madison, Wisconsin, they never looked back.

I have determined that since the mid-1930s, approximately 20 of Wright’s 100 clients for “Usonian” homes were Jews.  In theory at least, such homes were custom-designed yet moderately priced.  They were built across the country, including in Alabama, New Mexico and Ohio.

The Zimmermans’ stunning home at 223 Heather St., in Manchester’s North End, was completed in 1952.  In a letter to “Mr. Wright,” they proclaimed: “We are now living in the new house, an experience we would not miss for all the monetary riches in the world.”  So, in place of a Wrightian title, perhaps “Priceless” or “Hosannah” would have been appropriate names for the new house.

In a gorgeous book co-published by the Wright Foundation in 1993, “Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks,” David Larkin & Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, eds. (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. in association with The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1993), the Zimmerman House was characterized as a “masterwork.”

In 1950, Toufic Kalil, a Syrian-born Christian, and his wife, Mildred, decided to build their own Usonian in Manchester, at 117 Heather, only a short walk from the Zimmermans’ home. The couples were well acquainted since the men had rented offices in the same medical building, at 967 Elm St., and the women worked as their assistants.

The Kalils were also childless, so needed only two bedrooms.  But their slightly smaller residence, while manifesting many of the same principals as the Zimmermans’ house, was made primarily of concrete blocks rather than such traditional materials as wood, brick and terra-cotta.

I first visited the Zimmerman House in 1992, when I was able to interview another visitor, Loren Pope, who had built one of the first Usonians, in 1941 in Falls Church, Virginia.

I have been fortunate to experience the Zimmerman House a few more times, but my most recent trip, a few weeks ago, was perhaps the best.  My wife, Betsey, came with me, as did our dear friends and neighbors, Jim and Jill Tobak, who are Wright enthusiasts.

It was a perfect early spring day, and the property was awash with light, color and fragrance.  Visitors were allowed to move at their own pace, perhaps as they imagined that the Zimmermans had prepared a tasty meal and would soon perform on their grand piano and cello.

We examined many of the couple’s fine pieces of contemporary pottery and glass, Japanese screens, and African and pre-Columbian sculptures, displayed on numerous built-in shelves.  I didn’t see any Jewish ritual objects, but did notice Cecil Roth’s reference book, Jewish Art: An Illustrated History, among hundreds of other volumes.

The Zimmerman House, built on one level, measures only 1,450 square feet.  The front door leads to a narrow hallway, which gives way to an expansive living room.  An array of rear windows and glass doorways facilitate a heavenly embrace: sky, clouds, lawns, trees, shrubs, flowers and occasional singing creatures.

The Zimmerman House includes two tiny bedrooms and bathrooms, and a kitchen alcove known as a “workspace,” but the living room is so nurturing and restful that, during his final years, Isadore spent his days and evenings there.

Wasn’t it in some sense a Jewish gesture when the Zimmermans decided to share their good fortune with younger generations of visitors and pilgrims by bequeathing their prize possession, and a restoration fund, to Manchester’s Currier Museum of Art?

Fortunately, an anonymous donor also grasped the importance of the Kalil House and, following the death of the couple and their nephew, donated it to the Currier. Another mitzvah?

GEORGE M. GOODWIN, of Providence, is the editor of Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes.