MEMOIRS OF INDIVIDUALS ASSOCIATED WITH THE MODERN SCHOOL, circa 1925-2006

Summary: Typescript memoirs of four individuals who attended the Modern School or were associated with it: Lillian Rifkin Blumenfeld, Pauline Bridge Henderson, Harry Kelly, and Carl Zigrosser.

Lillian Rifkin Blumenfeld (b. 1897) was educated at Teachers College under John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick and taught at the Organic School in Fairhope, Alabama. She taught English at the Modern School in Stelton from 1923 to 1924 and later taught at the Walden School in New York. In her 1974 memoir, she describes her childhood as the daughter of Russian immigrants in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, her schooling and the development of her interest in teaching. Although she only mentions the Modern School of Stelton briefly, she discusses the educational philosophy she used in her teaching there.

The memoir of Pauline Bridge Henderson (1958) takes the form of the middle section of a short novel called "The Dogwood Tree," which is based on her experiences as a child at the Modern School. On the original file folder, someone had written "Pauline and Joan Bridge were two sisters very dear to uncle [Ferm]--he called them his children." The two sisters were the daughters of William Bridge who was on the staff of the school in the mid 1920s. Joan Bridge became the mother of folk singer Joan Baez. In a letter to Alexis Ferm attached to her memoir, Pauline Henderson mentions her niece "Joannie."

The printer and anarchist Harry Kelly (1871-1953) was a founder and leader of the Modern School. In this typescript of a piece written for the 25th anniversity of the Yiddish anarchist paper the Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Workers' Voice), 1925, Kelly discusses the paper's support for the Modern School.

Additionally, the series contains several shorter memoirs of individuals involved with either the Ferrer Colony and the Friends of the Modern School. Of special interest is the Kelly-Krimont-Edelman(n) family outline that details the complicated familial relations.

Finally, this series contains two chapters from a manuscript autobiography by The Modern School magazine editor Carl Zigrosser (1891-1975), later published as My Own Shall Come to Me (Philadelphia, 1971). He describes the evening lectures for adults at the Modern School in New York, where he heard Leonard Abbott and Will Durant speak, and took art classes taught by Robert Henri and George Bellows. He also describes his memories of anarchist leaders Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Hippolyte Havel. In the next section, Zigrosser describes his experiences editing The Modern School (1917-1920), and his impressions of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, who wrote some poems for the magazine, and the Van Gogh family, who allowed him to publish some extracts from Vincent Van Gogh's letters.