Man Ray (1890–1976) is a peculiar choice for the Yale University Press’s “Jewish Lives” series. Not that he wasn’t Jewish; in fact, his early life followed a traditional course for American Jews of his generation. His parents, Melach Radnitsky from Kiev and Manya from near Minsk, had an arranged marriage and met for the first time on their wedding day, the day Manya arrived on American soil. They settled in Brooklyn, where Emmanuel Radnitsky attended Boys’ High, an excellent school whose alumni rolls later included Norman Mailer, Isaac Asimov, and Aaron Copland. While not particularly observant, the Radnitskys gave Manny a traditional bar mitzvah.
But he was having none of it. “I abhor all biographical facts,” he said later in life, “consider them useless and distracting from one’s accomplishments.” He and his brother urged their parents to anglicize the family name to Ray, and Manny became Man Ray. The upwardly mobile Melach and Manya were more than happy to become Max and Minnie Ray, but they expected the close family relationships typical of Jewish immigrants to persist as their children grew up. His siblings were compliant, but Man Ray withdrew almost totally from the family, apparently seeing such ties as compromising his vital independence as an artist: “To those who ask how I got my name—supposing I had changed my name originally for certain reasons—wouldn’t an explanation nullify the effect I intended to obtain by this change?”
Arthur Lubow documents this process in Man Ray: The Artist and His Shadows, a brief biography like all those in the “Jewish Lives” series. “Like a butterfly who has spread its wings, Man Ray preferred not to acknowledge his caterpillar days,” Lubow writes. One hesitates to classify him as a self-hating Jew, but he certainly avoided any reference to his ethnic origins, not even mentioning them in his “autobiography,” Self Portrait (1963), an impressionistic and totally unreliable document if what one is looking for is facts.