Sophie was sixteen years old when she left Russia for America in 1906, traveling from Hamburg with her brothers Sam, Moses, and Aaron aboard the Graf Waldersee (their mother would come later). In Colchester she worked on the farm, but she also studied nursing.
A little more than a decade after that she was back in Europe—France, specifically—serving as a nurse during World War I. Her three brothers, Sam, Harry, and Louis served as soldiers toward the end of the war. A story in the Hartford Daily Courant indicates that the Appells made one of the largest American family contributions to the war effort. The account details the service of the brothers—a quartermaster sergeant, a machine gunner, and an army hospital worker—and then offers the following description of their sister:
Sophie Appell has done valiant service. She was graduated from Mount Sinai Hospital at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After being called to service, she was temporarily on duty at Cape May, N.J., General Hospital #11 and was sent from there to France. Her letters tell of the wonderful morale of the American soldiers. She expressed pride in New Britain boys with whom she came in contact. A recent letter tells of having met David Rosenberg, Fred Ward, John Storey, Edward Hayes, Joseph Farr, and John Kerin, all well-known young men of the city.
That Miss Appell was popular with her associates at Camp May is evidenced by the fact that in recognition of her service overseas, they named one of their rooms in the quarters at General Hospital #11 in her honor.8
Later in the piece, Louis Appell is quoted on the progress of the war, and the family spirit: “Never fear. We have [them] on the run, and we will be among the first to enter Berlin. Don’t worry. An Appell can always take care of himself or herself.”
When Sophie returned she had received a Red Cross commendation: “Sophie Appell—foreign service certificate … September 1918 to August 1919. The American National Red Cross tenders this expression of sincere appreciation for the faithful and efficient services rendered by you to this organization in its work overseas connected with the great European War when you served in the Nurses’ Bureau. Certificate of identity, no. 22842, Nurse, Base unit 60 at Hoboken…. One scar over left cheek, one mole under left eye.”9
The unofficial record consists of postcards from the war zone. One of them indicates that in France Sophie met a suitor. But the romance wasn’t going to go anywhere as he was not Jewish but a Christian from Texas, and her family objected.10
A year after her return, when she working as a nurse in Hartford, she met the confirmed bachelor, Abraham LeWitt, who had treated Sophie’s father in his medical practice.11 Nineteen years her senior, the forty-five-year-old the doctor was an adventurer who had traveled to Berlin and Vienna to investigate up-to-date surgical techniques and other new methods of treatment. He had been one of the first residents of Hartford to own a high-end automobile—a Knox,12 made in Springfield, Massachusetts—and among the first to be a victim of auto theft (someone stole the steering mechanism) and to be thrown from a car at a railroad crossing after a collision with a freighter (he suffered only minor injuries).
After his mother died in 1920, LeWitt proposed to Sophie Appell. The two were married on January 16, 1922, at the home of Rabbi Abraham Nowack, and honeymooned in Florida.
In addition to his career as a doctor, Abraham took up writing, apparently as an avocation. In a 1933 essay he foresaw a time when the automobile and incompetent or inebriated drivers would be at the heart of a great number of deaths.13 What is exceptional about the essay is the amount of research he had done to bolster his argument.
He also wrote a short story telling, in a foreshadowing of his son’s eventual passion for social justice, of a doctor faced with an ethical dilemma common in that time: how to protect a deeply distressed woman about to give birth who was unmarried at the time she conceived. The story that ends with the mother being sent off to an institution, an outcome the doctor deeply regrets.
The tale may have been based on a real Hartford incident, and it might indicate that that one night, after a hard day, Abraham at last found a way to address an issue that had troubled him—and, it may reasonably be inferred, left him with a guilty conscience. In any case, there is no doubt that Abraham’s final years were stressful.
He also was unfortunate with his real estate investments—which probably led to Sol LeWitt’s later expressing a reluctance to own real estate. Abraham’s investments were largely in properties in Hartford’s north end. Though these provided the level of income that allowed him and Sophie to travel as well as enjoy other luxuries, they also appear to have contributed to his eventually fatal medical condition. He was highly stressed as a result of at least two lawsuits filed against him, as a result of his inability to collect rent from his tenants in the heart of the Great Depression. One lawsuit was filed by the Society for Savings, a Hartford institution that had loaned Abraham money. The other, more crushing, suit was filed by his brother, Michel. On August 11, 1934, Abraham LeWitt collapsed at his home and died of a heart attack.14
In the following months, Sophie tried to avoid financial ruin. The only way she could manage was to try to collect rent herself: She had to go door to door begging people to pay, and hated it.15 Eventually, she realized that she would not be able to remain in her home.
■ When young Solly made his 1935 Mother’s Day card, he and his mother were living temporarily in a small apartment owned by Sophie’s sister, Luba Appell. She had taken them in after Abraham’s death, but she did not have substantial means either. Luba, who had lived alone, owned a small grocery store on the first floor of an apartment building, but she performed acts of charity, extending credit to those who in the midst of the Great Depression couldn’t pay their bills.
The view from Aunt Luba’s kitchen table in the spring of 1935 resembled New York as portrayed by painters in the Ashcan school.16 New Britain was a city of soot, but it had jobs. During the Great Depression the number of workers fell by a third, but the city’s factories still employed 11,000 men making hand tools, ball bearings, refrigerators, pots, machine parts, razor strops, coffin trimmings, and other items that had turned the city into an international destination for blue-collar workers.17
Downtown the sidewalks were crowded with people on their way to buy pirogues, sausages, or dark European bread; to go to the clothing shops; or to visit the Polish-language movie theater on Broad Street or the jewelry and optician shop owned by the LeWitts—members of Abraham’s extended family, which owned a variety of enterprises in the city and lived in much nicer housing than Luba’s. The circumstances of Sophie and Solly improved, if only modestly, when Sophie found work as a school nurse in 1936 and they moved to a second-floor apartment of their own, at 51 Cedar Street, off of West Main. The artist would recall in 1974, “I … remember living in a part of town that really wasn’t a very good part of town. It wasn’t so bad really. But I remember that people were out of work.”18
The Cedar Street location had at least one advantage: It was within easy walking distance of the library and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Few people could afford automobiles in the 1930s. Sophie would never learn to drive, and neither would her son (though certain people in rural Italy could testify that he foolishly took the wheel of a car at least once). The art museum was a community gathering spot, as in those days admission was free—primarily as a result of the generosity of the hosiery manufacturer John Butler Talcott and the philanthropist Grace Judd Landers. And as it turned out, it wasn’t the city’s manufacturing that made it a national sensation during those years, but an art exhibit.
Many decades earlier, in 1851, the Hartford Times had described New Britain as “a moral, well-regulated community.”19 That view held for a long time. Eventually, as both a teenager and a mature adult, Sol LeWitt would offer related descriptions that put the Times’s observation into an artistic context—the city could stifle ideas, especially those of young artists.
In 1929, the city became the focus of a national