Annie Cohen-Solal feels a deep kinship with the artist Mark Rothko, the subject of her excellent new biography, Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel. An academic and a cultural historian, Cohen-Solal is also the author of award-winning books on Jean-Paul Sartre and the influential New York City art dealer Leo Castelli. In a recent interview with the Jewish Advocate, Cohen-Solal, who lives and works in her native France, explained the impetus for writing about Rothko for Yale University Press’ series on Jewish Lives. “ Like Rothko I am between nations and cultures and I too am a cosmopolitan Jew.”

Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Russia, now Latvia, in 1903. His father Yacov Rotkovitch, a pharmacist, was a bookish secular Jew. His mother Kate came from a privileged Jewish family in Saint Petersburg that was barely touched by anti-Semitism. The marriage was a social coup for Yacov who brought his bride back to Dvinsk where the couple had four children. Mark, the youngest, was the only child to attend cheder. Cohen-Solal explains that Rothko’s “education in Talmud Torah did not align with his family’s secularism. He was fourteen years younger than his oldest brother and at the time there was this threat of thrusting Jewish boys into the Russian army. He went to Talmud Torah to avoid getting drafted.”

Alarmed by encroaching pogroms, the elder Rotkovitch immigrated with his two older sons to America in 1908. Two years later, Kate followed with her daughter and her youngest son. The family settled in Portland, Oregon where they had relatives. They lived among other Russian Jews in a neighborhood nicknamed “Little Odessa.” Three years after the family was reunited in Portland, Yacov died. Cohen-Solal points out that the family was so secular that ten year-old Mark, who had the most Jewish education among them, was the only relative who said the Mourner’s Kaddish for his father.

Marcus Rothkowitz, as he was known in Portland, excelled in high school and earned admission to Yale University along with two of his Jewish classmates. When Marcus arrived in New Haven in 1921, the campus was a WASP bastion of privilege and anti-Semitism. “He was disillusioned and disappointed,” Cohen-Solal said. “He didn’t agree with the policies of the closed fraternities. He was a rebel at heart and created a newspaper called the Yale Saturday Evening Pest, which destroyed the values of the institution rather than complying with them.” She further delineates the classist rivalry between Yale’s German and Russian Jews. Having immigrated earlier to the United States and succeeded socioeconomically, German Jews had an easier time fitting into Yale life.

After his scholarship was revoked in his sophomore year, Marcus left Yale and went to New York. Legend has it that his art career was launched after he visited a friend studying figure drawing at The Art Students’ League. “At the age of 20 Marcus was already a role model,” says Cohen-Solal, “He was an intellectual, a fighter, an educator. He was an individual who confronted the injustice of American society, the narrow-mindedness he encountered at Yale all the way through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art was a form of social action for him.” Young Marcus’ career took off when the American artist Milton Avery mentored him. “Avery was [Marcus’] American role model and a father figure to him.”

The 1920s was also a time when Rothko negotiated his internal tensions between Europe and the United States, the West Coast and East Coast, as well as his Jewish and secular influences. In his artwork from 1928 and 1939, Rothko moved towards his signature style by first painting landscapes, watercolors and oil paintings with enigmatic, phantom-like figures. Come the late 1930s Marcus Rothkowitz became an American citizen and changed his name to Mark Rothko.

Cohen-Solal notes that by the 1940s, “there was so much in Rothko’s work as a painter that could be described and integrated by his Judaism. Like many Jewish artists at the time, he thrived in the abstract, which may have been influenced by the Second Commandment about not making ‘graven images.’”

As for Rothko, many of his Jewish values came together in the paintings he did for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Commissioned by Jean and Dominique de Menil, the chapel is an ecumenical space dedicated to peace. As Cohen-Solal notes, three immigrants, one fleeing pogroms in Russia and two escaping Nazi-occupied France, created a meditative space that was as much political as it was spiritual.

“What Rothko has done with his art is to talk to the 21^st century,” says Cohen-Solal. “Think of the terrorist attacks in which art has been destroyed. An immigrant carries tools that he can turn into destruction or creativity. Rothko’s life is not only a model for immigrants today, he demonstrates that the history of art is the history of hunger over compliance.”

This article originally appeared in the March 20, 2015 issue of the Jewish Advocate

by Lior Zaltman for the Forward

Three years ago I decided to take Abilify, an anti-psychotic medication, prescribed to me to boost the waning effectiveness of my anti-depressant. I had been on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) since the fall of 2001, and Abilify would be the third psychotropic prescription in my pill organizer. Almost immediately, though, Abilify wreaked havoc with my blood sugar and I was forced to weigh its psychological benefit with the physical risk of getting diabetes. And so last year I tried to taper off it.

In light of my situation, I have been reading Diana Spechler’s excellent ongoing series “Going Off” with keen interest. Spechler, a novelist and essayist, has been documenting her experience of going off her psychotropic medications for the New York Times column, Anxiety. Her regimen of medication, similar to mine, included an anti-depressant, Trazadone (a sleep aid) and Lorazepam, a benzodiazepine. Although she responded well — her depression mostly lifted — she was anxious about being on the medication. .

The more I read, the more I felt that Spechler was a kindred spirit who I wanted to talk to directly. At the outset of our phone conversation, she put me at ease about my decision to stay on medication. “My goal as an artist,” she said, “is to undo shame. My goal with the Going Off series is to chip away at the taboos around meds and mental illness by writing frankly about my own experience.”

My own history of anxiety and depression has a straightforward trajectory. I had my first panic attack in 1980 when I was nineteen. The dread and anxiety that took up residence in my mind and in my soul left me alternately agoraphobic and claustrophobic. Yet I was resolute about getting through anxiety without medication. In my twenties I opted for therapy and it helped. When Prozac came along I was tempted to try it, but there was no data about its effects on pregnancy.

Soon after, I married a wonderful man and gave birth to two children. Yet panic was always lurking, and sometimes outright stalking me. And then September 11th happened. My husband was out of the country, my children were very young. I felt utterly alone and frightened and my anxiety felt different — I couldn’t get through the panic.

I held my husband’s hand as I cried throughout the appointment with the psychiatrist. He was a gentle man who listened to my loop of why I didn’t want to take Klonopin or Lexapro. I reasoned that I had been so stalwart all those years without any help. But with childbearing behind me, there was my quality of life and the lives of my children to consider.

I took the medicine. And it did change my life in concrete ways. I slept through the night, I could sit still without worrying about panicking. I could drive long distances on a highway. But even on the medication, I occasionally slipped back into depression and anxiety. That’s where the Abilify came in. Shortly after I started Abilify the difference in my demeanor was notable. Yet when I looked at the crowded slots of my pillbox, it felt like too much. I wanted to go back to just taking an SSRI.

Spechler sympathizes. “I also worry about the long-term effects of these drugs, which are still relatively new to consumers,” she told me. And in one of her Times essays she wrote: “I worry about Big Pharma. My stomach clenches when I read about studies and the ugliest side effects of the very medications pharmaceuticals companies hard-sell to psychiatrists, including pediatric psychiatrists.”

At first I didn’t notice any withdrawal symptoms from the Abilify until a Sunday last April when I couldn’t stop crying. Sundays are historically difficult for me — a day of anxiously anticipating the week ahead. But on this Sunday I felt the anxiety of my pre-medication days. I went back on the Abilify and my mind quieted down.

Back in 2001, when SSRIs made such a difference for me, I swore that if anyone tried to take away my Lexapro she would have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. I was the SSRI poster girl, a recovering phobic, a long-distance driver. These days, though, I worry that my psychotropic medications have become a crutch and, given the bad reaction I had to tapering off Abilify, a liability.

Spechler’s essays have dovetailed with psychiatrist Julie Holland’s recent op-ed in the New York Times’ Sunday Review. Dr. Holland writes that, “one in four women takes a psychiatric medication compared with one in seven men. Women are nearly twice as likely to receive a diagnosis of depression or anxiety disorder than men.” Furthermore, she reports that Abilify outsells not just psychiatric medications, but all other drugs in the United States.

Although I own my ambivalence about taking psychiatric medications, Spechler is not advocating that I go off them. “One of the disturbing responses that I’ve gotten [to my essays] is that it’s going to encourage people to go off their meds. I want to clarify that I’m not encouraging anyone to go off her meds. I’m only acknowledging that this is something people go through, that it’s something I’m going through, and it’s not being talked about enough in mainstream media.”

My psychiatrist and I are aiming to try again to taper me off Abilify. This time I’m grateful to have Diana Spechler’s experience and empathy at the ready.