About Bernard
Bernard Berenson at Harvard College
Rachel Cohen
When Bernard Berenson (fig. BB.I.1) began his university studies, he was eighteen years old, and his family had been in the United States for eight years. The Berensons, who had been the Valvrojenskis when they left the village of Butrimonys in Lithuania, had settled in the West End of Boston. They lived near the North Station rail yard and the North End, which would soon see a great influx of Eastern European Jews. But the Berensons were among the early arrivals, their struggles were solitary, and they had not exactly prospered. Albert Berenson (fig. CC.I.1), the father of the family, worked as a tin peddler, and though he had tried for a while to run a small shop out of their house, that had failed, and by the time Berenson began college, his father had gone back to the long trudging rounds with his copper and tin pots.
(BB.I.2) Bernard at 21 and 71
(BB.I.1) 1883 Class at Boston University
