LOOK INSIDE: Life In Charcoal by Edgar Jerins

EDGAR JERINS LIFE IN CHARCOAL

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Dedicated to my mom Rita, and family Alana, Ruby and Sterling

A LIFE, AMPLIFIED

month into covid lockdowns Edgar Jerins began posting photographs he had taken, onto social media. Gorgeous, uncanny images haunted by absence. Composed to emphasize the space between things and the way light transforms surfaces, the pictures bore the emphatic echo of what had been. Borrowing his daughter’s bicycle, Jerins took to the vacant streets of Manhattan during those first terrifying months of the global pandemic, venturing out of his studio and home to see that the city was still there. Each image was shot at peak hours that usually swelled with seething crowds in places most alive with NYC’s cacophony. Their world is hushed, calm, waiting: Grand Central Station’s façade set back from a clean street devoid of even idle cabs; Soho bathed in silver and ochre light reflected upon brickwork streets evoking Paris in 1900; Times Square glossy with rain, the kinetic chromatic lights received only by the misty night sky; seven converging lanes on a complex network of streets before the United Nations Building, silent and unpopulated, a world scrubbed clean of us.

These photographs astonished his friends and admirers. Some may not have realized his talent as a photographer. Others may not have expected the immediacy of the city subject. Jerins is so closely connected with the hand and with drawing that at first these digital images of a contemporary moment caught us off-guard. They did not seem real, especially to those who have spent a lot of time in these spaces. I am sure that I am not the only one who was brought to tears by them or who kept staring at them wondering how they were possible. Those early moments of the pandemic, especially in New York, felt ominous, simmered with dread and awful expectation. I have many friends in the city whose dispatches from the time read like fiction. It worried me as they described a shifted way of being, surrounded by terrible loss.

Who better to bring forth pictures of that moment than Jerins? These images, made quickly out in the world seem to contrast with his slowly developed hand-invested drawings. Yet they share the same careful composition and attention to human presence. Jerins is sensitive to body language, facial expressions, the charge between people, intimate and familial relationships, and the histories we carry inside ourselves. He knows what makes our humanity shape a space, what hangs in the air, the beat between movements and voices. Expressing the feeling of a New York paused—echoing what had been there—was a challenge that he understood. For two decades he has shown us how bodies make space pulse with mundane, sublime, and transgressive life. He captures what is unspoken while we experience longing and grief. Traces remain in his compositions; that is the uncanny presence his photographs and drawings show.

Edgar Jerins composes with authority on loss and trauma. He has experienced it in his own life and grew up understanding the deeper family (and political) histories that brought his Latvian parents to the United States. His portraits are of family, close friends, people who face challenges and respond in myriad ways ranging from resilience, addiction, loss of control, detachment, and emotional collapse. In other hands we might detect judgment, irony, or cynicism about how these lives unfold and the choices his subjects make. What sets him apart (aside from a technique that is revelatory) is the empathy and dignity with which he approaches his portraits. Jerins understands that the people we love are complicated, full of contradictions. He might show them at the edge or in the process of difficult transitions, but always treats them with respect. He holds them and he has their trust. These raw expressions would not work otherwise. The same eye that found presence hovering at the edge of legibility in empty New York streets finds deeper unspoken connections between his sitters. The Twins and John Sr. in Sewickley (2001) shows this in a visceral way. Among the earliest of Jerins’s large charcoal drawings, it presents twin brothers John and Jim Thornton (left to right) standing together at the top of a stairway on the second floor of their family home. Their father grips stairway bannisters on either side as he tilts his face downward and descends, his eyes closed. John stands in the light, arms out from his sides, body rising with agitation, and gaze directed at the viewer. Jim stands closer to the stairway, right arm crossed over his abdomen to hold his left arm, looking towards his father. To the far right we peer into a bedroom still decorated with the preferences of their late mother. Every choice that Jerins has made in arranging the composition reinforces the emotional relationships the three men have and heightens the narrative’s stakes. No mere family group, we feel strongly that we are watching John Sr. proceed to his death; Jim has accepted that this is the way of things while John Jr. appears ready to fight for his father’s soul.

In Christmas Day, Yutan, Nebraska (2004) a man dressed in a short-sleeved t-shirt, rugged jeans and sturdy work boots opens a door into a room alive with two boys playing. His eyes focus on something beyond us, perhaps disengaged from the scene or remembering his own childhood. Jerins has positioned him just off-center to the left and the boys frame him in their raucous play between two toy guns. The younger of the two stands on a trampoline, shoulders tense and raised and mouth open wide in a yell. The older boy leans back on the floor and points a realistic automatic assault rifle at his sibling, also yelling. The scene is unsettling, not just because of the nature of the toys (both passable replicas of the real thing) and the intensity of war play—but because of the contrast between otherwise serene, well-ordered surroundings and the lost look of their father gazing out past the action. Jerins knows how to balance contrasting elements so that they amplify one another and give the viewer no choice but to be part of the moment.

When Jerins focuses on a single figure, as in Prael and Pray in Rhinebeck (2008), Anita and the Feral Cats (2011), or Tom in Winter (2014), each is shown in their element, absorbed in an inner life. Bill Prael looks towards us, holding his hunting rifle, lit in a way that heightens the deep lines of his face. Paired with the deer carcass he has brought home from the field, he seems more threatening than need be. After all, he has just provided for his family. That tension between the active gun and his gaze in our direction, along with stark contrasts in light, brings menace to the moment. Jerins admits that he asked Prael to pose so that he could raise up the gun and shoot him in an instant. That sense of danger pervades the resulting scene.

Anita—Jerins’s cousin, whom he has drawn many times—sits on a stool out on a porch amidst several feral cats for whom she cares. In Jerins’s hands, she is beautiful, relaxed, carefully seen and understood. Subtle cues allude to the hard life she has had. A cigarette burns in her left hand, smoke rising upward towards a tabby cat who seems to inhale it with interest. It has been some time since she took a drag; a thick column of ash has formed at the end. Positioned to the far left of the drawing, she gazes outward, past us, and into a deep distance. Her eyes and expression suggest that she sees more than what is before her eyes; she is playing back something from her life or imagining a possible future. They glaze slightly, suggesting the time in which they have been unfocused in the world has kept rhythm with the burning cigarette. Where has she gone in this moment? What will happen to her after?

In Edgar Jerins’s drawings his realist method is a way to hold on to people, retain their personalities, recreate who they were in time, and remember what set them apart. He is invested in their lives and his careful attention to their full personhood allows us to feel connections between him and them—even invite connections between them and us. Knowing loss, whether through death or the distance that people drift when they succumb to personal demons or live with mental illness, gives perspective on presence. You understand what can be forgotten and missed. Jerins makes drawings that integrate the care and attention he gives to people in his life. That connection allows us to see them and perhaps reconsider our own relationships and community. His portraits amplify lives that are not usually centered in the art world, unless through satire. Jerins treats them with humanity, which is what we all deserve in the end.

Robert Cozzolino

Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings Minneapolis Institute of Art

FROM RIGA TO OMAHA: THREE GENERATIONS OF ART

Edgar Jerins is a first generation Latvian American artist born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1958. His parents, Rita (née Cepure) and Gunars Jerins, both grew up in Riga prior to the Soviet re-occupation of Latvia in 1944. When World War II ended, they both spent the next six years living as “displaced persons” in refugee camps in Germany. Throughout this period, however, their paths never crossed. It was only after each immigrated to the United States that the couple finally met, this courtesy of mutual friends in the tight-knit diaspora of Latvian asylum seekers. The couple married in 1952. Gunars worked as an accountant, and Rita supplemented the family income through a series of part-time jobs. All the while, she continued to make art, a lifelong passion she’d inherited from her father.

Over the next seven years, the Jerins had four children, all sons. The oldest, Ron, was himself an artist with extraordinary promise. Ron was followed by Edgar, who idolized his older brother’s artistic talent, followed by Tom and finally Alex.

Edgar, who was 64 at the time of this writing, is the only member of his family left alive.

The factors influencing every artist’s vision and trajectory are multiple, idiosyncratic, and complex. In Edgar’s monumental Life in Charcoal series, he combines astonishing technical mastery with deep empathy and compassion for his careworn subjects. Many of these subjects are close friends and relatives of the artist, people who at the time of their portraits were facing a crisis in their lives, from mental illness and drug addiction to economic privation and broken homes. Edgar’s ability to capture in art not just their suffering but their ennobling endurance in the face of it is the work of someone who knows adversity firsthand—a veteran traveler in the land of sorrow and travail.

If you’re lucky enough to meet Edgar in person, you’re unlikely to see this side of him, at least not at first. Most come away with an impression of tremendous bonhomie. What they see in Edgar is a generous, non-judgmental, understanding, and extremely humorous soul—one of those rare individuals who makes fast friendships in every social stratum, from indigents to movie stars.

This impression of Edgar, though accurate, is also incomplete. To understand Edgar’s insight into the darker side of the human condition, it’s best to start in childhood, not his but rather that of his immediate immigrant ancestors.

What follows is a short history of the Jerins family saga as told, as much as possible, through their own written and spoken words.

After Edgar’s mother Rita enrolled at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, she was assigned to write an essay about her early life. An excerpt:

Life in Latvia

My life's journey started in a faraway country called Latvia. Situated on the shores of the Baltic Sea between Russia, Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania, it has been a battle ground for countless political struggles throughout the centuries. It has been invaded by Germans, Poles, Swedes, and Russians. Latvia gained its freedom after World War I in 1918 and lost it again in 1940 when Russians invaded Latvia.

My childhood memories are from the time when Latvia was free and during the Russian and German occupations. We lived in a house that was situated near a beautiful park. I remember little hedgehogs coming out in the evening. We sometimes got them and brought them in the house and gave them milk to drink.

My parents were both teachers. My father had just graduated from the Academy of Art in Riga and besides teaching was painting and doing exhibits and other artistic endeavors in the community. It was a happy time.

Opposite: Edgar, Ron, Tom, Rita and Alex

I had two younger brothers and quite a few cousins, uncles, and aunts. On holidays and summer vacations, we went to our grandmother Anna Grinberg’s house, where we would sometimes have to help with watering and weeding plants in the greenhouse—my grandfather Karlis had four greenhouses and made his living selling plants. We also enjoyed trips to the seashore, visits to our country relatives, and mushroom and berry picking in the forests.

The happy times ended in 1940, when the Russians invaded Latvia. The aim of the Soviet government was a systematic extermination of Latvian leaders—political, economic, educational, cultural, and clerical.

The Soviet government nationalized all savings accounts over 1,000 rubles [about $20 in US dollars]. Similarly, all industrial and commercial establishments, real estate, and farmlands were nationalized without compensation.

People were arrested for trivial reasons or for no reason at all.

All publications were under censorship and libraries were ransacked and books objectionable to the new regime were destroyed.

Many high-ranking military officers disappeared—some to a military "camp" in Moscow. The rest were ordered on maneuvers, surrounded by Soviet troops with automatic weapons, and massacred on the spot.

During the Soviet occupation, people were afraid to talk openly even with their friends in fear of arrest, torture, and deportations. My mother lost her job as a teacher, and the Secret Police were looking for my father.

In the night of June 13, 1941, the Soviets arrested 16,000 people including children and deported them in cattle cars to slave labor camps to Russia where most of them perished.

The year of terror ended when German troops ousted the Soviet forces from the Baltic states. Latvians were hoping for a restoration of their government, but one occupation was merely replaced by another. While Gestapo ruthlessly exterminated Jews and gypsies and patients in mental institutions, the Nazis interfered very little into the Latvian cultural and religious life. Four years went by, and in 1944 the Germans were retreating from Russia.

When the Russian front was only 30 kilometers from Riga, and after we had spent many nights in the air raid shelters, our family decided to flee Latvia.

The family’s first move was to a refugee camp in Germany controlled by German soldiers. Hitler considered Latvians Aryan and worthy of protection from the invading Russians. Rita’s brother, Uldis, who would later become a Lutheran minister, describes the next step in the family’s odyssey.

We were sent to a little town in the mountains called Brandoberndorf. My mother had to work in a factory. It was a small factory. They made bunk beds there. One night we saw how Wetzlar, a manufacturing center, burned. Another night we saw how Giessen burned. These cities were not more than twenty miles from the place where we were, and that didn't let us to forget that the war was going on and that every day people had to pay for it—guilty or not.

We lived in Brandoberndorf till American forces took us over.

Rita also recalls this day, in the spring of 1945, when the American troops arrived in Brandoberndorf and liberated it.

There was no resistance in the village when the American troops came. The tanks and guns just rolled by. Some troops stopped and set up an outdoor camp near our barrack. The soldiers were friendly and passed out gum to the children. They had an outdoor religious service in the morning.

Soon afterwards, on May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, ending World War II in Europe. For the Cepures, armistice meant moving from a German-controlled refugee camp to a series of refugee camps, still in Germany, but now controlled by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. The move improved their living situation greatly. They were no longer forced to work. Even better, they were no longer starving.

Uldis, who was 10 years old, remembers his family’s first moves after the War. After the Americans came, we were somewhat confused about where to go and what to do. We heard that in the city of Wetzlar, the refugees were gathering and there was a relief organization called UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency). Our family and others went to Wetzlar. First, we lived in a small hotel, but later we were moved to an army camp outside the city. We became displaced persons.

Though she didn’t know it at the time, Rita would end up spending most of her adolescence, from age 12 to 17, being shuttled from one refugee camp to another throughout Germany.

TO understand Edgar Jerins’ insight into the darker side of the human condition, it’s best to start in childhood, not his but rather that of his immediate immigrant ancestors.

The camps, though far from luxurious, offered more than just the basic amenities. Each camp quickly established a school for the refugee children as well as a theater to provide entertainment for the whole community. Rita’s father did the set designs and painted scenery for the productions. Besides attending school, Rita was blooming as an artist in her own right. Art supplies were in short supply, so she often had to make do with burnt sticks instead of pencils to draw with. Despite this, her son Edgar says today, her sketches of camp life were excellent. From grandfather, to mother, to her sons, and now to Edgar’s daughters, artistic ability has been passed through the generations like a Cepure family heirloom.

Four nations—England, Australia, Canada, and the US—had agreed to accept some refugees. By luck, Rita’s family had ended up in American-controlled camps, and they held out hope the US would soon take them in. But US officials initially had a different idea: Latvian refugees, they argued, should be sent back to Latvia. For the Cepures, this was an untenable option.

As Rita wrote:

Most foreigners who were in Germany were happy to return to their native countries—except the ones from communist occupied lands. The Russians and some Poles were forcefully deported back. Many resisted and many committed suicide, because they knew what fate awaited them at home. We had no country to return to and were allowed to stay in Germany. UNRRA moved us from camp to camp quite often.

During the years in Germany, we were moved to six different camps. In the fall of 1945, the first Latvian schools began classes. There were more than 200 schools in operation, which ranged from kindergarten to university level—all were taught by professional teachers.

There were also many cultural activities and organizations in the camps, from theater to song festivals.

Churches of different denominations were established, and I was confirmed in a Latvian church in Germany.

Books and newspapers were printed and widely read.

Our living quarters were crowded, but we had adequate food, while the German population was starving after the war. The Germans were willing to part from their treasured family possessions for a can of Spam or Crisco. Coffee and cigarettes were precious.

Rita Jerins Fire Pencil and crayon

Though only a child at the time, Uldis remembers the rampant corruption of the era and its impact on Germans and refugees alike.

A lot of people had lost their hopes, their wealth, and their homes. Some still hoped for some miracles, but others tried to forget their troubles by drinking. They called it forgetting the past, the present, and their hopes.

There were many others who thought it was the best time to get rich and went around robbing the unprotected German civilians. There were a lot of hungry people in Germany, and they took whatever they could and changed the name of stealing to taking.

There were many American soldiers in Germany. They were men. There were also many women in Germany; and somehow this developed a wide scale of degeneracy. It was called friendship.

All this time I went to school, and in 1950 I was ready to enter high school. Often the schools were in very poor conditions. There was a shortage of books. We had to share one book among many students. Even with all the hardships, we had Latvian school in every place we lived.

One semester I and my aunt were the only pupils in the sixth-grade class. We had to study hard, and in the seventh grade we covered material that American children cover in junior high school. We had to respect our teachers more highly than American children respect their teachers. We had a stricter order and regime then American schools practice, but I don't consider that it was bad. The children often do not realize the teachers are giving them a chance to be valuable for life.

Five years were gone after the war ended, and we did not belong in Germany. There were too many foreign people in Germany, and the ones who did not have a homeland to return to had to find another place to live till the real peace would come over the uneasy world.

The population inside the camps had slowly started to dwindle as early as 1947, when England, then Australia, and then Canada had all begun to accept Latvian refugees. The United States, for its part, continued to delay its commitment. It also instituted bureaucratic hurdles to further impede hopeful immigrants. Chief among these roadblocks was a requirement to secure an American sponsor to help with housing and employment.

With the backing of the Lutheran World Federation, the camp’s Latvian pastor and

his wife finally found a sponsor and were allowed to immigrate. Their sponsor was a very kind woman, Miss Edmundson, who lived in the sandhills region of Nebraska. Upon arrival in Lincoln, the pastor wasted no time pleading the case for so many desperate Latvian refugees still languishing in the German camps. At the Latvian church in Lincoln, he was able to recruit additional sponsors among the congregation. His own sponsor, Miss Edmundson, was a huge admirer of Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman who had made numerous public appeals to Americans to help the world’s down-trodden, war refugees in particular. She agreed to sponsor Rita’s family. For Rita and her family, a new chapter was beginning. As she wrote: The camp life was coming to an end, and the future seemed very bleak. I could not imagine myself integrating in the German society. Most of my friends already had left.

OURliving quarters were crowded, but we had adequate food while the German population was starving after the war. The Germans were willing to part from their treasured family possessions for a can of Spam or Crisco.

Far away in the state of Nebraska in the country, Miss Edmundson heard about the desperate plight of the refugees who were waiting to emigrate from Germany. She wanted to help. She decided to sponsor us and especially wanted to meet my father, because he was an artist.

We were very thankful to Miss Edmondson for her kindness. She gave us hope for a new life.

It is hard to describe the joy we felt when our papers came through, and we were going to immigrate to the United States.

Once again, we packed our meager belongings and boarded a ship to a faraway country. The boat trip to the United States was arranged by the National Lutheran Council. We left from Bremerhaven, Germany, on the USNS General M. L. Hersey in 1950, destination New York. We did not have any time to see the sights of New York but were instead taken on a bus to the railroad station.

Opposite: Rita Jerins

Army Camp Pencil and crayon 5" x 8" 1944

For days, the engines of the machine were singing as if the sound of the waves was still around me. The hills and towns were rolling fast by. It was cool in the train, although I knew it was very hot outside. I felt that I could not stand straight on a firm ground. Eleven days everything has been moving and shaking, and you had to balance yourself.

It felt good to stand on your own feet, when we had to change the trains in Chicago. The next one would be in Lincoln, Nebraska. There had always been a crowd around us and languages of all kinds, and now there were only a few families left in the train besides us.

You could not tell very much from the map about Nebraska. There were a few cities in the eastern part and almost nothing in the west except some highways and railroads going through it.

And the nicest thing was that my way ended in the west.

I was a little afraid of what would be expected of me out there. I leaned against the seat while the memories of the past slipped by. There will be a lady in the station to meet us. What will she say? How shall I act? What would the place be like where we are going to live?

It was getting dark. The train went through Omaha. After a few hours we reached Lincoln. We had to wait in the station for our next train. I felt stranger than I thought.

We met our minister there and some man came from the Lutheran World Federation. I ate dried potatoes for the first time in my life. Outside was a strong thunderstorm. I could see the city lights out of the station window. I wished we did not have to go further. Then our train was ready to leave.

It was a heavy rain, and the unusual thunder frightened me a little. The minister told us that there will be snakes and turtles. I was too tired to think about them. I went to sleep a few minutes after I reach the seat. I dreamt about the sea and a storm.

Early in the morning when I opened my eyes, I was surprised that there was not anything to be seen other than green hills without any trees or houses. The sun was rising in the emptiness. The hours went by, and I could tell how many houses there were on the way.

We could see cattle grazing in the hills and a few windmills and little lakes shining blue as the sky. So that was it. My eyes got tired of the lonesome site. The time went by. A few little towns. The next will be ours. And then there it was. Bingham, Nebraska, where Miss Edmonson was waiting for us.

It looked like a little nest along the endless gray hills. I watched the people in the station. Miss Edmundson recognized us and shook hands with us. We stepped into her car. There was a little white dog with her. The car went slowly up the hill. I could see the sunflowers along the road.

I wonder what the future is going to bring us next.

She had found a house we could rent, and we settled right in. My father and my oldest brother painted barns and other buildings for the ranchers. He also found time to go and sketch the Sand Hills. My youngest brother, John, learned how to ride a horse on Miss Edmonson's ranch. I help to prepare food for the ranchers and their help. We only spent the summer months in Bingham and left for Lincoln, Nebraska, before the schools started.

THEunusual thunder frightened me a little. The minister told us that there will be snakes and turtles. I was too tired to think about them. I went to sleep a few minutes after I reach the seat. I dreamt about the sea and a storm.

Miss Edmundson insisted on this move to Lincoln, yet another act of kindness of her part. The cost of transportation from Germany to New York and ultimately to Nebraska was substantial. It was not subsidized by the US government but rather paid for by the sponsors themselves. As a result, the new immigrants were expected to “pay off their ticket” by working for a year. But Miss Edmundson was determined that the Cepure children finish their education and that their father continue his work as an artist. She waived this work requirement.

As Edgar would later learn, his father, Gunars Jerins, had not received quite so welcoming an arrival in America. He was immediately sent to Georgia, where he would spend the next year picking cotton to clear his debt. Only then did he make his way to Nebraska, where he had heard a burgeoning Latvian population had settled.

Gunars’ rocky start notwithstanding, coming to America did promise all of Edgar’s forerunners a chance at a new and better life. But it was not so easy to forget their old life, and the adjustment process was challenging. As Uldis would write in 1955: Bingham was a very small town, and our family had three children who needed to finish schooling. We moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. First, I went to an adult

high school, but I wanted to attend a regular high school. The school I am attending now is called Lincoln High.

At this point of my life, I had learned that people should withhold judgment of others, before they learn all the facts. So many difficulties arise from wrong judgments given about others. I believe that experiences and memories are the main factors which make people to be what they are. It is true in my life.

During the years of the War, I was too small to understand many things, but I was not too small to remember them. Often, I hear something which reminds me to think of the days gone. Those memories are not always beautiful, so they can make me only more sad than happy.

If I think of myself, there always is a connection with my native country and the people living in it or in the wide Russia.

All those years while away from Latvia, I have felt that the best place for everybody is his native land, and my highest hope is that soon will come the day for us to return from where we have come.

It is not very clever to ask a foreigner who has come to a different country if he likes a strange country better than his own. When with Americans, I feel that I am different—I didn't mean it better or worse, but I don't think it is wrong to feel that way. The American youth and I have very different backgrounds, and we can't possibly be alike and think alike. I don't feel that anybody asks me to be exactly alike, but I don't think that it would be right if someone would, because it is not right to try to be something what you are not.

I don't want to tell too many of my beliefs, because I understand—I am only a “big child,” and it can happen that tomorrow I will hate that I once had the thoughts the way I do now.

Rita, for her part, also shared nostalgia for the Latvia of her childhood, but with her homeland occupied by Russians, she was quicker than Uldis to embrace her new country. She spoke no English upon arrival in America. A year later, having finished her senior year at Lincoln High School, she was fluent. She enrolled at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, paying for it by working parttime as a nurse’s aide at Bryan Memorial Hospital. Among various classes, she studied lithography, and she continued making art.

It was at the University that she finally met Gunars Jerins through Latvian friends. Gunars, an accountant, had also spent the five years in refugee camps, but he was reticent to discuss his past, let alone write about it in detail.

Rita Jerins

Christmas Eve Pencil and crayon 8" x 12"t 1945

“When our first daughter, Ruby, was born,” Edgar recounts, “my wife and I felt strongly we should try to get my father to tell his life story. I even bought him a recorder. It never happened. Not long after Ruby turned one, Dad had a heart attack and died. Later, I was surprised to discover a classroom assignment that he wrote in one of the German displaced persons camps. It was tucked into one of my mom’s diaries. English was a new language for him, and I am accurately copying what he wrote:

My Biography by Gunars Jerins

I was born on 27th of July, 1929, in Riga. I live there till 1st October, 1944, when my family was emigrated to Germany.

My father worked as a bookkeeper in Riga and my mother worked at home. My brother, who was three years younger, and I were going in the primary-school. I graduated the primary-school there in the year of 1940.

Then the war came nearer and nearer and many of our people had to left their houses and had to flee. We all hated the Russians and therefore we decided to left our own country.

I arrived in Germany on the 4th of October. We came with the ship and landed in Konigsberg. After we had come, we traveled two weeks till we met our relatives at Konigstein near the river Elba. There I lived three months. This was a very nice time. The autumn was very fine this year and here were often shining days with falling autumn leaves. I enjoyed this time very well.

When this joyful time has gone, I went to the small town in Sudetia. The name of this town was Teplitz-Schönau, and it was near the beautiful Dresden. There I spent my first Christmas in Germany. There I also met the terrible air-raids and I saw the burning Dresden.

In the year of 1945, I had to flee once more. The reason were also Russians. We had a lot of our things and in this journey, if I can say so, I was hungry and tired all the time. I saw how low human-life was considered.

When I met the first American, I knew that I was in the liberty. A qualified form of liberty, that is. One of the few “coming-to-America” stories Gunars had shared with Edgar concerned his first year in the US. He spent this in the state of Georgia, and unlike the generosity shown by Rita’s sponsor, Gunars’ sponsor insisted he “pay off his ticket” in its entirety. And thus, he spent his first twelve months in the US picking cotton, a back-breaking job that had once been the job of slaves. Given the negligible pay he received for his labor, arguably it still was. As soon as Gunars completed this obligation, he moved out of the South, first

to Minneapolis for a short interlude, and then to Lincoln, Nebraska, which by then had a thriving Latvian community.

It was there in Lincoln that mutual friends introduced Gunars and Rita. The pair were soon smitten. Rita dropped out of college after her sophomore year, the two married in 1952, and Rita soon became pregnant. After so many years of discord and hardship, the American Dream appeared finally at hand. What happened next seems like an omen. The newlyweds and Rita’s parents went for a drive. Gunars was driving, Rita sat in the passenger seat, and her mother and father were in the back seat. After stopping at stop sign, Gunars proceeded into the intersection. A car speeding from the side failed to stop and broadsided them at high velocity. So violent was the collision that all four were thrown from the car. Gunars, Rita, and her father did not lose consciousness. But when Rita walked over to check on her mother, she saw no blood or evidence of trauma. It looked like she’d gently fallen to sleep. But it wasn’t sleep—the crash had broken her neck, killing her instantly.

Rita’s mom would not be the only casualty of the crash. Months later, Rita went into labor. “The baby was a girl, and she would have been my older sister, Monika,” recounts Edgar. “But she was born dead, strangled by the umbilical cord. That’s how our family started.”

Within a year or two, Rita became pregnant again, this time with a boy who would emerge from the womb unscathed. His parents named him Ron. Over the next seven years, Ron was joined by Edgar, Tom, and Alex. All four kids were handsome, smart, and rambunctious—in the popular vernacular, quite a handful.

In 1962, Gunars received an offer for a higher-paying accounting job, and the family moved from Lincoln to Omaha. In a diary entry written later in life, Rita leaves out any mention of her still-borne daughter nor does she mention any of the other family deaths to come. Instead, she concentrated on more positive developments.

WHEN I met the first American, I knew that I was in the liberty.

Opposite: Alex, Tom, Ron, Edgar and Gunars

Top: Rita Jerins

War Pencil 5" x 8" 1944

Bottom: John, Rita, Ansis and Uldis

I became a US Citizen in 1956. We moved to Omaha in 1962 and bought a house on Curtis Avenue. My children grew up in that house, and I still live there with my three cats. Art has always been close to my heart, and when the opportunity arose, I took art classes here at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

Edgar, for his part, loved his mother’s work, particularly a series of prints she did about the War. The family favorite, however, was a portrait Rita did of Clark Gable based on a photograph of the actor from a movie magazine. This hung for years on their kitchen wall.

In her diary, Rita cites two other highlights that brought her joy: her job as a librarian and a long-prayed-for geopolitical development in Europe.

I got a job typing library cards, and I'm still working at the Historical Society of Douglas County Library. We don't type library cards anymore,

now we have computers, and my official title is “secretary.” I enjoy working in the library; there are always new challenges at work and new opportunities to meet different and interesting people.

Latvia gained its freedom from the Soviet Union in 1991. It brought great joy to all the Latvians who left the country during the Second World War. I do have emotional ties to Latvia but too many years have passed for me to return and feel at home in Latvia. My home is now here, the people I care about are here. Having experienced tyranny and war I cherish the freedom that I and my family can enjoy living in the United States.

OURDad showed us the regular guy side of life: how to camp, catch fish, play poker—those kinds of things. We loved it. Until Ron reached adolescence, I would describe our childhood as very normal and very fun.

Edgar and his brothers, like most second-generation immigrants, had little trouble assimilating into American society. Nevertheless, they also retained a patriotic nostalgia for Latvia, this despite never having visited the country. Part of their affection, not to mention their commensurate loathing for all things Soviet, came from Rita and Gunars, who regularly spoke in Latvian about the country of their birth.

For a while, Rita tried to teach her sons the mother tongue. But for four young and active boys, after-school language lessons were not a high priority. Between the day-to-day toils of child-rearing and her job at the Library, Rita eventually and reluctantly reached the same conclusion. Besides, she knew her sons were being regularly exposed to Latvian culture courtesy of weekly get-togethers in the nearby town of Blair. It was here that Rita’s grandparents, Anna and Karlis Grinbergs, had settled. Throughout the years in the German camps, the pair had managed to keep the extended family of fourteen Grinbergs and five Cepures together. Now in Nebraska, they continued to do so, by organizing these non-stop family reunions.

As Edgar describes this aspect of his childhood:

Unlike Lithuanians, who created “Little Lithuania” neighborhoods, Latvians settled across the region. We did, however, live in reasonable proximity to one other. Between cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents, anywhere from 30-60 relatives would gather together in Blair, a small town between Omaha and Lincoln. To get to Blair, none of the relatives had to travel more than an hour at most. These reunions happened every Friday and every holiday of the year, and I remember they were so much fun.

All the adults came from my mother’s side of the family, and all of them knew each other from the refugee camps. After driving to Blair, the men would say perfunctory hellos to the women before slinking away for their weekly poker game. The women would then get together to gossip and talk.

As for us boys, we had our own routine. Groups based on age would assemble into little bands and head to the town to run around for hours. We’d check out the stores, go to the park, and basically just hang out. We did this year-round no matter how hot or cold it was outside. My group was usually me and my cousins, Paul and Mike. Sometimes our cousin Daina, who was a bit of a tomboy, would join us, but for the most part it was boys only. Ron, Tom, and Alex each had their own little running groups, too.

The girls hung out in groups, too, but they didn’t come into town. I honestly don’t know what they did, but they seemed to have as much fun as we did.

Besides the get-togethers, our dad would often take my brothers and me hiking and fishing. Gunars was a lot different from mom. He had two operas he liked, and he dabbled in photography, but for the most part, he wasn’t into fine art or “cultured” the way our mother was. He showed us the regular guy side of life: how to camp, catch fish, play poker—those kinds of things. We loved it. Until Ron reached adolescence, I would describe our childhood as very normal and very fun.

From his early childhood on, Ron manifested extraordinary artistic ability. By sixth grade, he completed a set of portraits of the American presidents that would hang in Wakonda Grade School for the next thirty years. By high school, the art teacher realized Ron was a prodigy and recommended a private tutor to help him reach the next level. Everyone who saw Ron’s work was astonished by it. But of all his many admirers, none was greater than his brother, Edgar.

Rita Jerins

In the Garden Lithograph 11" x 9" 1983

I idolized Ron as an older brother, but I particularly idolized his art. I knew he was better than me—I compared what I could do in the sixth grade with what he had done, and there was no comparison. It wasn’t a competition between us, but I did want to catch up and become as good an artist as I could.

Ron’s tutor was a Russian émigré named Dimitar Khrushchev, a formalist who taught Ron classic composition and painting techniques with a strong emphasis on figure drawing. It was the same approach Edgar would later encounter at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After Ron had been taking lessons for a year, Edgar became increasingly desperate to tag along to the sessions.

I’d already been doing this outside of class. Ron would go out into the country, for instance, to paint watercolors, and he’d let me go with him and would give me tips. Finally, my parents agreed to pay for me to study with Dimitar, too. Every Monday thereafter, he would pick us up after school, drive us to his studio, and we’d spend the next three hours getting truly world-class art instruction. I was 14 years old then, and Ron was 16. Ron was usually nice to me during class. I remember once when Dimitar hired a model to let us practice figure drawing. She was around 20, very pretty, and to my amazement, she took her clothes off so we could draw her nude. Ron walked over to me, smiled, and whispered, “I bet you’re having a hard time concentrating.” No kidding! It was the first time I’d ever seen a naked woman. At school the next day, I told all my friends, of course.

But nobody believed me. “You’re a liar, Jerins!” they said. I didn’t care. That model had launched my life-long love for figure drawing.

Outside of Dimitar’s studio, however, Ron was not always so nice to his siblings. Most brothers wrestle and skirmish with each other, but with Ron, normal rough housing had been escalating ever since his voice changed. Ron’s grades also dropped precipitously—the once all-A’s student stopped caring about school and made little effort to study. Edgar says the whole family noticed these changes but at the time chalked it up to hormones.

Ron had a bow and arrow set. I remember him setting up a target 25-30 feet away and then firing arrows at it for practice. Our brother Tom came out of the house and said, “Ron, I want a turn.” Ron said no. Tom said, “If you don’t give me a turn, I’m going to kick over your target.” Ron said, “If you do, I’ll kill you.” So, Tom walks over to the target, kicks it to the ground, and then turns around to see Ron’s reaction. By then, the arrow was already in flight. It hit him in the top of the head and embedded itself under his scalp. There was a lot of blood, and he collapsed to the ground and lay there. Ron and I both thought he was

dead. Then Tom got up—it turns out he was not that hurt, but he played it for all it was worth. So, Ron told Tom, “I'll pay you a dollar if you don't tell Mom.”

When I later asked Ron why he’d done it, he said, “I just saw red.” All brothers fight and wrestle, but with Ron things were becoming truly violent. It wasn’t until Ron’s illness became full blown that we learned personality changes like this are often early symptoms of the disorder.

After high school, Ron enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute to continue his studies. For the first year and a half, everything seemed fine enough. Ron’s artistic proficiency continued its remarkable upwards trajectory, and his future career in the fine arts seemed all but destined. Half-way through his sophomore year, Ron returned to Omaha to spend Christmas vacation with his family.

This was when his breakdown started.

He started becoming paranoid. In the past, Ron had occasionally bought beer for me and my girlfriend—we were underage and couldn’t get it ourselves. That Christmas, he became obsessed that the police were out to get him, because he’d been our enabler.

As a family, we didn’t know what was happening. We didn’t know what to do.

When Christmas break was over, my brother insisted on returning to art school in Kansas City. Our dad took him to the bus station. That’s where Ron started seeing people that weren't there. My dad kept trying to talk him out of leaving, but he couldn’t and wasn’t physically strong enough to restrain him. So, Ron went down to Kansas City and shortly afterwards had a full-blown schizophrenic breakdown.

After being notified of Ron’s hospitalization, Gunars, Rita, and Edgar immediately drove down to the mental institution where he was being held. The news was even worse than they feared.

A psychiatrist told us Ron’s illness was extremely severe, and he would never be well again. He was going to be in and out of institutions his entire life. It broke my heart. Ron spoke in a high-pitched child-like voice, and for the first time in his life, he couldn’t draw. He went from being this amazing artist to

TOM said, “If you don’t give me a turn, I’m going to kick over your target.” Ron said, “If you do, I’ll kill you.”

Rita Jerins

Top: Reflections Lithograph 6" x 7" 1983

Bottom: Mother and Child Lithograph 11" x 9" 1983

scribbling like a five-year-old. We left Ron in the hospital to stabilize as much as possible on Thorazine, and then drove back home. My mother found a place for him at a mental institution in Omaha. Then Dad and I drove back to Kansas City to bring Ron home.

A couple times, he tried to jump out of the car on the highway. It was a fucking nightmare.

I never told anyone, but after school I would go to visit him in the institution. I was 17, a couple months away from graduating high school. Mental institutions back then were very depressing, straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ron would tell me he didn’t want to live anymore. He was aware of everything that he had lost and that none of it was ever coming back. After each visit, I would just sit in the parking lot and cry.

Over the next months, heavy doses of anti-psychotic drugs reduced some of Ron’s symptoms, but this came at the cost of stealing every ounce of vitality he had once had in such abundance.

He tried making art, but his talent was gone, stolen by both his illness and the draconian treatment for it. Eventually, the staff decided Ron was stable enough to come home for occasional weekend visits with the family. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, his main topics were wanting to die and hoping to be saved by Jesus.

Sometimes he would become catatonic before the weekend was over. He’d sit at the kitchen table, for instance, with a fork in his hand, incapable of moving or saying anything for hours on end. After a few of these episodes, the family realized they were helpless to break him out of this state, and they’d drive him back to the institution early.

Edgar can still recall in heart-breaking detail his brother’s last two visits home. It was in the spring, and Ron seemed okay enough for us to try going on a family outing. So, we went to the mall. My parents, brothers, and I were determined to always keep an eye on Ron. Somehow, he managed to slip away for a minute or two, but we quickly found him looking at stuff in the sporting goods section. My dad even patted him down in case he had shoplifted anything. Nothing. By the time we returned home, everything seemed okay, or at least as okay as it could be under the circumstances. On Sunday evening, my parents took him back to his room at the institution. No one gave the mall visit a second thought.

Two weeks later, Ron returned home for Palm Sunday weekend. On Sunday morning, April 11th, Mom and Alex had gone to church, Dad was in the bathroom shaving, and Tom was in his bedroom. I walked to the kitchen and saw Ron on the living room couch. “Edgar,” he asked me, “do you believe in Jesus?”

One of the symptoms of Ron’s schizophrenia was religious mania, and he had been talking about Jesus Christ incessantly. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was sick of hearing it. “No,” I told Ron in exasperation. “I don’t believe in Jesus.” I continued to the kitchen, and Ron must have gotten up off the couch and headed to his bedroom.

A minute later, I heard a loud bang followed by a boom like a body falling. We rushed to Ron’s room and found him lying on the floor with a bullet in his temple. He was still alive and breathing, but he wasn’t conscious. My dad was never able to stand the sight of blood and went outside. Tom went with him.

I used the phone to call an ambulance. It was a party line, and people wanted to know what was going on. I lost my temper and swore at them to get off the line, then the operator connected me, and the ambulance people said they were on their way.

I went back to Ron’s room and held his hand. He was still breathing but there

was blood everywhere. He was moving around, moving around, then suddenly everything went slack and he was gone. The ambulance people arrived too late, not that they could have done anything to save him.

The autopsy would later determine Ron had shot himself with a .22, a small caliber bullet known for ricocheting inside a victim’s skull and shredding the brain. Thinking back to Ron’s unsupervised minute in the mall, we realized that’s when Ron must have pocketed a single bullet. The round was so small that Gunars hadn’t felt it when he patted Ron’s pockets. Edgar continues:

We were never really a gun family like some of our neighbors and cousins. Like many people in Nebraska, we did have a .22 rifle, which we used to go “plinking” at tin cans. Almost everyone did this for fun back in those days.

We never stored any ammunition in the house. Some people afterwards said that we should have taken the bolt out, too. But we didn’t understand guns—it never occurred to us to do this. People can be so quick to assign blame. If Ron had used a razor to kill himself, would they say we never should have had a razor in the house?

I figure if a person is as determined to die as Ron was, he’ll find a way no matter what you do.

Sadly, condemnation was not limited to mean-spirited outsiders. The worst blame of all came from within the Jerins' marriage itself, and it would prove no less destructive than the bullet had.

Even before Ron’s death, Mom and Dad hadn’t been getting along that well. They had very different personalities. Add in the stress of raising four boys and earning enough money to support the family, and my parents had been drifting apart for years. After Ron’s death, they both blamed each other. But my father was particularly condemning of my mother. Ron had always been Dad’s favorite kid, and he blamed his suicide 100 percent on my Mom. What made it worse was that the social mores of the era backed him up. Everything was Freudian back then, and everything bad that happened was the mother’s fault.

It is true that Mom and Ron had butted heads a lot. Mom was a real disciplinarian, and she wanted to raise us to be nice and empathetic people. She didn’t make us do chores, but she did expect us to study and get good grades.

In retrospect, I realize that even as a child, Ron showed signs of a schizophrenic personality. He could be selfish, self-centered, and isolated. These traits got so much worse after he turned 14 and his illness started taking hold. By this point, Mom couldn’t make Ron take school seriously. She couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to. This set up a real battle of wills between them, with Dad usually on Ron’s side.

Rita Jerins

The Dream lithograph 11" x 9" 1984

Statistics indicate very few marriages survive the death of a child, and this would prove the case for Rita and Gunars. Their divorce didn’t happen right away. As their relationship slowly disintegrated, it took an additional toll on the surviving sons. When Gunars finally moved out of the house, Alex was devastated. He turned increasingly moody, which seemed a normal reaction to the trauma he’d endured. No one yet suspected that Alex, like Ron before him, might be showing early symptoms of the same disease that had killed his older brother.

minute later, I heard a loud bang followed by a boom like a body fall.

AOn the surface, Tom seemed to be coping well. But what the family didn’t know is that by age fifteen, he’d secretly begun taking drugs and drinking heavily, a pattern of abuse that would eventually lead to addiction and alcoholism.

As for Edgar, the immediate aftermath of Ron’s death felt surreal. I remember going to school the next day. I could barely walk; I just put one foot in front of the other till I got there. It sounds weird today, but nobody talked to me about what happened. There weren’t any school grief counselors back then, and nobody offered therapy of any kind. You were just expected to go on with life as if nothing had changed.

After a couple weeks, the shock started to wear off. I took consolation in art and found myself more determined than ever to become the best artist I could. Ron’s death turned this ambition into a mission. So much talent lost to the world—I was determined to honor him by making art for the both of us.

That June, Edgar graduated from high school. In September, only five months after his brother’s suicide, he left for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, arguably the premier art school in the country for artists interested in realism.

Edgar quickly made friends with many fellow students, most of whom were slightly older than the precocious eighteen-year-old from Omaha. But Edgar’s sense of humor, good nature, and natural charm proved irresistible, and the friendships he forged at the Academy would last a lifetime.

One such friend was John Thornton, an aspiring painter from Pittsburgh. During college at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, John had majored in

math before undergoing an epiphany halfway through his sophomore year. It happened when he first saw paintings by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky. The work bedazzled him so much that it inspired him to become an artist. Midway through his junior year, he had completed all the course work required for his math major. For the rest of his collegiate career, he took only art and art history classes. One of his favorite teachers was painter Mo Brooker, who had attended the Pennsylvania Academy and recommended John check it out. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Carolina, he returned to Pittsburgh and a year later enrolled in the Academy.

John has vivid memories of meeting Edgar for the first time. The phrase “starving artist” is, of course, a cliché. For John and Edgar, both of whom were living on a shoestring to pay for the Academy, a more apt description is “chronically underfed artist.” As John recalls about the time they first became friends, food played a critical role:

Edgar was this very charismatic, funny guy. He’d

Rita Jerins

Top: Total War Lithograph 9" x 8" 1983

Bottom: Clark Gable Pencil 12" x 9" 1951

already become good friends with someone I knew a little, an art student named Jock Anderson from Long Island. Edgar and Jock had also befriended another guy, Ken Dirsa, an older student who I didn’t know personally. Anyhow, one day I overheard Edgar and Jock talking about being invited to Ken’s for a party. I begged them to let me come along. On the drive over, Edgar and I joked around pretty much nonstop. When we got to the party, Ken had made this huge vat of fish chowder. It turns out he had been a professional cook before coming to the Academy, and the dinner was absolutely delicious. I was so grateful to Edgar for bringing me. That meal was like the sacrament that sealed our friendship. But John and Edgar’s relationship was based on more than laughs and chowder. Despite their differences in age and educational status, they soon realized each could help the other become a better artist. As John explains:

I was better educated than Edgar because I had gone to college, and he was fresh out of maybe not the world's greatest public high school. So, I had a lot more general knowledge than he did. But Edgar’s art ability was just off the charts. He was already so good at painting, and he knew so much thanks to this wonderful private art teacher back in Omaha, Dimitar Khrushchev. At 18, Edgar was already so skilled I knew I’d be lucky over the next three years just to catch up to where he was then. I managed to do so, but that was only made possible for one reason: Edgar agreed to become my teacher.

Don’t get me wrong, the faculty at the Academy were world-class. But Edgar was just sensational. Over the years, he taught me so much more than anyone else at the school. I’ll give you one minor but amusing example. I was very cheap and would break down cardboard boxes and use the pieces to paint on. I remember when Edgar first saw me do this. Dripping with condescension, he told me, “You can’t do that anymore! You’ve got to use the best materials you can afford.” So that’s when I started to use actual canvas.

Classes at the Academy followed a very predictable pattern. For three hours every

NONo one yet suspected that Alex, like Ron before him, might be showing early symptoms of the same disease that killed his older brother.

morning, we would paint still lifes and sometimes clothed models. After a quick lunch break, we’d spend the rest of the afternoon painting nudes. After Edgar and I became roommates, we’d return to our apartment after school, eat dinner, then spend the rest of the evening drinking Bartels beer and painting till it was time to sleep. It was very intense, and we did this for three years. All throughout, Edgar would give me these great critiques and explain how I could fix or improve things.

The one area I was able reciprocate was art history. Despite his technical wizardry, Edgar’s knowledge base about other artists was limited. He wanted to learn as much as he could. So, we started eating lunch in the school library, which had a great collection of art books. I introduced him to many of my favorite artists and explained what I had learned about their lives and their contributions to art history. Edgar just soaked it up. One night, he came back to our apartment and was super excited. “I just found the best artist,” he announced. “Goggin.” And I thought, “Oh my god, he’s never stumped me before. I’ve never heard of this Goggin.” That’s when Edgar added, “Yeah, he paints these beautiful Polynesian girls.”

I burst out laughing. To this day, we both love Goggin.

During their final year at art school, Edgar received word his youngest brother, Alex had suffered a psychotic breakdown. At the hospital, it took five orderlies to pin him down long enough to inject the Thorazine. Unlike with Ron, however, the medication worked fairly well. Doctors were able to adjust the dosage to the point of putting him into remission. As Edgar remembers:

Alex had always been the sweetest and most normal seeming of my brothers. He managed to pull out of his breakdown and get better. His doctors told us that patients who stay on medicine can live with the disease. Alex did get well, but I’ll never forget it when he said, “If it ever comes back, I will kill myself.”

Pretty early on in my friendship with John, I told him about Ron’s death. We talked about it all the time. I told him how scared I was that I’d become mentally ill, too. John had a real understanding of what I was going through, because he’d struggled with mental problems himself. During college, he’d been briefly hospitalized after suffering auditory hallucinations. It wasn’t schizophrenia, the doctors later concluded, but rather the result of major depression and the resultant

Ron Jerins

Nude Charcoal on paper 24" x 18" 1972

insomnia and sleep deprivation it triggered. John recovered and has not heard voices since. I remember him telling me, “Edgar, I know you are not mentally ill, and I know you’re not going to become mentally ill.” There was something about his certitude that convinced me not to worry. And from that point on, I didn’t—even after Alex got sick. John helped me so much, and for this I will always be grateful.

In 1980, Edgar graduated from the Academy, and he began establishing himself as a professional artist. He moved to Los Angeles and met various collectors interested in buying his work. Edgar’s ultimate goal, however, was to live and work in New York City, the global center of the art world. A Latvian friend, Laila Robins, worked for a Manhattan psychiatrist and art connoisseur. Arthur Brandt was looking for a house sitter/live-in caretaker for one of his several estates. This house was in Snedens Landing, New York, a secluded hamlet on the Hudson River about a half-hour drive from the city. In exchange for performing some light maintenance duties and making sure the estate was secure, he could live in the house rent-free and work exclusively on his art.

His Snedens Landing neighbors warmly welcomed him to the neighborhood. To Edgar’s surprise, many of them weren’t the stereotypical, affluent suburbanites he’d expected. What he found instead was a veritable Who’s Who of A-list celebrities: actors, writers, dancers, and journalists who treasured the privacy and seclusion Snedens offered. Within months, Edgar had become friendly with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mike Nichols, Diane Sawyer, Margot Kidder, and multiple other household names. Most loved his work and passion for art. They treated him not as a lowly house sitter but as one of their own.

Just as his parents’ escape to America had initially seemed a harbinger of better times ahead, so did Edgar’s arrival in Snedens fill him with great optimism for a future of opportunity, a future free of the nightmares of his past.

EDGAR received word his youngest brother Alex had suffered a psychotic breakdown.

Ron Jerins

My Brother Alex Conte on board 30" x 22" 1974

Self Portrait Pencil 23" x 16" 1971–2

Bottom: Ron Jerins at Scholastic Art Awards

He’d been living Snedens for less than a year when he got the call from Omaha. Edgar recalls the devastating news:

Alex had killed himself in the family home on April 9th, two days short of the eight-year anniversary of Ron’s suicide. He borrowed a friend’s gun and bought the same kind of .22 bullet Ron had used. I think he planned to die on the very same day Ron did, but that he just couldn’t make it till then.

Years later, I was visiting Omaha and found myself at the same city park where everybody used to hang out when we were kids. There were a bunch of people partying, and I recognized one man we grew up with. He was between Alex and me in age. As kids, both Alex and I had known him fairly well, but because of the age difference, he hadn’t been in either of our friend groups.

The guy came up to me and said how sorry he was about Alex. Then he recounted a conversation he and Alex had in this same park shortly before

his suicide. “Alex told me the voices were coming back,” he said. “He told me they were telling him to kill Sarah.”

Alex loved his girlfriend, Sarah. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t hold out till April 11th. Maybe he was afraid of succumbing to the commands and was trying to protect her.

In the years since Alex’s death, Edgar has slowly watched his whole nuclear family disappear. Gunars was the next to die, the victim of a heart attack in 1999. He was 69 years old. “Tom found him in the kitchen of his house,” says Edgar. “Of all the people to find our Dad, I wish it hadn't been Tom. Our father by then was his main and nearly sole source of support. With his death, Tom’s problems got so much worse.”

could no longer sustain the working life. He lost his job and in depressingly short order became homeless and from there his life just spiraled downwards.

Throughout his twenties and thirties, Tom worked at a printing company and was the most sought-after graphic designer in Omaha. He earned great money, had a nice apartment, and his good looks attracted women in droves. On the surface, he had achieved great success, but he was doing it as a high-functioning alcoholic and drug addict.

Eventually Tom could no longer sustain the working life. He lost his job and in depressingly short order became homeless, and from there his life just spiraled downwards. Towards the end of his life, Tom’s femur was shattered, one of many bones he’d broken over years of living rough. Doctors gave him as much morphine as they could, but they knew that a dose high enough to really work would suppress his breathing and kill him. Tom died in agony at age fifty-seven, Edgar recalls. His death certificate listed bone fractures and sepsis as immediate cause.

Rita remained in the family home on Curtis Avenue till the age of 86, at which point Edgar persuaded her to move into a memory care facility. The only time Edgar wasn’t allowed to visit was during the height of the Covid epidemic. As soon as the ban was lifted, he made the long drive from New York to Omaha to spend time with her. He continued to do so as often as he could for the rest of her life. In August 2022, Rita entered hospice care and died that September at age 89. At the end,

TOM

Top: Ron Jerins

she was surrounded by Edgar, his wife Alana, and their two daughters, Ruby and Sterling. She was comforted by her beloved cousin John Grinbergs, who sang Latvian songs to her.

Of all her four sons, Edgar is most like Rita in temperament and spirit. “Despite everything Mom lived through in her life,” he says, “she never complained, and she was never bitter.” For some, the genetic lottery and life’s hardships are a pitiless and cruel combination. But as Edgar Jerins and his mother have shown, even the direst of circumstances can’t stop great artists from finding ways to endure and inspire us.

Jim Thornton

Ron Jerins

Left: Nightmare Watercolor 23" x 29" 1975

Above: Wild Horse Watercolor 30" x 22" 1975

Ron Jerins

Horse pastel 9" x 12" 1976

Ron Jerins

Prayer Pencil 10" x 12" 1976

LIFE IN CHARCOAL

Prael & Prey in Rhinebeck

60” x 96” Charcoal on paper 2008

Collection of The Global Center for Latvian Art, Cesis, Latvia

Daina & Doyle at Home With Anita’s Children

60” x 96” Charcoal on paper 2007

Collection of Kathy and Marc LeBaron

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Martin Pedersen for your article on my New York City lockdown photographs, your help looking for a publisher and the door that opened with the introduction to Gordon Goff.

To Jim Thornton for telling my family history and writing and editing our conversation with your brother John.

To John Thornton for our interview and your editing help and writing, and above all my lifelong friendship with you and Jim.

To Patrick King for your absolutely stunning design of my book.

To Robert Cozzolino for your insightful essay.

To Gordon Goff, Managing Director & Publisher of ORO Editions for believing in my artwork.

To Kirby Anderson, Managing Editor, for guiding me through the process and getting the book finished.

To Pat Drickey and Jim Vakoc for your guidance and continued support.

And to the friends and family who opened their homes and lives and allowed me to tell their stories.

Back Cover: Jay & Lesley in Astoria

60” x 103” Charcoal on paper 2005 Private Collection