UNCLE MANUEL & ME

The Columbia Collection includes more than 300 sketches and caricatures of leading personalities in public life and the arts including escape artist Harry Houdini; British Egyptologist Howard Carter, who discovered King Tut’s tomb; comedian Groucho Marx; pianist Liberace; and actress Debbie Reynolds, along with numerous other entertainers, sportsmen, politicians, and writers. Most notable are his travel series, created between the 1920s and the 1950s, including 60 sheets of drawings made during his trip to Russia in 1929, accompanied by other Western journalists. In the forty-three years since my uncle’s work was donated to Columbia University by his wife, Lydie Rosenberg, I was the first to check out the box. Multiple boxes, really. Gray cardboard boxes filled with magical treasures he collected over a lifetime. 
 

The Rare Book and Manuscript Library was eerily quiet on that rainy day in 2016. As I opened the lid on the first box and touched the pencil sketch on top, I got zapped. It was as if an invisible current of energy connected me directly to Uncle Manuel, the people he met, and the places he went. Tears began to stream down my face. I was hoping no one noticed, yet even if they did, I didn’t care. I was having a meaningful moment—a magical connection to the past, where I was learning about my artistic heritage. And then it started making sense, recalling that my Uncle Alan always told me, “You are most like Uncle Manuel.” 

 

In the early 20th century, my great-uncle Manuel Rosenberg was a thoroughly assimilated first-generation Jewish American working at a steady, respectable job. But in that job, as art director of the Cincinnati Post during the Roaring Twenties, he was also a man who spoke five languages, mingled with celebrities on Broadway and in Hollywood, and got to know politicians, popes, royalty, prime ministers, and gangsters. Mixing easily with diverse cultures and religions in America and abroad, Manuel “Rosie” Rosenberg was a boulevardier, ingratiating himself with his subjects via his ever-present sketchpad. His collection of over 20,000 personally autographed celebrity drawings was the largest of its kind. His drawings and stories touched millions of Midwestern Americans during his thirteen years at the Scripps-Howard newspapers. Manuel Rosenberg was a household name in the United States in the 1920s, tantalizing his readers with accounts of intrigue, exploration, and celebrity. He connected his readers with people, places, and events in the wider world that were exciting, exotic, and a little bit dangerous.