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She went there fairly directly. She was the second child of four in a Russian Jewish family, landowners who lived near Kiev. Her father, Isaac Berliawsky, took off for the New World in 1903 and fetched up in Rockland, Me., where he began to establish himself in real estate and lumber. Left with her grandparents in Russia, the three-year-old Louise convinced herself that her father had abandoned her, and she refused to utter a single word for six months. But in 1905 passage money came, and the Berliawsky family took ship for America. At a quarantine depot in Liverpool, Louise had the first visual experience she can still clearly remember: a sweetshop at night, with rows of glass jars glittering under the electric glare, each jar filled with a different sort of colored candy—toffees, bull's-eyes, peppermints, fruit gums. "It looked like heaven," she recalls. "It was very magical." There is an obvious and durable link between that epiphany in the candy store and the regulating image of Nevelson's mature work: the serried boxes, each holding its array of repeated forms, offered for inspection in a shallow space.
The Berliawskys were one of 30 Jewish families in a provincial town whose anti-Semitism stung in a thousand ways. Nevelson remembers her father taking to his bed for weeks at a time when things got too much for him. Her mother was "misplaced in every conceivable way"—intelligent, pretty, neurasthenic, miserable in her marriage but devoted to her offspring. By the prevailing standards of Maine she had a ripe sense of style; she rouged her cheeks and dressed as though she were in New York City, thus laying the foundation of her daughter's passion for maquillage as armor and costume as spectacle. Her father's ventures prospered, and within the inward-turned circle of her family young Louise was completely indulged, the focus of two high-strung parents who, not always getting on with each other, loaded her with approval. "Being a female was never a handicap for me," she says. "I felt—I knew—that I could do anything I wanted. So I did it."
In 1920 she married a young cargo-ship owner named Charles Nevelson, who took her to live in New York. The city was the stronger marriage. "New York is a city of collage," Nevelson would pronounce 50 years later, at the dedication ceremony of one of her outdoor sculptures in lower Manhattan, "a collage with kinds of religions, and the whole thing is magnificent ... There's no place like it."