Page "Edward Sapir" Paragraph 5

Sapir was born into a family of Lithuanian Jews in Lauenburg in the Province of Pomerania where his father, Jacob David Sapir, worked as a cantor.

The family was not orthodox, and his father maintained his ties to Judaism through its music.

The Sapir family did not stay long in Pomerania and never accepted German as a nationality.

Edward Sapir's first language was Yiddish, and later English.

In 1888, when he was four years old, the family moved to Liverpool, England, and in 1890 to the United States, to Richmond, Virginia.

Here Edward Sapir lost his younger brother Max to typhoid fever.

His father had difficultly keeping a job in a synagogue and finally settled in New York on the Lower East Side, where the family lived in poverty.

As Jacob Sapir could not provide for his family, Sapir's mother, Eva Seagal Sapir, opened a shop to supply the basic necessities.

They formally divorced in 1910.

After settling in New York Edward Sapir was raised mostly by his mother, who stressed the importance of education for the upwardly social mobile, and turned the family increasingly away from Judaism.

Even though Eva Sapir was an important influence, Sapir received his lust for knowledge and interest in scholarship, aesthetics and music from his father.

At age 14 Sapir won a Pulitzer scholarship to the prestigious Horace Mann high school, but he chose not to attend the school which he found too posh, going instead to Peter Stuyvesant High School, and saving the scholarship money for his college education.

Through the scholarship Sapir supplemented his mother's meager earnings.