Boy Wonder

There might be a million stories in the naked city, but the early childhood of Stanley Kubrick was one of the more typical: born in 1928, in the Bronx, to upwardly mobile, artistically sophisticated Jewish parents, one generation out of the Pale. ‘I’m not Jewish but my parents were,’ he liked to joke.

A small, shy, nerdy, baby-faced misfit, he ‘preferred the street to school’ and therefore didn’t go much. Instead, he went to the movies – a lot – read comics and pulp magazines, and played a high level of chess, often in Washington Square, for money. Having declined a bar mitzvah, he was given a camera for his thirteenth birthday instead. This proved useful to hide behind, like dark glasses (which he also affected), and helped his social life. Born obsessive, he soon became the school photographer. He discovered Shakespeare through photographing a teacher who would declaim Hamlet, but still watched every movie that came to town, including Italian, French, and Yiddish movies at the local Arthouse cinema.