| A private tour of the former Manhattan home and studio of the Jewish artist Ben-Zion presents as the artistic version of an ice-cream headache. Spread over several floors, including a basement with a hidden trap-door staircase, the works are a dizzying array of drawings, paintings and sculptures, some that include the self-taught artist's poetry, set among hundreds of books, artifacts and knick-knacks. Ben-Zion was born in Ukraine in 1897. After the death of his father, a cantor and composer of liturgical music, Ben-Zion's mother moved him and his younger siblings to Boston in 1920, where she had a brother. Six months later, Ben-Zion moved to the Bronx, N.Y., where he met Hebrew and Yiddish writers, with whom he published a Hebrew-Yiddish journal. (The group hoped it would be the first of many, but there was no second iteration.) In 1965, Ben-Zion relocated to Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, the house that is now a museum and where he lived until his death in 1987. "Chelsea was a rough neighborhood at the time," Tabita Shalem, who manages the Ben-Zion estate, said on an April 2019 tour of the house. Ben-Zion often mined biblical and other Jewish subject matter in his art; his style and temperament at times evoke the works of Marc Chagall. But it has taken a recent exhibit of his works, which ran at the Maor Art Gallery in Brooklyn, to remind the public about Ben-Zion, who is little known even among many Jewish art aficionados. "Ben-Zion was among the first to create works in America in response to the Holocaust and its effects on the continuation of Eastern European culture in America," Matthew Baigell, art history professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of many volumes on Jewish | 
