Stanley Kubrick was born on 26 July 1928, a year before the catastrophe of the Great Depression. Penicillin was discovered that year, and the first trans-Pacific flight was made. Japan broke off relations with China, following its attacks on the mainland, presaging the Pacific conflict of World War II. In Germany, the Social Democrats won a majority in the Reichstag. Hitler, recently released from jail, began his consolidation of power over the Nazi party. In the arts, as we’ve seen, modernism was flourishing. But these were distant events for the baby born in the Lying-In Hospital on Second Avenue in Manhattan, a plain and ‘awkward pile of grey stone’, but one of the finest maternity hospitals in New York, where Stanley’s father could provide the best medical care for his pregnant wife. Sadie Gertrude (Gert) Kubrick, née Perveler, was housed in a comfortable, light, airy ward on one of the building’s upper floors. His father Jack L. (it was never clear if the L stood for Leonard or Leon), alternately known as Jacques or Jacob, was a successful and respected neighbourhood doctor with a practice on the ground floor of a new building on the corner of Courtlandt Avenue and 158th Street in the Bronx. He also took up a residency at Morrisania City Hospital, also in the Bronx, specializing in otolaryngology.

It was an ordinary birth to a relatively well-to-do Jewish couple, auspicious only in how the baby would grow up. At this moment, all thoughts were on the baby boy (he would have a sister, Barbara Mary, born six years later on 21 May 1934), whose parents had become successful in ways that so many immigrants had hoped for. Like most Jewish families, Stanley’s family came from central and eastern Europe as part of the large wave of immigrants who migrated to the United States between 1881 and 1910. Their forebears, his grandparents, came from Probużna in Galicia, now modern-day Ukraine. Jacob Cubrick (as his name was spelt on his birth certificate) was born on 21 May 1902 to Elias Kubrik from Galicia, Poland, and Romania, and his second wife, Rosa Spiegelblatt, from Galicia. Rosa was already pregnant with Jacob when they arrived at Ellis Island. Once in the US, they lived on East Houston Street, near the knishery and bakery of Yonah Schimmel, which was lovingly recreated by Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut. Both parents took up the rag trade as tailors and clothes-makers. Gert’s mother, Celia Siegel, had been born in 1881, in Austria. Gert’s father, Samuel Perveler, a waiter, had also been born in Austria in 1875. In 1902, Samuel and Celia wed in New York City where Gert and her two younger brothers, David and Martin, were raised. Martin later moved to California where he became an enormously successful pharmacist with a chain of stores. His success would allow him to finance Kubrick’s first feature film.

Jack did not follow his parents in the rag trade, pursuing a medical education at the New York Homeopathic Medical College and Flower Hospital on York Avenue and 63rd Street instead. He graduated in 1927, one of the 2,069 Jewish doctors to do so that year in the US. He married Gert in a Jewish ceremony the same year. But after their marriage, they did not keep a particularly Jewish household, and Stanley did not have a religious upbringing. He had limited exposure to Yiddish and Hebrew and was not bar-mitzvahed. The religion itself and its practice seemed alien, foreign, not really American as understood by an ambitious Bronx teenager more interested in music, photography, chess, girls, and sports than in Torah study. Stanley said that he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents. But there was some nostalgia for his ethnic roots, at least as expressed through the movies. He loved Woody Allen’s 1987 portrait of Jews in New York City in the late 1930s and early 1940s in Radio Days, identifying with the little boy Joe. ‘He knew the taste and smell of everything in this film. His parents were more sophisticated than the family portrayed in the film, but Stanley felt so at home with the “drama” and the language used,’ said his future brother-in-law, Jan Harlan.

Stanley’s parents were trim, upright, and good-looking. Native-born, they were stylish and comfortable with the world, standing out from the other parents around them, many of whom were first-generation immigrants. Early snapshots from the time show a prosperous middle-class family. Jack and Gert had college educations, spoke English well, and were cultured and wealthy enough to line their house with books, as would Stanley later in life. Unlike his peers, Jack was particularly well read. He was conservative and ‘a worrier’, according to Stanley’s wife, Christiane. As a doctor, Jack was relatively unaffected by the stock market crash and subsequent Depression that caused many other Jewish families to slide into poverty.

Stanley’s family moved around a bit, living for a while in the garment district of Manhattan and then in various Bronx apartments, including, between 1942 and 1944, an elegant building at 196 Grand Concourse, a broad, central European-styled roadway. They eventually settled in a private row house, a rarity in a borough that consisted mostly of large apartment buildings. If Stanley began to feel different, or an outsider, his relatively privileged upbringing was a source of this. ‘He was a doctor’s son who lived in a house when everyone else lived in an apartment,’ journalist Michael Herr observed in his memoir of working with Kubrick on Full Metal Jacket. Stanley told a reporter years later that he grew up as ‘a lonely child’, motivating his desire to be regular, ‘one of the boys’, who played softball. His father was wealthy enough to own a 16 mm movie camera and Jack filmed his children in both black-and-white and colour. Stanley drove his father’s Buick when most families did not even own a car. They owned a large vicious-looking Dobermann pinscher, setting up Stanley’s attachment to dogs and all manner of animals for life. The photo albums also depict a son rarely deprived of attention, care, or support. Even at that youthful age, in those sparkling yet intense eyes and his wry smile, one can see the confidence and droll sense of humour that would mark his personality and much of his later work. Stanley, as his neighbour Cliff Vogel remembered, had an ‘aquiline face [and] sharp, piercing eyes’. This ‘hypnotic, very Svengali quality’, says novelist-screenwriter Gwen Davis, an early friend of Kubrick’s, would later serve him well in Hollywood. ‘Everybody fell in love with him.’

As befitted the eldest boy in a Jewish family, Stanley was indulged. His childhood home was an idyll over which his mother, Gert, presided with impeccable, doting competence. ‘The little Jewish boy does grow up to think of himself as all-cherishable,’ Alfred Kazin would write some four decades later. Gert told him he could do anything. Christiane said that Gert told her how Stanley ‘took no interest in himself as a child’. He saw himself as a grown-up. ‘He was a gifted boy, brilliant and independent, and [Gert], in her wisdom, succeeded in implanting in him a strong belief in himself.’ Stanley was close to his mother. Christiane remembered her as ‘a very lovely and very intelligent woman. His father too. I think Stanley was very much loved and admired as a child. It gave him the strength to have an enormous interest in life and be very creative. I also think he inherited from his mother the best sense of humour I have ever come across.’ Unlike so many fathers, not just the Jewish ones, who dedicated themselves to work rather than their family, Jack also took a close interest in his only son’s upbringing. His father, more silent than his mother, was still a strong presence. ‘Stanley as a child was very scared about things,’ Christiane said. ‘His father, who was a doctor, scared him. He told him far too much about medicine, so Stanley was frightened of illness and all the connecting things. Certainly, Stanley was told many medical things at far too young an age, and it drove him crazy knowing this stuff. By the time he was a teenager, he was very fearful of unreal things, as well as real things.’

Stanley was formed by the Bronx, New York’s northernmost borough, named in 1898 after Jonas Bronck when the City of Greater New York was formed. The Grand Concourse was the lifeblood of the West Bronx. One might compare it to Paris’s Champs-Élysées or the Ringstraße of Vienna, straddling the Old World of central Europe and the New World of America. Its Art Deco elegance, grandeur, and once-aristocratic buildings may have long lost their former prestige and become shabby but, as the longest and broadest avenue in the Bronx, it was the centre of life along which various upwardly mobile immigrant and ethnic groups pursued the American dream. Along the Grand Concourse, a mixture of ethnicities fanned out. They had all chosen to move from the crowded streets and buildings of Manhattan and the other boroughs to the roomier apartments and broad avenues of the Bronx. The borough underwent rapid change in the early decades of the twentieth century and its population grew exponentially from just over 200,000 in the 1900s to over 1.2 million by 1930. The Bronx was...