too this, too that," recalled Kadish in the Archives of American Art interview. During World War II, Kadish worked as a civilian for Bethlehem Steel and the shipping industry, building destroyers and submarines until he was recruited to join the U.S. Army's Artist Unit, an elite branch funded by Congress to artistically document the war effort. Many of his searing images of bombed-out villages in Burma and India and heart-rending scenes of death and starvation are now in the collection of the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C. Dairy farming But the earth-shaking events of World War II had another impact on Kadish, back in the U.S. with a young family to support and no job prospects, so to speak. He worked for twenty-five cents per impression in a part-time job for Stanley Hayter's storied Atelier 17 in Greenwich Village, printing editions for the likes of Joan Miró, André Masson and other European Surrealists. Keen on living in New York City (a dream he had ever since his first boyhood visit in the mid-1920s when he saw a Courbet nude at The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Kadish wanted to join old friends like Jackson Pollock who were migrating to the eastern end of Long Island for cheap housing. But Kadish had no luck there and eventually found a run down, farm in northern New Jersey, about sixty miles from Manhattan. He more or less turned his back on the percolating New York City art world where Abstract Expressionism and the New York School were raging and became a successful dairy farmer. Years later, the artist characterized that move: "Unfortunately I lost and separated myself from that world. It could have been in Kansas. Really, it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life." Though he quickly became an expert dairy farmer and grew enamored of the land and life cycles of raising animals, misfortune pursued him. A catastrophic fire in his metal quonset hut studio on the farm in the late 1940s destroyed all but a few of his Abstract Expressionist paintings. He would never paint again. But after hard times of torment about his loss, the artist, geared to the soil and hands-on machinery of the farm, became a sculptor. Cooper Union period Once that dramatic transformation was made, Kadish moved his family back to New York City, renting out his land to tenant farmers