Jewish Influences on 20th-century American Music: Robert Gluck, JNS, Dec. 8, 2013
______________________________________________________The Americanization of Irving Berlin
Stefan Kanfer
CJ, Spring 2002 It is supremely fitting that “God Bless America”—that stirring hymn to patriotism—has become our unofficial anthem in the aftermath of September 11, since the life of the legendary New York songsmith who penned it, Irving Berlin, born one Israel Baline in 1888 in distant Siberia, epitomizes everything about America’s indomitable civilization that our terrorist enemies despise: its openness to striving and talent, its freedom, its inexhaustible optimism and creativity.Baline’s amazing American success story began when he stepped onto Ellis Island in 1893, on his way to Gotham’s teeming Lower East Side, “the eyesore of New York and perhaps the filthiest place on the continent,” according to the New York Times of the era. However dirty and poor, this Jewish ghetto was incubating an American renaissance that would produce legislators, merchants, professionals of all stripes—and Irving Berlin. Berlin’s family was too poor to provide piano lessons, let alone a piano; Berlin would remain musically illiterate. His father, Moses, a cantor, gave him a love of melody and a quick wit, but that was about all he could afford. To supplement the family’s meager income, Israel, more fluent in English than his parents and five older siblings, haggled with a nearby junk shop. “I used to go there selling bits and pieces of an old samovar that my mother had brought from Russia and kept under the bed,” he once recalled. “I’d get five and ten cents for the pieces and kept selling them until the entire samovar disappeared.”
Berlin understood the value of hard-earned money from early on. Hawking papers on a downtown pier in 1901, a 13-year-old Israel had just sold his fifth copy of the New York Evening Journal when a loading crane swung into his path, knocking him into the East River. Fished out just in time, he was given artificial respiration and packed off to Gouverneur Hospital for further ministrations. An hour later, as the young newsie slept, a nurse pried open his clenched hand. In it: five copper coins. He remained tight-fisted for the rest of his 101 years.
Shortly after Israel was bar mitzvahed, Moses died, and the following year young Izzy left home and school to try his luck at street singing. Sans education, but brimming with aspiration and besotted with the street sounds and street language of the town he would never leave for long, the teenage Berlin plied his trade along the Bowery and the Lower East Side. He soon got a regular gig at the roughhouse Pelham Café, doing ribald parodies of popular hits. The salary was meager, sure, but the café provided a piano and a place to hang out. He taught himself to play a bit by ear, amused the rowdy crowds, and picked up small change. A colleague, Jubal Sweet, remembered the young Berlin “moving around easy, singing all the time, every time a nickel would drop, he’d put his toe on it and kick it or nurse it to a certain spot. When he was done, he’d have all the jack in a pile, see?”
As the pile grew, Izzy kept his eye open for the main chance. It came in 1907, when a song in an Italian dialect, “My Mariucci Take a Steam Boat,” swept through the saloons. Collaborating with a melodist, Izzy wrote the lyrics for “Marie from Sunny Italy,” to be performed with the same Neapolitan intonation:
Please come out tonight my queen
Can’t you hear my mandolin?
The riffraff made “Marie” a hit. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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How Jewish-American Immigrant Irving Berlin Started a Christmas Revolution
Rich Tenorio
Times of Israel, Dec. 24, 2019
Anyone who ventures outside during the holiday season is likely familiar with the classic song “White Christmas,” which plays on the radio, in movies and concerts, and almost nonstop in shopping malls. Bing Crosby’s version, first recorded in 1942, is the best-selling single of all time. In a testament to the diversity of the United States, it turns out that this Christmas mainstay was written by the legendary Jewish-American songwriter, Irving Berlin.
Many of Berlin’s other 1,500 songs written over more than six decades have become classics, from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “God Bless America.” This legacy is part of a new Berlin biography, “Irving Berlin: New York Genius,” by James Kaplan.
Published by Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series, the book shows how young Israel Beilin — born a cantor’s son in czarist Russia in 1888 — immigrated with his family to the United States. In the New World, his musical contributions during a long life of over a century remain as resonant as ever, author Kaplan told The Times of Israel.
Berlin was part of an era that included such fellow luminaries as George Gershwin and Cole Porter. But Berlin’s legacy was summed up by another gifted contemporary, Jerome Kern: “Berlin has no place in American music; he is American music.”
As Kaplan noted, “He was an immigrant Jew who came from nothing, nowhere, had zero money, grew up on the Lower East Side, made his way… He believed in the man and woman on the street and their good taste. I think that is an insight that makes him kind of special among all the great writers in the American songbook.”
Calling Jewish Lives “a wonderful series,” Kaplan welcomed the chance to participate when invited by editorial director Ilene Smith almost 10 years ago. After some back-and-forth proposals, he suggested a Berlin biography, which Smith “liked a lot,” he recalled.
“Berlin was a Jew, proud of it his whole life,” Kaplan said. “He did change his name but there was never any attempt to disguise the fact he was Jewish.”
The book discusses an ecumenical holiday season at the Berlin household with him and his second wife, Ellin Mackay, who was Catholic, sharing Christmas and Hanukkah with their young daughters.
Berlin was “Jewish to his bones, I felt, the core of his being,” Kaplan said. “He was a New York Jew for life, always — a secular Jew, though.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Patriotism Was His Religion
Dan Barker
Freedom from Religion Foundation, May 2004
How many patriotic Americans, proudly singing “God Bless America,” realize that the song they are intoning was written by a man who did not believe in God?
This U.S. postage stamp was issued in a ceremony in New York City in September 2002, one year after the 9/11 WTC attacks. Out of agnostic Irving Berlin’s 1,500+ songs, “God Bless America” was chosen to represent his life’s work.
Or that it was intended as an anti-war anthem?
Irving Berlin is by any measure the greatest composer of popular American music, with hundreds of enduring hits, such as “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “I Love A Piano,” “Always,” “Blue Skies,” “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Marie,” “Play a Simple Melody,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Anything You Can Do,” “Easter Parade,” and “White Christmas.”
Born in 1888 into a Russian Jewish family who came to New York City to escape religious persecution when Irving was five years old, he quickly shed his religious roots and fell in love with America. He became an American citizen when he was 29. “Patriotism was Irving Berlin’s true religion,” writes biographer Laurence Bergreen in As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (1990).
Irving Berlin was “not a religious person,” according to his daughter Mary Ellin. Relating the story of Irving’s marriage to Ellin Mackay in 1926, whose devout father had a deep reluctance to welcome a “lower-class” Jew into the wealthy Catholic family, she writes:
“About religion — Jew and Catholic. My mother has broached the subject of being married by a priest. She herself, though she goes to mass, keeps up appearances, doesn’t believe in all that anymore, she assures him. She has had such a strange religious upbringing: a Protestant like her mother till the divorce, a Catholic since. But a priest might help soften her father. Irving, however, the cantor’s son, doesn’t see himself being married by a priest. Though he is not a religious person, doesn’t even keep up appearances of being an observant Jew, he does not forget who his people are.” (Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Mary Ellin Barrett, 1994) They got married in an unannounced secular, civil ceremony at the Municipal Building, not a church or synagogue.
Once they had children, Mrs. Berlin did try to keep up a minimal appearance of religious tradition. Mary Ellin writes that her unbelieving parents “had their first bad fight when my mother suggested raising me as a Catholic.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Jewish Influences on 20th-century American Music
Robert Gluck
JNS, Dec. 8, 2013
Discuss these names—Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Benny Goodman—with author/musician Ben Sidran, and you will understand how being Jewish, the Jews’ hunger to fit in, and their ease at doing so helped shape both the core of their identity and many of America’s greatest songs.
“Jews in America were able to access a popular imagination because they were, in some ways, experts at being outsiders wanting to be accepted. They had a long tradition of this. A lot of people have speculated that this kind of alienation is a key component to the Jewish identity, and without it, the Jewish identity might well be in jeopardy,” Sidran, author of “There Was A Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream,” tells JNS.org.
Experts cite Irving Berlin, born Israel Baline in Russia in 1888 before being raised on New York City’s Lower East Side, as the first major Jewish songwriter to influence the American songbook. Berlin rejuvenated music from the bottom up, according to Sidran.
“An important part of the story is the connection of the Jewish tradition to the popular tradition,” Sidran says. “The initial connection was with the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment period of 18-19th century Europe), the popular Yiddish writers in the Pale of Settlement, and how important it was. The Jewish community recognized early on the importance of having the liturgical, spiritual and historical information translated into Yiddish, into the popular language, not just in Hebrew, so that it became a synthesis between the higher aspirations of a culture and the everyday life of the culture. This is one of the things that continues today.”
Berlin published his first song, “Marie from Sunny Italy,” in 1907 and in 1911 had his first major international hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which sparked an international dance craze in places as far away as his native Russia. Known for writing music and lyrics in the American vernacular (uncomplicated, simple, and direct), Berlin’s aim was to reach the heart of the average American, who he saw as the real soul of the country. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:
Irving Berlin – His Music and Life on the Lower East Side: Eldridge, YouTube, Sep 8, 2016
Irving Berlin Spotlight Interview (with Mary Ellen Berlin-Barrett, Ted Chapin & John Jacobson): YouTube, May 24, 2011 — Host John Jacobson sits down with Mary Ellen Berlin-Barrett, daughter of Irving Berlin and Ted Chapin, historian of musical theater, to discuss the life and songs of Irving Berlin.
A Look into the Llife of Irving Berlin, An Interview with James Rocco: YouTube, Dec 17, 2008 — Ordway Center Spotlight on Irving Berlin. Take a look into the life and career of Irving Berlin in an interview with James Rocco.
Imagine 2013 Broadway Musicals a Jewish Legacy: Nov. 29, 2016
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This week’s French-language briefing is titled :
