The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (44 page)

The continuing importance of Jerome Kern’s achievement lies in his careful attention to feelings, character development, and American musical idioms. He was the first theatrical composer to use jazz, ragtime, folk music, opera, and popular song in one fabulous, expressive style, yet always tied to dramatic impulse.

Born in New York City and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Kern was taught music by his mother exposing him at ten to the Broadway musical. After successes writing music for school plays, Kern dropped out to study music full-time. Pursuing his musical studies, he took the accepted route for young American composers at the time, traveling briefly to Germany for more advanced study. Upon his return, he attended the New York College of Music (but only for a few short months).

At the age of eighteen he began to write individual songs to be placed in musicals of other composers. By the outset of the First World War he had composed several dozen songs to be integrated into other writers’ stage shows. One such song was
They Didn’t Believe Me,
which is recognized today as the first truly representative modern musical theater song. The song, much more complex in melody and harmony than the European-influenced work of his contemporaries, such as Victor Herbert and Rudolf Friml, has served as a model for many songwriters.

During the war, Kern received many opportunities to write entire musical shows for the small Princess Theater in New York. He expanded his interest in meaningful songs into meaningful shows, plays which had songs and incidental music wholly integrated into the drama (slight as some of them may have been). Before Kern, it was common to stop the dramatic action abruptly for a quick, often irrelevant, song-and-dance number, then just as quickly, return to the play. Although Kern’s integration of music into the drama was not a new concept, it was new to popular American theater. European opera since Mozart had approached the problem of integrating song and drama in varying ways, culminating in the pure conception of
Pelléas et Mélisande,
the fin de siècle masterwork of Impressionism by Claude Debussy. In America, however, popular musical theater developed from vaudeville, melodramatic plays, and European operetta, forms that paid little heed to more than mere entertainment.

Show Boat
is that rare work which incorporates all of the historical elements of American musical theater and produces something quite new. The show boat is a floating old-fashioned musical and dramatic show, the last of its kind to glide down the river. Yet the entertainers sailing on it are complex characters, not the stock figures they first appear. Times are changing, old prejudices between whites and blacks are exposed, unending cruelty is made plain. This musical show glides forward to its cathartic ending of reconciliation, regret, and recognition that “O1’ Man River, he just keeps rollin’ along.”

Kern and Hammerstein tell not only the conventional story of two juvenile leads making believe they love each other as they grow in love (unconventionally they separate when his gambling debts impoverish the family, only to reconcile in old age), but also a story of miscegenation, of Julie, the mulatto cabaret singer who pines for her man in that perfect song,
Bill,
and sacrifices her career to help a younger friend in need. For a popular show to be introduced at the Ziegfeld Follies with such a story, despite the costumes, large boat, Americana, and other trappings, was revolutionary, and we can only praise the creators for their courage and vision.

After
Show Boat,
Kern largely withdrew from the stage to spend more time with his family. In the 1930s and 1940s he wrote several hits for Hollywood movies including sophisticated songs for Fred Astaire such as
The Way You Look Tonight
and
The Last Time I Saw Paris.
Many of his stage shows were turned into movies, most notably
Show Boat,
with Irene Dunne, Helen Morgan (the remarkable, original Julie), Paul Robeson, and Hattie McDaniel. Although it has been cited by some as racist, the show, especially in its brilliant first act, retains its potent message. Like Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn,
the operetta examined problems of prejudice and miscegenation in America’s heartland. That a Ziegfeld production, usually concerned with only lavish frivolity, would attempt such important themes indicated that the musical could mean something, not just entertain. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals flowed easily out of the waters stirring
Show Boat.

In 1945 Kern was stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage while walking on a New York street. Lacking identification on his person, Kern, a nameless victim, was taken to a city hospital on Welfare Island. He was located by his friends and moved to better care where he died, Oscar Hammerstein II at his side, a few days later, never having awakened from a coma.

A portrait of Kern taken in the early 1940s.

“
H
is spirit pervaded our whole house,” wrote the Russian poet and novelist Pasternak of his family’s friend and mentor, Count Leo Tolstoy. The spirit of Tolstoy, it can be truly said, of caring for humanity, tolerance, compassion, of a profound understanding of motivations and hopes, survived in Russia through the black nights of the Stalinist terror in Boris Pasternak.

To the West he is remembered largely for his last major work, the novel
Dr. Zhivago
(and mostly due to the David Lean film). Russians, however, glorify his life for the great poetry written during the golden age of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin after the Revolution of 1917 and later during the years of oppression and reconstruction after the Second World War.

Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958 for his life’s work culminating in
Zhivago,
Pasternak was forced to renounce the award, fearful of being cast out of Russia by the government. Although publicly defeated by the authorities, Pasternak, like his compatriot the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, remains a potent symbol of the force of artistic truth and courage in the shadow of the bitterest tyranny. Almost all of his poetry and the novel
Zhivago
endure through an irrepressible lyricism and humanity.

Pasternak grew up in Odessa and Moscow, the son of Rosa Kaufman, a concert pianist (and student of the influential Russian Jewish pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein) who had given up her promising career for her family, and Leonid Pasternak, a respected post-Impressionist painter and illustrator (notably for Tolstoy’s
Resurrection).
In addition to the Tolstoys, his parents were friendly with the great musicians, composers, novelists, and poets of the time including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Pasternak first thought he would be a composer. During one notable summer, his family rented a house next door to Scriabin’s. Pasternak was intoxicated by the color-rich harmonies and ecstatic melodies wafting across the lawn from his illustrious neighbor’s house. On long walks with his father and Scriabin, he absorbed the reactions of the two fine artists to nature and listened carefully to their disparate views on eternal issues. Scriabin encouraged Boris to compose and urged him to leave the easy study of law for philosophy. While studying philosophy at the University of Marburg in Germany, Boris fell in love for the first time and began writing verses.

Pasternak was a witness to some of the most important events of twentieth-century Russian history. During a demonstration in 1905 during the first Russian revolution, he received a blow from a Cossack on horseback (later recounted in
Dr. Zhivago).
He also ventured with his father in 1910 to the railway station at Astapovo to view the body of Tolstoy, who had died the night before.

Prior to the First World War, Pasternak aligned himself with a group of writers called “Centrifuge.” In literary battles carried out in cafes and city squares, young authors belonging to groups called Futurists, Symbolists, and Imagists imitated in art the civil strife then raging in Russian’s streets between Bolsheviks, Whites, Mensheviks, and Anarchists. Pasternak became friendly with Mayakovsky and acquainted with the peasant’s poet, the mercurial Yesenin (future husband of Isadora Duncan). Both Mayakovsky and Yesenin were carried away by revolutionary fervor. Pasternak, however, due to what he called his slow-moving mind, could not get caught up in the revolutionary bathos. Neither did he follow his parents to Berlin when they emigrated in the early 1920s, frustrated with a deteriorating life in Russia. Pasternak felt the need to remain in his beloved Russia. Repelled by the human carnage of the Revolution and its oppressive aftermath, Yesenin and later Mayakovsky committed suicide. Pasternak meanwhile continued his steady and sensitive examination of the human condition.

His early prose and poetry have an almost translucent quality. Unlike the bombast of his revolutionary friends, this work shows the influence of his musical upbringing, a charming, quiet lyricism, clearly and simply expressed, but always highly sophisticated.

He chose to pass quietly through the years of Stalinist madness, first as a librarian and then as a translator. His translations of Shakespeare were widely performed throughout the Soviet Union.

In 1934, Stalin declared a literary manifesto, demanding total control over all literature, directing writers how to think. Only socialist realism, the praising of collective work and the Great Leader Stalin, was rewarded. Free thought expressed in a personal manner was damned. Vicious purges destroyed great spirits. While many of his friends fell, Pasternak met the woman whom he would later call “Lara” in
Zhivago,
crediting her with saving him from the numbing desperation of those dark years.

During the Second World War, Pasternak started to write poetry once more, first, to avoid censorship, on patriotic themes, then more personally. When Stalin again imposed literary controls after the war through his flunky Andrei Zhdanov, Pasternak resumed translating. He continued to work secretly, however, on a novel about a poet, a novel that ended in poetry. This epic was about a doctor who grew up in tsarist comfort, wrote poems, was witness to a great war and a violent revolution, fell in love with a mysterious woman, rekindling his poetic flame, and perished in the Soviet wasteland. Although Pasternak wrote autobiographical prose,
Zhivago
was in many ways his own story.

His great contemporary, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, observed that Pasternak always exhibited a childlike vision. He did not promote his “self” like the revolutionary poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin. Lyricism should never be confused with or used in defense of history. A poetry rising out of the unconscious, tempered with sensitive, almost luminous feeling, will surely outlast the Gulag, the purges, the denunciations. As Tolstoy had once remarked to Boris’s father, Leonid, all money, property, empires are fated to disappear, but if art contains the smallest grain of truth, it cannot die.

T
he great playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw once quipped that alongside Jesus and Sherlock Holmes, Harry Houdini was one of the three most famous people in world history (Shaw’s ranking of Houdini with a fictional and biblical figure seems curiously appropriate). For a little over a dozen years around the time of the First World War, Shaw’s quip may just have been true.