The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (46 page)

Joachim arranged for Auer to debut at age nineteen with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, at that time one of the most prominent showcases for musical artists. Positions followed as concertmaster with orchestras in Düsseldorf and Hamburg. He met and played with the great Russian Jewish pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein in London, which led to Rubinstein’s recommending Auer in 1868 to succeed Henri Wieniawski as violin professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and as court violinist to the tsar. Auer remained in Russia for forty-nine years.

Auer’s almost half century in Russia coincided with the awakening of Russian music after centuries of neglect. With the liberation of the serfs at about the same time Auer arrived in Russia, its society and industry began to modernize. A Russian school of composers including Modest Mussorgsky, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Aleksander Borodin, and the very individual Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky produced nationalist works of great rhythmic force and lyric beauty. Tchaikovsky would dedicate his violin concerto to Auer (only to face Auer’s rejection of the work as awkward and overwritten); Auer later saw his error and edited and performed the masterpiece.

His first student to grab world attention was Mischa Elman. Elman became a model for young Jewish boys who also as if by magic wanted to perform before the tsar. Auer’s most famous pupil was Jascha Heifetz, generally regarded, like Niccolo Paganini earlier, as the greatest violinist of his century. Auer inculcated in his students (who were usually well trained and prepared for Auer’s finishing lessons) a unique sense of style and interpretation, as well as a method of gripping their bows that became known as the “Russian bow grip.”

Fleeing the Russian Revolution, Auer came in 1917 to America where he taught a new generation of string players at the famed Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Auer’s incredible legacy of friendships with the greatest composers and musicians of his time, including Franz Liszt, Gioacchino Rossini, Hector Berlioz, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Aleksander Glazunov, Henri Vieuxtemps, Johann and Richard Strauss, and many others was passed on to his students with taste and intensity.

Auer died in Germany in 1930 at the age of eighty-five. His wish that he be buried in the United States was fulfilled with his internment at the Ferncliff Mausoleum in Hartsdale, New York.

Auer’s influence can still be heard when listening to most of the great orchestras and string players of Europe and America. Virtuosity reined in always by the best taste, sentimentality directed by clear expression, and rich, pure line never bled dry, are musical attributes sought by most musicians today and ultimately derived from Auer’s great teaching.

W
hether Groucho Marx was professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, explorer captain Jeffrey T. Spalding, impresario Otis B. Driftwood, quack doctor Hackenbush, or dictator Rufus T. Firefly—Julius Henry Marx, brother of Leonard (Chico), Arthur (Harpo), Milton (Gummo), and Herbert (Zeppo), was the most influential comedian in the world after Charlie Chaplin.

Groucho’s unique combination of comedic gifts—physical movement, verbal insult, political wit, slapstick, burlesque, and expert delivery—inspired generations of performers. His immense talents assaulted and overwhelmed audiences. Groucho simply did not and could not let up. Think of comedians after him (and think also of the importance of comedy in our lives), and you will recognize their (and our) debt to him. Many comedians before and since have had greater individual skills than Groucho: the grace of Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the slapstick of Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, and Lucille Ball, the subversive battery of Lenny Bruce, Jackie Mason, and Richard Pryor, the intellectual fancies of Sid Caesar and Woody Allen, the unrelenting mania of Mel Brooks, Jonathan Winters, and Robin Williams. Yet, Groucho had it all. We still are astonished by the artistry and force of his movies. We watch these old films over and over again, with their creaky plots, dated supporting casts and locales, never tiring of them. We cannot stop laughing, because Groucho and his brothers
won’t let us stop.

Raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the poor streets of Yorkville by an Alsatian-born tailor and his stage struck wife, Minnie, Julius and his brothers were pushed into show business—in order to eat. Most people do not realize that the Marx Brothers were in their late thirties and early forties when they first appeared in movies. Before their breakthrough success in 1929 with
The Cocoanuts,
the brothers had been on the road for twenty-five years, appearing in theaters on the vaudeville circuit, seedy hotels, and even brothels.

As their act developed, they used carefully thought-through scripts as diving boards into uncharted seas of improvisational mirth. Famous writers like George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and S.J. Perelman, skilled in the fast pace of vaudeville and Broadway comedy, wrote for the brothers. Kaufman in particular was often frustrated with Groucho’s repeated inclination to warp the playwright’s lines into wackier and often funnier lingo.

Groucho’s career began in variety shows and ended in the 1970s at Carnegie Hall and on television talk shows. More than four generations of fans reveled in his zany antics. The appeal of his comedy remains unaffected by the passing years. Usually, comedy is rooted in contemporary events and cultural mores. Audiences often fail to react to what was thought in an earlier day to be hilarious. For example, we do not respond to Fatty Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd as our forebears did. Some comedians remain “classic” and “perfect” to us (Chaplin, Keaton, Fields, Caesar, Gleason, Lucy), but many are so wedded to their era that with its passing they become dated. Groucho, however, still teaches us how to think like him and how to really insult, not with just slightly unpleasant jibes, but with shattering, shredding jolts of sarcasm. Yet his humor is shaped with such great timing and taste that it always seems inoffensive.

The best extant source of Groucho’s art are the movies the Brothers made for Paramount and M-G-M during the Depression of the 1930s.
Duck Soup
is perhaps their greatest movie, containing no fussy romantic subplots, but in the context of rising fascism in Europe, just uninterrupted political chaos.
A Night at the Opera
does to
Il Trovatore
what countless operagoers have been powerless to do but would have loved to try. Whether right-wing dictatorship or grand opera, retail capitalism
(The Big Store)
or higher education
(Horse Feathers),
institutions are easy (and appropriate) targets. They must be exposed for their tyranny, stupidity, arrogance, petulance, and downright cussed-ness. Idiot leaders should be kicked in the pants not once, but at least several times. When Chaplin and Mickey Mouse lost their early bitter, vicious side, they became less funny to us (but much sweeter and safer). Except in the last few movies, the Marx Brothers never halted their frontal attack on authority, their ridiculous rush at every symbol we don’t hold dear.

Groucho Marx appearing in
Day at the Races
with Maureen O’Sullivan.

When Groucho slides up to the knees of that imposing dowager of considerable means, Margaret Dumont, screaming “Can’t you see what I’m trying to tell you? I love you. Why don’t you marry me?”, he is not only making himself look quite ludicrous (and attempting for profit and lascivious fun a rather bald and bold seduction), but making incredible fun of romance. These dashes at Dumont recur often, contrasting with the boring love stories that studios of the period insisted films must contain (again, with the notable exception of
Duck Soup).
When Groucho dances across hotel furniture with blond bombshell Thelma Todd (and winds up hiding in her closet), he’s not interested in money. Groucho’s love try with Thelma comes straight out of Roman farce (full of raunchy glances and sexual suggestions). This scene was quite daring for its time. It still titillates us.

Groucho never forgot his immigrant roots. Just recall his amazing dialogues with brother Chico, firing rapidly at each other a cultural mishmash of ethnic puns and asides. “Why a duck?” becomes “viaduct”; “down by the levees” a reference to the Jewish neighborhood; and contractual parties of the first and second part are edited out literally by ripping documents apart. In his old age Groucho objected to the ethnic humor of comedians like Myron Cohen, on the grounds that their approach demeaned the Jewish people. Yet to many, Groucho’s method of delivery, loose-limbed strides, cigar smoking, large mustache, old-fashioned dress, and general “misdemeanor” were all representative of the quick-thinking, fast-talking, wisecracking Jew. Unlike the Three Stooges, Groucho did not have to physically attack to overwhelm. In the well-worn Jewish tradition of inquiry and subversive humor, Groucho overwhelmed by the power of his wits. He would live to see his brand of subversion appropriated by 1960s radicals. Hippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin often seemed more influenced by father Groucho than comrade Karl. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Groucho’s television show
You Bet Your Life
brought his personal brand of insult into America’s living rooms. In an era marked by conformity and postwar prosperity, the elder Groucho used the conventional game show format as a pulpit. No age group, profession, sex, or celebrity escaped his glare. The talk show gave him the opportunity in a commercial setting to dispense with plot, scenery, physical action, his brothers’ antics, love stories, and institutions and to concentrate on his greatest love, using words perfectly inflected and timed to make people laugh, blush, and always learn.

B
orn Emmanuel Radnitsky in 1890 in Philadelphia, Man Ray was one of the most influential artistic figures of the twentieth century. Photographer, painter, sculptor, philosopher, writer, collagist, and creator of objects of art—Man Ray was a leader of the Dada-Surrealists who dominated European art in the 1920s and continue today to influence every field of art. With his compatriot in creativity and lifelong friend the great French painter Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray created a kind of anti-art. He found artistic meanings and sardonic humor in commonplace things seemingly thrown together in a haphazard way yet always with a serious purpose afoot.