And ran away that night.īut nobody seemed to want a half-grown boy as a waiter and Izzy spent two nights sleeping in doorways before he finally found a paying situation-acting as guide and coin collector for a sightless street singer known as Blind Sol. But Leah Baline would have none of it Izzy would sing in synagogue or not at all. Enthusiastically, he told his mother about it. He had wandered into Chinatown, where he saw patrons throw coins onto the trays of singing waiters. Izzy found out some people got paid for singing. “What happened next, though- that, she didn’t like at all.” And after a day or two she seemed to accept it. “Not because I wanted to help, but because I’d had to drop out of school to sell the papers. “Of course, mama was furious,” Berlin said. One day, when the other Baline children lined up to drop their day’s earnings into their mother’s apron, Izzy contributed four pennies, earned in a day of selling newspapers. like all the others except for two things: I was Jewish and they were mostly Catholic, and that could have got me knocked around a lot except for the other thing, which was that I looked tough.” “I was 8 years old,” he said, “and until then I was just another street kid. Moses Baline died in 1896, less than four years after his arrival in New York, and Leah Baline and her four eldest children went to work. No cantors were needed, it seemed, in the synagogues of New York, so Moses Baline got a job as shomer (supervisor of ritual preparation) in a kosher slaughterhouse. and the deepest part of it was in Monroe Street, on the East Side, where we went to live.” But when we got there, this turned out to be an exaggeration. “Like everybody,” Berlin said later, “my parents knew New York had streets paved with gold. And so, in the fourth year of his life, Israel found himself en route with his family across the Pale of Settlement to Latvia, Lithuania-and finally on board a ship bound for a city called New York. Most of their neighbors died, as did the town itself. Because they lived on the outskirts of town, he was able to get his wife, Leah, and their eight children away into the frozen fields where they hid under a white blanket. Israel’s father, Moses Baline, was cantor of the Temun synagogue. And it very nearly became his graveyard as well on the night in 1892 when Cossacks rode in with murder on their minds. That was the Jewish community of Temun in Siberian Russia, where Israel Baline entered the world on May 11, 1888. They were the white of a Siberian snowscape, the blue of a night sky-and the red terror-tint of flames consuming the house and village where he was born. ![]() His red-white-and-blue sentiments spawned the hit soldier shows of World War I "(Yip Yip Yaphank)” and World War II (“This Is The Army),” while “God Bless America” perennially threatens to dislodge “The Star Spangled Banner” as the national anthem of his adopted homeland.īut the red, white and blue of his earliest memory had little to do with America. He was the embodiment of Tin Pan Alley the most prolific songsmith in the United States, wrote scores for 16 Broadway musicals plus 18 films, and was a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). He was a composer who couldn’t read music.Ī pianist who could play in only one key.Ī holder of three university doctorates who never finished second grade.Īn immigrant called “the nearest thing to a native folk singer since Stephen Foster.”Īnd a success who lived a life haunted by the specter of failure. For the man known as Irving Berlin and called “The Ford and General Motors of the songwriting industry” was also a conglomerate of contradictions. The critics loved it.Īnd the star himself seemed to have a good time.īut he may secretly have considered himself miscast. ![]() It had everything: a rags-to-riches, riches-to-rags story line, a poor-boy-marries-rich-girl subplot, and a score of more than 1,000 songs. When death finally came it was as a curtain-call for a life that had been one of America’s greatest long-running musical dramas. He is American music,” the late composer Jerome Kern once said. ![]() In Hollywood, Berlin did the scores of “Top Hat,” starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and “Holiday Inn” with Astaire and Bing Crosby. Among his many popular hits from musicals were “Cheek to Cheek,” “Marie,” and “Blue Skies.” His wrote the scores for the 1925 Marx Brothers show, “The Coconuts,” and the Broadway hit “Annie Get Your Gun.” His last Broadway show was “Mr.
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