Articoli correlati a My First 79 Years
The world famous violinist describes his decades-long love affair with the world of music, his friendships with such notable colleagues as Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Casals, his ideas and beliefs about art and life, and his dedicated work with younger musicians
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L'autore:
Isaac Stern is one of the most celebrated violinists of the century. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Linda, and Gracie, the cat.
Chaim Potok is an ordained rabbi and has written many best-selling books, including The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev. He lives in Pennsylvania.
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Chaim Potok is an ordained rabbi and has written many best-selling books, including The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev. He lives in Pennsylvania.
Early one October morning in 1937 I boarded a double-decker bus at 72nd Street in Manhattan and disappeared. I was seventeen years old.
For the next six hours, no one knew where I was: not my mother, whom I had left at our apartment without informing her that I was going out, nor our friends. The bus traveled up and down the length of Manhattan, from Washington Square to Washington Heights and back again, and I rode and rode, entirely unaware of what I was doing.
I sat on the top deck, gazing out at the streets but not taking in what my eyes were seeing. I had to face a critical moment in my life, and I needed to be alone. My head was filled with the reviews of my debut performance at Town Hall on the evening of October 10. The reviews, I thought, were disastrous.
One critic, writing that I had "sailed into Tartini's 'Devil's Trill' Sonata with the greatest aplomb, revealing a big, beautiful tone of the G string and a pleasant one on the others," added a tart comment about my "generally erratic understanding of the structure and the musical content of the ancient and honorable composition." About my playing of the Glazunov Concerto in G Minor, that same critic wrote that "the work brought no new elements from the violinist's equipment to the surface" and alluded to "a few technical smears."
Another critic began his review with these condescending words: "From that far away land of violinistic prodigies, movie 'yes-men' and sunshine, California, there comes yet another violinist"; and then went on to mention, as if in passing, that I had "definite possibilities." A third wrote, "His tone is good, especially in the lower part of the scale," but added, concerning my technique, "it can scarcely be called transcendent."
I remember yet another critic mentioning that violinists seemed to be "as prevalent in California as oranges," and while conceding that "his talent is indubitable," nevertheless concluded that "one was not wholly convinced that he has actually traversed the Great Divide that separates the promising player from the artist."
I had hoped that my Town Hall debut would be the moment of breakthrough for me, the beginning of a career as a solo concert violinist. Instead, the New York critics were telling me to go home and practice some more, to learn how to ride the horse better. And, riding that bus, I was asking myself repeatedly: Should I keep on trying to become a concert violinist, or should I take one of the many jobs I had been offered by symphony orchestras in New York for more money than I had ever dreamed of making, money that would have meant security for my family?
The hours went by. I didn't know it at the time, but there was a huge panic developing over my disappearance. My mother was telephoning friends to find out where I was. She called the concert manager's office and was beginning to consider calling the police.
In the meantime, I was riding back and forth, trying to decide. My mind was churning. I sat there, letting it churn.
I had come for that Town Hall performance from San Francisco, where I grew up and still lived with my parents and my younger sister, Eva. My father, Solomon -- a dour man, then in his mid-forties -- was born in Kiev. There are pictures of him as a dashing young man with a goatee, wearing high boots and an open silk shirt and holding an easel and a paintbrush. He came from the upper-middle class, as did my mother, Clara, who was seven years younger than he. Her birthplace was Kreminiecz, a town on the Russian-Polish border. My parents told me that they and their families, who had been there for at least a generation or two, always considered the town Russian. And during the week of my birth, my mother had received a scholarship to study singing at the conservatory in St. Petersburg, which was then headed by the famous composer Alexander Glazunov. In order to study in St. Petersburg at that time, she'd had to wear a yellow star, a rule for Jews living outside what was called the Pale. During the turbulent years of 1918-1920, following the Bolshevik Revolution, Kreminiecz changed hands about every two weeks. I was born there on July 21, 1920. It was the Polish two-week period.
In the midst of the Russian Civil War and shortly after the failed Bolshevik invasion of Poland, my father obtained a Polish passport and a visa to the United States. The passport showed his profession to be artist-painter, and his domicile Kreminiecz. After months of travel through Siberia and across the Pacific, we arrived in San Francisco, where my mother's older brother had settled some years before. I was ten months old.
My parents' language was Russian; neither spoke English. They knew a little Yiddish, but it was not a language we used in the house. It's a very expressive language, with many untranslatable phrases, and my parents would use it only to heighten or color certain comments. There was no hint, in anything my parents said, of their having lived anything remotely resembling a traditional Jewish life in Kreminiecz.
I doubt that my father ever had a bar mitzvah, and he felt no inclination to insist that I should, so I didn't. The traditional Jewish home -- challah every Friday night, candles, prayers -- did not exist for us. Religion played no part in my family's life.
Politics, yes -- we were refugees from Russia. My parents were well educated, and naturally liberal. I was impressed then, and still am, by the truth that you can take a Russian out of Russia but you can never take Russia out of a Russian. My parents had nothing to do with Soviet life or the Communist cause. There were long political discussions between them and with other Russian émigrés; they were part of a large group of people to whom everything Russian was familiar and necessary.
My father wasn't trained in a profession. As an artist of sorts, he knew a little bit about paints, so he became a house painter and was quite ill in later life with lead poisoning. He loved stewed prunes and hot chocolate, and he drank coffee; no, he drank sugar with a touch of coffee in it. A normal breakfast for him consisted of eggs, sausage, hotcakes, cheeses -- which might have contributed to the ulcers he developed. During the Depression years, he started going from house to house, selling MJB coffee. Occasionally during the worst times of the Depression, when we didn't have enough money for food, we received the day's version of food stamps: boxes of cans without labels, whose contents we never knew until we opened them.
We moved a number of times during our early years in San Francisco. The two houses I remember best were the Buchanan Street house and the one at 383 29th Avenue. The house on Buchanan Street had a long series of steps that went up to the front door; it was situated on one of those typically steep San Francisco hills that always scare anyone who has never lived in a city like that. The 29th Avenue house, pale yellow or dirty white, was located in the Sunset district, about five blocks from the bay, and two or three miles from the Pacific Ocean and the beach, where there was a seal house and seal rocks and an enormous building, Fleischaker Pool, that had three or four pools, some with salt water and some heated -- quite an exciting structure and for many years a great meeting place. Nearby was the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the 1915 World's Fair.
That was the normal topography of my life. As a child, I would go with my parents and sister, and with cousins and uncles and aunts, for Sunday picnics in Golden Gate Park, one of the largest and most beautiful urban parks in the country, and I remember all our drives through it. There was the area for buffalo, and the large aquarium, and a Japanese teahouse and garden with its little bridges, and Kezar Stadium, home of the San Francisco Seals, the double-A farm team of the New York Yankees, where Joe DiMaggio and Dom DiMaggio played and were trained by the famous batting coach Lefty O'Doul. I saw my first football games in that stadium. The city was also the cultural center of California, for everything except movies. There were theaters, the Geary and the Curran, and the Opera House and the Veterans Auditorium, a huge public library, and beautiful stores . In those days, no lady went downtown without wearing a hat and white gloves. There were few high-rise buildings. To this day, I remember the sound of the foghorn and the rich sea scent of the fog as it rolled into the Bay Area from the Pacific. There were only ferries then to take you across the bay to Oakland and the trains, and to Marin County. The ferries left from the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, the dock area, where all the ships came in and were loaded and unloaded. In Chinatown, the largest in the world outside China, the street signs were all in Chinese; the district had its own telephone central, in Chinese. The Fillmore area, thick with drugs and rock music during the sixties, was the Jewish shopping district when I lived in San Francisco. There were stores where you bought herring and pickles and lox and rye bread. Fillmore and Divisadero Streets were like the lower East Side in New York. That was the world I grew up in.
I remember that my mother sometimes sang and my father played the piano. When I was six, I started piano lessons, shortly before my sister, Eva, was born. At that time, we were living on a street about three blocks from the northern side of Golden Gate Park. Across the street from us lived a family named Koblick, with whom my parents were friendly. They had a son named Nathan. When I was eight years old, Nathan was already playing the violin.
I've often said that I didn't return home from a concert one day and plead for a violin. Nor did I begin, at the age of five or six, to pick out melodies on the piano. None of that; nothing so mysterious, so romantic. My friend Nathan Koblick was playing the violin; therefore I wanted to play the violin. I can't recall what Nathan loo...
For the next six hours, no one knew where I was: not my mother, whom I had left at our apartment without informing her that I was going out, nor our friends. The bus traveled up and down the length of Manhattan, from Washington Square to Washington Heights and back again, and I rode and rode, entirely unaware of what I was doing.
I sat on the top deck, gazing out at the streets but not taking in what my eyes were seeing. I had to face a critical moment in my life, and I needed to be alone. My head was filled with the reviews of my debut performance at Town Hall on the evening of October 10. The reviews, I thought, were disastrous.
One critic, writing that I had "sailed into Tartini's 'Devil's Trill' Sonata with the greatest aplomb, revealing a big, beautiful tone of the G string and a pleasant one on the others," added a tart comment about my "generally erratic understanding of the structure and the musical content of the ancient and honorable composition." About my playing of the Glazunov Concerto in G Minor, that same critic wrote that "the work brought no new elements from the violinist's equipment to the surface" and alluded to "a few technical smears."
Another critic began his review with these condescending words: "From that far away land of violinistic prodigies, movie 'yes-men' and sunshine, California, there comes yet another violinist"; and then went on to mention, as if in passing, that I had "definite possibilities." A third wrote, "His tone is good, especially in the lower part of the scale," but added, concerning my technique, "it can scarcely be called transcendent."
I remember yet another critic mentioning that violinists seemed to be "as prevalent in California as oranges," and while conceding that "his talent is indubitable," nevertheless concluded that "one was not wholly convinced that he has actually traversed the Great Divide that separates the promising player from the artist."
I had hoped that my Town Hall debut would be the moment of breakthrough for me, the beginning of a career as a solo concert violinist. Instead, the New York critics were telling me to go home and practice some more, to learn how to ride the horse better. And, riding that bus, I was asking myself repeatedly: Should I keep on trying to become a concert violinist, or should I take one of the many jobs I had been offered by symphony orchestras in New York for more money than I had ever dreamed of making, money that would have meant security for my family?
The hours went by. I didn't know it at the time, but there was a huge panic developing over my disappearance. My mother was telephoning friends to find out where I was. She called the concert manager's office and was beginning to consider calling the police.
In the meantime, I was riding back and forth, trying to decide. My mind was churning. I sat there, letting it churn.
I had come for that Town Hall performance from San Francisco, where I grew up and still lived with my parents and my younger sister, Eva. My father, Solomon -- a dour man, then in his mid-forties -- was born in Kiev. There are pictures of him as a dashing young man with a goatee, wearing high boots and an open silk shirt and holding an easel and a paintbrush. He came from the upper-middle class, as did my mother, Clara, who was seven years younger than he. Her birthplace was Kreminiecz, a town on the Russian-Polish border. My parents told me that they and their families, who had been there for at least a generation or two, always considered the town Russian. And during the week of my birth, my mother had received a scholarship to study singing at the conservatory in St. Petersburg, which was then headed by the famous composer Alexander Glazunov. In order to study in St. Petersburg at that time, she'd had to wear a yellow star, a rule for Jews living outside what was called the Pale. During the turbulent years of 1918-1920, following the Bolshevik Revolution, Kreminiecz changed hands about every two weeks. I was born there on July 21, 1920. It was the Polish two-week period.
In the midst of the Russian Civil War and shortly after the failed Bolshevik invasion of Poland, my father obtained a Polish passport and a visa to the United States. The passport showed his profession to be artist-painter, and his domicile Kreminiecz. After months of travel through Siberia and across the Pacific, we arrived in San Francisco, where my mother's older brother had settled some years before. I was ten months old.
My parents' language was Russian; neither spoke English. They knew a little Yiddish, but it was not a language we used in the house. It's a very expressive language, with many untranslatable phrases, and my parents would use it only to heighten or color certain comments. There was no hint, in anything my parents said, of their having lived anything remotely resembling a traditional Jewish life in Kreminiecz.
I doubt that my father ever had a bar mitzvah, and he felt no inclination to insist that I should, so I didn't. The traditional Jewish home -- challah every Friday night, candles, prayers -- did not exist for us. Religion played no part in my family's life.
Politics, yes -- we were refugees from Russia. My parents were well educated, and naturally liberal. I was impressed then, and still am, by the truth that you can take a Russian out of Russia but you can never take Russia out of a Russian. My parents had nothing to do with Soviet life or the Communist cause. There were long political discussions between them and with other Russian émigrés; they were part of a large group of people to whom everything Russian was familiar and necessary.
My father wasn't trained in a profession. As an artist of sorts, he knew a little bit about paints, so he became a house painter and was quite ill in later life with lead poisoning. He loved stewed prunes and hot chocolate, and he drank coffee; no, he drank sugar with a touch of coffee in it. A normal breakfast for him consisted of eggs, sausage, hotcakes, cheeses -- which might have contributed to the ulcers he developed. During the Depression years, he started going from house to house, selling MJB coffee. Occasionally during the worst times of the Depression, when we didn't have enough money for food, we received the day's version of food stamps: boxes of cans without labels, whose contents we never knew until we opened them.
We moved a number of times during our early years in San Francisco. The two houses I remember best were the Buchanan Street house and the one at 383 29th Avenue. The house on Buchanan Street had a long series of steps that went up to the front door; it was situated on one of those typically steep San Francisco hills that always scare anyone who has never lived in a city like that. The 29th Avenue house, pale yellow or dirty white, was located in the Sunset district, about five blocks from the bay, and two or three miles from the Pacific Ocean and the beach, where there was a seal house and seal rocks and an enormous building, Fleischaker Pool, that had three or four pools, some with salt water and some heated -- quite an exciting structure and for many years a great meeting place. Nearby was the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the 1915 World's Fair.
That was the normal topography of my life. As a child, I would go with my parents and sister, and with cousins and uncles and aunts, for Sunday picnics in Golden Gate Park, one of the largest and most beautiful urban parks in the country, and I remember all our drives through it. There was the area for buffalo, and the large aquarium, and a Japanese teahouse and garden with its little bridges, and Kezar Stadium, home of the San Francisco Seals, the double-A farm team of the New York Yankees, where Joe DiMaggio and Dom DiMaggio played and were trained by the famous batting coach Lefty O'Doul. I saw my first football games in that stadium. The city was also the cultural center of California, for everything except movies. There were theaters, the Geary and the Curran, and the Opera House and the Veterans Auditorium, a huge public library, and beautiful stores . In those days, no lady went downtown without wearing a hat and white gloves. There were few high-rise buildings. To this day, I remember the sound of the foghorn and the rich sea scent of the fog as it rolled into the Bay Area from the Pacific. There were only ferries then to take you across the bay to Oakland and the trains, and to Marin County. The ferries left from the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, the dock area, where all the ships came in and were loaded and unloaded. In Chinatown, the largest in the world outside China, the street signs were all in Chinese; the district had its own telephone central, in Chinese. The Fillmore area, thick with drugs and rock music during the sixties, was the Jewish shopping district when I lived in San Francisco. There were stores where you bought herring and pickles and lox and rye bread. Fillmore and Divisadero Streets were like the lower East Side in New York. That was the world I grew up in.
I remember that my mother sometimes sang and my father played the piano. When I was six, I started piano lessons, shortly before my sister, Eva, was born. At that time, we were living on a street about three blocks from the northern side of Golden Gate Park. Across the street from us lived a family named Koblick, with whom my parents were friendly. They had a son named Nathan. When I was eight years old, Nathan was already playing the violin.
I've often said that I didn't return home from a concert one day and plead for a violin. Nor did I begin, at the age of five or six, to pick out melodies on the piano. None of that; nothing so mysterious, so romantic. My friend Nathan Koblick was playing the violin; therefore I wanted to play the violin. I can't recall what Nathan loo...
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- EditoreAlfred a Knopf Inc
- Data di pubblicazione1999
- ISBN 10 0679451307
- ISBN 13 9780679451303
- RilegaturaCopertina rigida
- Numero di pagine317
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