The Revolution in “I Can’t Get Started” or Jacob and Israel Gershovitz (George and Ira Gershwin ) and Vladmir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke)

What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or woman in the time of Ira and George Gershwin? Of Vernon Duke? To answer such questions as well as those raised last week in this web log, perhaps we might parse an answer by examining the lyrics of Ira Gershwin himself. Perhaps the first clue lies in the opening lyrics of Ira Gershwin’s “I Can’t Get Started”:

I’ve been around the world in a plane /
Settled revolutions ….

All three of these young men had been affected by a series of military conflicts in Russia. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia forced Vladmir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), educated at the Kiev Conservatory as a music student of Reinhold Gliere and Marian Dombrovsky, to flee to Istanbul, Turkey. In 1921, he and his mother arrived in New York where he became a protégé of—George Gershwin. An earlier revolution in Russia which began with the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 led to the birth of these two Gershwin brothers in Brooklyn, New York, 1896 and 1898 respectively. And too, all three Russia descendents, now Americans, George and Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke, were masters of song and lyric which console sadness and return torment for joy.

But since Ira and George were first to arrive in the Lower East Side, how did it all really begin, way back in the old country? With a love story, it seems.

Jacob and Israel Gershovitz’s parents had dated in St. Petersburg, Russia in the late 19th century. Their mother, Rose Bruskin, was the daughter of a furrier and their father, Moishe Gershovitz, was the son of Yakov Gershovitz, an inventor who had completed his twenty-five years of compulsory military service. About Yakov, George is thought to have said, “The only creative ancestry that I have seems to have been my father’s father who, he tells me, was an inventor. His ingenuity had something to do with Czar’s guns.” They met when Rose was 15 and Moishe, 19. But shortly after they met, Rose’s father decided to move his furrier business to New York.

Rose’s father was one of many thousands of Russian emigrants to the United States somewhere around the late 1880s. In 1881, the assassination was blamed on the Russian Jewish population and so began a series of massacres, known as “pograms” in Russia, meaning “to demolish violently.” Immigration records show that between 1820 and 1920, over 3,250,000 emigrated from Russian to the United States. And too, Moishe Gershovitz, required by law to serve in the military for twenty-five years, left St. Petersburg in 1892 to propose to Rose.

As soon as Moishe arrived, he began searching for Rose Bruskin, already somewhere in New York City. But first he had to find his uncle, a tailor named Greenstein. He knew where Rose was. Moishe, now “Morris,” not only found Rose, but he married her on July 21, 1895. They lived above Simpson’s Pawnshop at the corner of Hester Street and Eldrige Street when they had their first child, Israel Gershovitz, (Ira Gershwin) on December 6, 1896. Two years later, Jacob Gershovitz or George Gershovitz was born. To seem more American, they changed their Russian last name from Gershovitz to Gershwin.