Jacob Gershovitz’s (George Gershwin’s) First Piano

Our last post began, “What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or woman in the time of Ira and George Gershwin?” And in attempting to answer that question, we find only another question. What was the life of an ordinary Russian Jewish immigrant in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century? Perhaps the letters of Moishe, Rosa, Ira or George would be of help? Now, being in the mountains of Southern Brazil with only an internet connection at hand, I could not find much after typing in Google, “letters of George Gershwin” and “letters of Ira Gershwin,” enter. My query only yielded the fact that Moishe and Rosa bought a piano for their first son, Ira (Israel). But it wasn’t Ira who had much interest in the piano. His younger brother, George (Jacob), began to tinker with it.

And why did Moishe and Rosa, ten years or so now in a new country after fleeing the dangers of revolution in Russia, buy a piano? Another Google search and we find that after the Civil War, twenty-five thousand new pianos were sold every year and that five hundred thousand children were studying the piano in 1887. Why this need for pianos? Tin Pan Alley. More than just a neighborhood in New York City, located on West 28^th Street, Tin Pan Alley was an era of songwriting in American Popular Music.

And East 28^th Street wasn’t the only source for songs in New York City, so was Manhattan’s Bowery and Second Avenue, the center of the Russian-Yiddish Theater. This professional theater started in 1876 in Eastern Europe and was re-established in New York when a wave of immigrants arrived in their new home after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. In 1892, the New York Yiddish Theater presented a Jewish version of King Lear to rave reviews.

American’s racial and religious melting pot was also a musical melting pot. Ragtime, stride and blues mixed with Bach and Beethoven along with Yiddish music. Though George Gershwin or Irving Berlin (Israel Baline) never composed for the Yiddish stage, Russian Yiddish melodies were a spring source for their compositions. Hollywood composer Bernard Hermann remembers a worried George Gershwin saying that his “Summertime,” the operatic centerpiece of Porgy and Bess, sounded “too Yiddish.” Jack Gottlieb in his book, Funny it Doesn’t Sound Jewish, finds powerful similarities in both the melody and lyrics between an old Yiddish lullaby, “Lu, Lu, Lulink” and “Summertime.”