GEORGE GERSHWIN’S PARENTS were part of the tide of immigrants that hit American shores between 1880 and the outbreak of World War I. More than two million Jews immigrated to the United States during those years, many of them fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms that followed the assassination of the Russian czar Alexander II in 1881. A majority came from the stetl—the near-impoverished rural communities of eastern Europe where Yiddish was spoken and the omnipresence of God assumed. Those people’s westward journey, the Gershwin parents included, ended in New York City. There, during the three decades before 1910, the Jewish population grew more than tenfold. Many of the new arrivals settled on the Lower East Side, where urban crowding and the scarcity of decent-paying work complicated the struggles of recent stetl-dwellers to make their way in the New World.
By the time Morris Gershovitz and Rose Bruskin married on July 21, 1895, however, their adjustment to life in America was well under way. Born and bred in the Russian capital St. Petersburg, Morris came from urban stock. A leather-cutter by trade, he was the grandson of a rabbi and the son of a mechanic who had provided technical support to the czarist artillery. When forced military service loomed, he left Russia for the United States, arriving on August 14, 1890.1 Rose, also a St. Petersburg native and the daughter of a furrier, likely immigrated with her family early in 1892.
Morris made his ocean crossing with an essential piece of information written on a slip of paper and kept in his hatband: the address of his mother’s brother, “Greenstein the tailor,” who lived somewhere in the New York area. But after a gust of wind blew the hat overboard just before the ship docked, Morris was cast alone into a teeming city with no money, no address, and no knowledge of the English language. Yet the culture in which he found himself left him unintimidated. Locating a pool hall with a game in progress, he won enough cash to pay for a bed in a Bowery flophouse. And he met speakers of Russian and Yiddish, who steered him to the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where many immigrants lived. Within hours of his arrival there, he found his uncle Greenstein.2
Rose had already caught Morris’s eye back in St. Petersburg, and by some turn of events he located her after the Bruskins arrived in New York. At the time of their wedding, Morris was a foreman in a shoe factory, designing fancy women’s shoes and earning $35 a week. Immigrant families could live on half that amount or less. “Compared to most of us,” observed lyricist Yip Harburg, who also grew up on the Lower East Side, “the Gershwins were affluent.”3
The name “Gershwin,” inscribed in the annals of America’s culture by the couple’s second son—to replace Gershovitz, or its variants Gershwine or Gershvin—points to George and his brother Ira, who wrote the words for most Gershwin songs.4 But first and foremost, “the Gershwins” signifies a family—Morris and Rose, Ira, George, Arthur, and their sister Frances—who shared a household until 1929, long after both George and Ira, at thirty-one and thirty-three, had won fortune and fame in show business. The family spent much of their lives in each other’s company. While Morris and Rose did little to encourage their sons’ artistic leanings, they did not oppose them either. But from the time George began to make his mark in the music business, the lives of his parents and siblings grew more affluent.
During the years before 1916, the Gershwins occupied twenty-eight different residences, owing to Morris’s preference for living within walking distance of his place of business, which changed often.5 His post–shoe-business ventures included a cigar store, a bakery, a billiard parlor, a Turkish and a Russian bath, and a succession (even a small chain) of restaurants, not to mention a brief stint as a bookmaker at the Belmont Park racetrack. They reveal the range of possibilities that existed for a man like him in the commercial life of New York City. Ira worked for a time as cashier in Morris’s Turkish bath business, an experience that provided fodder for the diary he began on September 3, 1916, under the title “Every Man His Own Boswell.” “From what I have seen thus far of the Turkish Bath business,” he wrote in October,
the “season” is always starting next month. Excuses for bum business / When outside it is a beautiful day—“can’t expect business today everybody wants to be out on a day like this.” / When it is a dreary, rainy, dismal day, “can’t expect business today—nobody wants to leave home.” / Very Cold Day, “can’t expect etc.— ’stoo cold.” / [Very] “Warm—’stoo hot.” / or “Can’t expect much this month—everybody’s away.” . . . [Or “Can’t expect much this] year—Presidential Year.”6
Against a background in which financial security was far from guaranteed, impermanent living arrangements must sometimes have unsettled family harmony. Avoiding banks—Ira was tasked with pawning and redeeming Rose’s diamond ring through the course of Morris’s varied ventures, each time raising around $400—changing occupations, and moving a lot, the Gershwins seemed to place little value on domestic stability.7 George and Ira’s lives and destinies were left mostly in their own hands.
As a musician, George was not formally trained in standard fashion, but neither was he self-educated. Rather, he was taught by a succession of private teachers, most of whom he hired himself. Hungry for knowledge, he showed a keen sense of what he needed to know, how to obtain it, and from whom. At age fifteen, he left school for a job as a song seller on Tin Pan Alley. Unlike Ira, George possessed an independent drive that resisted the learning environment of the schoolroom. Nor did the Gershwins show themselves more than casual practitioners of their Jewish faith; only Ira had a bar mitzvah. For a latter-day observer in search of patterns in George’s early life, his lack of experience in being socialized under institutional authority looms large.
What we know about Morris and Rose has come most directly through their offspring, especially Ira and George. Arthur, a shadowy figure, did not weigh in on the subject of family life. Frances, the only daughter, did so with a bang—but only in the 1950s, after her mother had died, when she began to challenge the outlook of Ira, who had emerged over the years as the family’s chief spokesman. The Gershwin saga according to George took shape during the 1920s. Its main source was the celebrity interview, a journalistic form he mastered early in life.8 Anticipating interviewers’ questions, he could be counted on to offer a few words about his parents (Russian immigrants, not musicians, with a dad engaged in “business”) and his musical training, plus an early encounter or two with music as an enthralling force. Rose’s purchase of a piano in 1912, when George was thirteen or fourteen, marked the pivotal point in his story, for, as he often said, its presence in the house changed his life. But beyond that decisive moment, family history was almost never on his interviewers’ minds, nor was it on George’s mind unless an anecdote happened to occur to him.
As the lesser-known partner of what came to be a luminary songwriting team, Ira was seldom interviewed. Nevertheless, he was a reliable source of information: a keen observer who took words seriously and enjoyed keeping accurate written records. (The first Gershwin scrapbooks date from Ira’s teenage years, which also found him involved with school newspapers.) Circumspect and seemingly born with an antigossip gene, Ira placed a high value on privacy—that of others as well as his own. Virtually from boyhood to old age, he lived by the principle that when he had nothing positive to say on a subject, nothing is what he would pass on. His studied avoidance of negative judgments, especially where family members and friends were concerned, made him a discreet keeper of the flame. Ira’s philosophy of information-keeping set the guidelines for Gershwin biography during his lifetime. Not until after his death did Frances go public about her own struggle growing up in the Gershwin household.
Gershwin’s first biographer, Isaac Goldberg, who was able to observe the family firsthand, detected overlap between George’s sense of humor, fundamental to his personality, and the social manner of his father, in whom the author found “a strange combination of fun without humor.” On one occasion, when somebody questioned the stature of the Rhapsody in Blue, Morris shot back: “Of course it’s a great piece! Doesn’t it take fifteen minutes to play?”9 From the mid-1920s on, “Papa” Gershwin stories in this vein circulated in the Gershwins’ social circle. Friends eager for more were known to greet George with “What’s the latest?” Goldberg came to believe that Morris had passed on something of his unintended humor to his second son. (No one seems to have questioned that Ira’s humor was always the intended kind.)
A family friend, journalist and playwright S. N. Behrman, characterized Morris as an eccentric with a gift for saying “that final thing beyond which there is nothing to be said.”10 Pianist and composer Oscar Levant felt, like Goldberg, that “Papa” Gershwin’s “gift for oblique thinking and apparently irrelevant simplicity was not unlike certain attitudes of George.”11 There was a strong emotional bond between father and son as well, for Morris’s pride in George’s accomplishments was palpable. And surely it was Morris—who appreciated opera, enjoyed singing, whistled with flair, and was known to “coax music out of the silliest contraptions, such as combs and clothespins and pencils”—who passed his feeling for music on to his offspring.12
At age sixty-one, Ira published an anthology of his song lyrics that included comments his father had made about several of them. One was “Embraceable You” from Girl Crazy (1930). When company was present, he recalled, Morris sometimes asked George to “ ‘play that song about me.’ And when the line ‘Come to papa—come to papa— do!’ was sung, he would thump his chest, look around the room, and beam.”13 “Fascinating Rhythm” offered another example of the odds Morris faced in making sense of the English language. For he was known to request this song by a title—“Fashion on the River”—that, however distant from the song’s literal meaning, never dampened his love for it.14
Rose Gershwin was the boss of the family, not her husband. Though she avoided close involvement in her children’s activities, George described her as “very loving”: set on their being educated and ready to enter a respectable line of work—which, in the spring of 1914, did not include making music. When the fifteen-year-old George declared his intent to become a musician, Rose balked at the idea. But when he proposed leaving New York’s High School of Commerce for a $15-a-week salary at Remick’s publishers, Rose saw the advantages of a job in hand, and her resistance crumbled.
It is fair to say that two views about the Gershwins exist, both with roots in the family and each true in its own way. According to Ira, the family was significant only insofar as it produced a musical genius, whose work could speak for itself. But Frances Gershwin Godowsky, the family member most openly aggrieved by the influence of Rose, held that as the cradle of extraordinary talent, the family was fundamental to the Gershwin story. As Frances saw it, the lovable Morris’s feckless tendencies and Rose’s dominating selfishness created an unsupportive, emotionally precarious environment for the children, leaving marks not only on Ira, Arthur, and especially on her, but on George too, the family genius—who, it must be noted, dedicated his magnum opus, Porgy and Bess, “To My Parents.”
If sorting out the personal relationships behind Gershwin’s artistry affects the way his music is understood, then Frances’s perspective contributes to the context for his musical achievements. As a humanizing force, love in the Gershwin household seems to have been in limited supply. Yet there is no denying that the parents’ laissez-faire attitude gave both George and Ira freedom to find their own way. As things worked out, each chose a fiercely competitive line of work with a slim chance of success, and each beat the odds spectacularly.