I’m giving my spirits a break with a more light-hearted classically trained musician’s take on immigration.
My wife caught me faux conducting Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto the other night. I tried not to meet her gaze because I was so deeply caught up in the music and I did not want to stop. But Rachmaninoff! An immigrant, from Russia, then ruled by Communists! Oh my God, can we forgive him for coming?
Have you ever heard a recording of Danny Kaye singing the Russian composer song from the 1941 Broadway musical Lady in the Dark? How many do we have to forgive for coming over? Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin listed fifty. Sorry but I won’t give up Rachmaninoff for being an immigrant.
Have you heard about Tchaikovsky? My heavens, we take our children to see – or even dance in – the Nutcracker every winter. Gay! Tchaikovsky was gay, and I don’t mean happy. In fact he was so distraught, he tried to take satisfy wrong-wing extremists by going straight and getting married – his wife ran away screaming when she discovered. I’m from a musical family – my dad and daughter would have loved to meet Peter Ilyich – unless he tried to go straight and fool my admiring daughter. Let their friendship be Platonic.
I grew up hearing my dad play a Rachmaninoff prelude – a real finger cracker – and some Prokofiev too. OMG have your children listened to Peter and the Wolf – by Prokofiev, another Russian immigrant. Has our culture has been “poisoned” by immigrants? Or enriched?
Kurt Weill wrote the music for the Threepenny Opera and Mack the Knife but he was German. Dvorak wrote the New World Symphony while living here but he was – oh what would the [H]enry [H]iggins of My Fair Lady have said – [H]ungarian – but it’s OK, Dvorak didn’t stay.
Have you seen Oppenheimer, about the Manhattan Project that created the A-bomb? Filled with refugees. I studied with refugees and my college chemistry professor was part of the Manhattan Project – somehow instead of being totally corrupted, he was a generous, caring, patriotic man. And heavens, my late cousin was a physicist who studied and worked with famous immigrant physicists – was she corrupted by the experience – would lasers work better if she hadn’t worked with them? Everyone remembers her as a sweet, lovely person as well as a respected physicist – should I imagine a dagger in her heart because she knew, even studied with, foreigners.
Cancer took mama away from us when I was still in college. But her first experience of America was at Ellis Island – she was an eight-year-old immigrant. Thank heavens she came.
It happens that a road we often use has been blocked because of a fire that took out a pair of restaurants, possibly because of a gas leak though we don’t yet know for sure. One of those restaurants served Thai food and we’ve both ordered from it and eaten there. They were another example of the ways immigrants enliven the area and the economy. I wish them well. My heart also goes out to the people from other countries who were lost in the collision with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the Baltimore harbor and the families that depended on them. And may I add that the reason many of us are so torn by the war between Israel and Hamas is precisely the loss of life, foreigners though they may be.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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