George Gershwin (1898-1937) - 25 September 1998

There was a heartening story the other day. A middle-aged Russian couple, a Mr and Mrs Kitsis posing, as people do on special occasions, grinning like a honeymoon couple, waving through a blizzard of confetti.

They had good cause. If they only thought back 22 years ago when they arrived in New York, in the clothes they stood in, a shabby suitcase and $60 and, on borrowed money, bought a pancake parlour. Worked 18 hours a day and spent their short nights on the floor of a storeroom. And here they were, on the bright noonday of Rosh Hashanah, standing in front of their new house. A large, modern, three-storey shingled house, 10 white steps leading up to a porch and colonnades supported by long slender Doric columns, the height of two storeys. Really, a small mansion.

Honestly earned, first through a successful restaurant, then a wholesale food business, on into the building and eventually, home financing. Now they could improve on the tenacious Russian custom of having the family live in the same house. The difference? Here being New York and Odessa, where biggish families were packed into drab little houses in an overcrowded ghetto, was that here their house had 22 rooms and six bathrooms.

Here, I should say, is the shoreline down by the tip of Brooklyn in a comparatively posh, quiet neighbourhood known as Manhattan Beach. Hard by is Brighton Beach which even 100 years ago was transformed from a village by the sea into a small, compact Russian immigrant settlement.

Today, Brighton Beach is a busy, prosperous florid town. Literally florid – houses and shops painted in many colours. In the old country, the newcomers say, everything was grey and dull. Threading through a street swarm of Russians, speaking Russian, shopping Russian, Russian everything, it's hard to recall that only a dozen years ago, the state department was desperately trying to answer the pleas of old people, of culture groups, to squeeze out of the Soviets a visa for a dissident musician here, a famous author there.

But not long after Mr Yeltsin stood on that tank and the next sound we heard was the collapse of Communism, the legions of Russians who had ached, without hope, to get out of the Communist Utopia went rushing to the American consulates throughout Russia.

And it's an amazing figure. Between 1991 and this year, this country let in 340,000 Russian immigrants, most of them Jews. Over half of them stayed in New York and, at the last count, at least 50,000 of them descended on Brighton Beach. And here, thousands of a new generation of Russian immigrants have gone from shirtsleeves to a house and two cars in the same generation. How different the story of European immigration a hundred years ago!

In 1890, Alexander III of Russia was coming to the end of his repressive reign and wound up in a berserk rage of persecution. He conceived the idea of trying to make Russia pure, recognisably pure, by persecuting every person, every sect, that did not conform to what he'd decided was the true type of Russian. Most of all, he persecuted, all over again, the Jews.

You know one of the undying legends about European immigrants to America is that they were always poor – correct, industrious – they'd better be, idealistic – well, burning to make a better life in the land of the free. It's also true, and not part of the romantic legend, that America received from many countries many ne'er-do-wells and escaped convicts and, especially from Eastern and Central Europe, hoards of young men dodging the approaching nightmare of compulsory military service.

I'm thinking of one in particular. And if America has a single cause to be grateful for even the existence of Alexander III, this man is it.

His name was Morris. I'm not sure that was his original first Russian name but Morris Gershowitz. In 1890, he'd arrived at the age of 18 and the next knock on the door would be that of the recruiting sergeant. So he borrowed enough money to get himself a steerage passage across the Atlantic, maybe a fake identity card, made a bundle of his few possessions and managed to steal out of the city, his native St Petersburg, and be on his way.

All he had to pin his hopes on in the New World was an uncle who'd gone before and lived somewhere in New York City. Anyway, Mr Gershowitz got through immigration and kept his name. The Irish inspectors often had trouble with European names and half the time they would have the immigrant pronounce it, "Say it again! What? Jonanberg? Listen sonny, you're Sonenberg from now on!"

That happened to an old close friend of mine who did indeed fulfil the legendary tale by arriving with his mother in a shawl and a sister speechless in English, who came in time, however, like the Kitsises, to acquire a large house with, not 22 rooms, but 37 rooms this time.

So here we are in 1890, young Mr Gershowitz, sleeping somewhere among the tenements, tramped off the first morning looking for his uncle. He knew four words of English, "Please, Mr Greenstein, tailor", a reconnaissance expedition about as promising as starting through London looking for Mr Robinson, the carpenter.

Mr Gershowitz had one great advantage. He spoke no English. He soon learned the places, the sections of town to go where people spoke Yiddish. And then he narrowed it down to the slums where they spoke Yiddish and Russian. At nightfall, on the second day, he found Uncle Greenstein, and started to learn from him something about shoe making.

Three years later he married an immigrant Russian girl. They had children, two boys and a girl, and Morris Gershowitz wasn't making enough to keep them. He went after other jobs. A newsstand, a cigar store, small restaurant, another Turkish bath, a pool, billiards parlour.

Failing and desperate, he went down to the Russian settlement at Brighton Beach for what his sons later called "three exciting but disastrous weeks as a bookie". The sons later figured that through all these jobs, and while they were in their teens, the family lived briefly in 25 different flats.

Finally, at the ripe age of about 22, Morris Gershowitz came home to port. He became good enough at making the uppers for women's shoes to earn the dazzling sum, for him, of $35 a week. On that, the family could settle. And Mrs Gershowitz was proud to say she could afford a maid, and around 1911, an amenity all respectable people, all but the very poor, could exhibit in their front room or parlour. An upright piano.

The elder boy, an indoor bookish type, was set to piano lessons and didn't take to them. The younger boy, a roller-skating, looking-for-a-fight street kid from the start whirled the piano stool into the correct position for a nipper, climbed aboard and rattled off a popular song, to his brother's astonishment.

It seems the little fella had been taken with a friend's pianola and fooled around and discovered a beginning talent. He'd always pretended that music was sissy stuff and he kept almost as a shameful secret the fact that at the age of six he'd been struck dumb, standing in a penny arcade, hearing an automatic piano playing Rubinstein's Melody in F.

Within a year or two, by the time he was 14, he was restless with school lessons. Gave it up, took a job as a song plugger in a song publisher's shop. He started to compose and proudly offered one of his own songs. The boss put an end to that by telling him "You're paid, George, to play the piano only".

Well, you'll have guessed by now, that that was the beginning of the emergence of a talent for song writing that of all those famous talents in the golden age of American song writing, from Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Ray Henderson and the rest, I'm talking about the one that has endured and does not seem to dim in the ears of succeeding generations.

I ought to have said before now that the Gershowitz's got into a neighbourhood, Italian, I believe, that didn't do very well with the name. Mr Gershowitz became Mr Gershvin. Then his neighbours had trouble with the v and it was young George who opted for George Gershwin.

Young Gershwin eventually found an obsessed piano teacher who drilled the boy in the standard piano classics, also imbued in him a fondness for Debussy and Ravel. For a brief time, George fought two conflicting impulses – to become a concert pianist and to do something of his own with the stuff he heard all around him, the emerging popular music that had grown out of ragtime into what people called jazz.

It's impossible, for me at any rate, to distil what is unique about Gershwin in talk, without music. I should be playing you one, or all five, of the radio series I did 11 years ago to mark the 50th anniversary of Gershwin's death at the age of 38.

His songs are not, perhaps, as sheerly sing-able as Irving Berlin's, nor does he have Richard Rodgers' jetting melody, but a gift for poignancy, putting a jaunty tune in a minor key, intruding modulations of pathos into the sunniest melodies.

If you want to hear the essence of Gershwin, I recommend you listen to Julie London, Dinah Shore, Fred Astaire. Most of all to Ella Fitzgerald at her peak, in the late '50s, in her glorious album called The Gershwin Songbook, with the marvellous orchestrations of a man who knew what Gershwin was all about, Nelson Riddle.

A year or two ago, a now-famous contemporary songwriter who at the moment is greatly fancied by the intelligentsia, especially in Europe, made the majestic pronouncement, "We have gone beyond melody”.

Thank goodness he wasn't born a little earlier and infected George Gershwin with the idea so that he, too, might have decided to write 12-tone songs, instead of becoming, as he did, the American Schubert.

Or better, America's Gershwin, son of Morris Gershowitz, born 100 years ago this Saturday, 26 September, 1898.

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