My First 79 Years - Hardcover

Stern, Isaac; Potok, Chaim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679451307 ISBN 13: 9780679451303

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

For sixty-four years, Isaac Stern has been a great--and greatly loved--performing artist, famous for his profound music-making, his gusto for life, his passionate dedication to sharing his knowledge and wisdom with younger musicians, and his determination in a good cause (Stern is, after all, The Man Who Saved Carnegie Hall). Indeed, there is no more revered musician in the world than Isaac Stern, revered not only as a great violinist but as a warm and generous personality and as a crucial figure and spokesperson in the world of the arts.

Brought to America from Russia when he was ten months old, Stern grew up in San Francisco and was quickly recognized as an extraordinary talent. He began performing publicly while still very young, and was soon touring across the country and around the world. His fame escalated when he led the fight to save Carnegie Hall, and again when he was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary film From Mao to Mozart.

In this book he shares with us both his personal and his artistic experiences: the story of his rise to eminence; his feelings about music and the violin; his rich emotional life; his great friendships and collaborations with colleagues such as Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Casals; his background as an ardent supporter of Israel; his ideas and beliefs about art, life, love, and the world we live in.

At seventy-nine, Stern's mind, his wit, and his spirit are as strong as ever, and they are conveyed to us in the most sympathetic and articulate way by Chaim Potok. The two men spent a year talking and sharing their perceptions, and the result is a book in which Stern's voice comes through with complete conviction and persuasiveness. The man on the page is
the musician and humanitarian we have loved and admired for so long. Here is the most readable and revealing musical autobiography of the decade.

About this title

About the Author

Isaac Stern is one of the most celebrated violinists of the century. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Linda, and Gracie, the cat.

Chaim Potok is an ordained rabbi and has written many best-selling books, including The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev. He lives in Pennsylvania.

From the Inside Flap

ur years, Isaac Stern has been a great--and greatly loved--performing artist, famous for his profound music-making, his gusto for life, his passionate dedication to sharing his knowledge and wisdom with younger musicians, and his determination in a good cause (Stern is, after all, The Man Who Saved Carnegie Hall). Indeed, there is no more revered musician in the world than Isaac Stern, revered not only as a great violinist but as a warm and generous personality and as a crucial figure and spokesperson in the world of the arts.<br><br>Brought to America from Russia when he was ten months old, Stern grew up in San Francisco and was quickly recognized as an extraordinary talent. He began performing publicly while still very young, and was soon touring across the country and around the world. His fame escalated when he led the fight to save Carnegie Hall, and again when he was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary film <i>From Mao to Mozart</i>.<br><br>In this book he shar

Reviews

As one might expect, the more engaging elements in this autobiography occur when Stern, world-renowned violinist (or as he would have it, "fiddler") and music education activist, discusses playingAand not just his own. Stern seems most excited when discussing performances by others (mainly classical musicians and conductors), including Naoum Blinder, Pierre Monteux and Leonard Bernstein. The virtuoso also details his childhood and formal training: Stern, it seems, had very little of either. Born and raised by middle-class Russian-Ukrainian immigrant parents in San Francisco, Stern credits his interest in the violin to a childhood friend: "My friend Nathan Koblick was playing the violin; therefore, I wanted to play the violin." Rather than bloat his talent or sense of destiny, Stern is given to frank statements such as, "It seems I may have been the first American violinist to do a tour of the major Soviet cities." Coauthor Potok's (The Promise) narrative touch is clear; instead of technical jargon, classical pieces are described through setting and emotion. Occasionally, lifeless passages diminish substanceAe.g., long transcriptions of personal tapes Stern sent his family while out on the road; and there are windy clich?s: on meeting President Kennedy, Stern writes, "I felt as though I were inside a golden coach drawn by four pure-bred white horses into the glitter of mythic Camelot." But after three marriages, four kids and a 60-plus-year career that spans playing in Carnegie Hall to saving it from demolition, to touring the world dozens of times over, a man is entitled to a few clich?s. Photos. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Born in Russia but an immigrant almost immediately thereafter, Stern is arguably the greatest American-bred violinist. He grew up in San Francisco, which he recalls as culturally rich in the '20s and '30s, though when your violin teacher is concertmaster of the city's orchestra, and you play chamber music with him and his orchestral cronies, of course it is. After a less-than-earthshaking New York Town Hall debut at 17, Stern went home and trained his "hands and fingers to recognize what they were doing and what they were supposed to feel like while they were doing it." His second Town Hall appearance two years later launched his career. He has been around the world, seemingly constantly, since, playing in every major and most minor venues, except in Germany and Austria, which he crossed off his list after the Holocaust was exposed. Although raised in a religiously nonobservant family, he became a champion of Israel and thereafter a busy cultural ambassador, touring the Soviet Union early in the cold war era and China as it was opening up to the U.S. Meanwhile, he spearheaded the 1970s campaign to save Carnegie Hall. All those experiences and the encounters with the panoply of famous people they entailed seem to be noticed in an as-told-to autobiography that benefits immensely from having esteemed novelist Potok as its transcriber. Like many a star performer's memoir, Stern's turns into a choppy recital of concerts and other appearances after the first few chapters. But Potok makes it flow beautifully, in a voice that is vital and exciting as well as excited, never more so than when it is talking about music performance and performers. Ray Olson

Stern has packed several lifetimes of accomplishments into his first 79 years, and they make for fascinating reading. With his beloved Guarnerius safely in hand, he delighted audiences around the world, performing before heads of state, regular concert audiences, and patients in Israeli hospitals. The stories of these experiences range from humorous to deeply moving and reveal Stern to be a generous, talented, and comfortingly human personality. His colleagues over the years read like a musical Who's WhoALeonard Bernstein, Pablo Caasals, and a host of others too numerous to mention. Warm reminiscences of friendships and professional associations with impresario Sol Hurok and accompanist Alexander Zakin are woven throughout, alongside stories about Carnegie Hall. (Stern didn't just perform there throughout his careerAhe was also a pivotal figure in saving it from the wrecker's ball.) His story flows engagingly with an approach that is candid yet gracious. Written with award-winning novelist Potok, this is a sensitive and engrossing history of a man and an era. Recommended for all libraries, especially those with strong music and art collections.ACarol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Early one October morning in 1937 I boarded a double-decker bus at 72nd Street in Manhattan and disappeared. I was seventeen years old.

For the next six hours, no one knew where I was: not my mother, whom I had left at our apartment without informing her that I was going out, nor our friends. The bus traveled up and down the length of Manhattan, from Washington Square to Washington Heights and back again, and I rode and rode, entirely unaware of what I was doing.

I sat on the top deck, gazing out at the streets but not taking in what my eyes were seeing. I had to face a critical moment in my life, and I needed to be alone. My head was filled with the reviews of my debut performance at Town Hall on the evening of October 10. The reviews, I thought, were disastrous.

One critic, writing that I had "sailed into Tartini's 'Devil's Trill' Sonata with the greatest aplomb, revealing a big, beautiful tone of the G string and a pleasant one on the others," added a tart comment about my "generally erratic understanding of the structure and the musical content of the ancient and honorable composition." About my playing of the Glazunov Concerto in G Minor, that same critic wrote that "the work brought no new elements from the violinist's equipment to the surface" and alluded to "a few technical smears."

Another critic began his review with these condescending words: "From that far away land of violinistic prodigies, movie 'yes-men' and sunshine, California, there comes yet another violinist"; and then went on to mention, as if in passing, that I had "definite possibilities." A third wrote, "His tone is good, especially in the lower part of the scale," but added, concerning my technique, "it can scarcely be called transcendent."

I remember yet another critic mentioning that violinists seemed to be "as prevalent in California as oranges," and while conceding that "his talent is indubitable," nevertheless concluded that "one was not wholly convinced that he has actually traversed the Great Divide that separates the promising player from the artist."

I had hoped that my Town Hall debut would be the moment of breakthrough for me, the beginning of a career as a solo concert violinist. Instead, the New York critics were telling me to go home and practice some more, to learn how to ride the horse better. And, riding that bus, I was asking myself repeatedly: Should I keep on trying to become a concert violinist, or should I take one of the many jobs I had been offered by symphony orchestras in New York for more money than I had ever dreamed of making, money that would have meant security for my family?

The hours went by. I didn't know it at the time, but there was a huge panic developing over my disappearance. My mother was telephoning friends to find out where I was. She called the concert manager's office and was beginning to consider calling the police.

In the meantime, I was riding back and forth, trying to decide. My mind was churning. I sat there, letting it churn.

I had come for that Town Hall performance from San Francisco, where I grew up and still lived with my parents and my younger sister, Eva. My father, Solomon -- a dour man, then in his mid-forties -- was born in Kiev. There are pictures of him as a dashing young man with a goatee, wearing high boots and an open silk shirt and holding an easel and a paintbrush. He came from the upper-middle class, as did my mother, Clara, who was seven years younger than he. Her birthplace was Kreminiecz, a town on the Russian-Polish border. My parents told me that they and their families, who had been there for at least a generation or two, always considered the town Russian. And during the week of my birth, my mother had received a scholarship to study singing at the conservatory in St. Petersburg, which was then headed by the famous composer Alexander Glazunov. In order to study in St. Petersburg at that time, she'd had to wear a yellow star, a rule for Jews living outside what was called the Pale. During the turbulent years of 1918-1920, following the Bolshevik Revolution, Kreminiecz changed hands about every two weeks. I was born there on July 21, 1920. It was the Polish two-week period.

In the midst of the Russian Civil War and shortly after the failed Bolshevik invasion of Poland, my father obtained a Polish passport and a visa to the United States. The passport showed his profession to be artist-painter, and his domicile Kreminiecz. After months of travel through Siberia and across the Pacific, we arrived in San Francisco, where my mother's older brother had settled some years before. I was ten months old.

My parents' language was Russian; neither spoke English. They knew a little Yiddish, but it was not a language we used in the house. It's a very expressive language, with many untranslatable phrases, and my parents would use it only to heighten or color certain comments. There was no hint, in anything my parents said, of their having lived anything remotely resembling a traditional Jewish life in Kreminiecz.

I doubt that my father ever had a bar mitzvah, and he felt no inclination to insist that I should, so I didn't. The traditional Jewish home -- challah every Friday night, candles, prayers -- did not exist for us. Religion played no part in my family's life.

Politics, yes -- we were refugees from Russia. My parents were well educated, and naturally liberal. I was impressed then, and still am, by the truth that you can take a Russian out of Russia but you can never take Russia out of a Russian. My parents had nothing to do with Soviet life or the Communist cause. There were long political discussions between them and with other Russian émigrés; they were part of a large group of people to whom everything Russian was familiar and necessary.

My father wasn't trained in a profession. As an artist of sorts, he knew a little bit about paints, so he became a house painter and was quite ill in later life with lead poisoning. He loved stewed prunes and hot chocolate, and he drank coffee; no, he drank sugar with a touch of coffee in it. A normal breakfast for him consisted of eggs, sausage, hotcakes, cheeses -- which might have contributed to the ulcers he developed. During the Depression years, he started going from house to house, selling MJB coffee. Occasionally during the worst times of the Depression, when we didn't have enough money for food, we received the day's version of food stamps: boxes of cans without labels, whose contents we never knew until we opened them.

We moved a number of times during our early years in San Francisco. The two houses I remember best were the Buchanan Street house and the one at 383 29th Avenue. The house on Buchanan Street had a long series of steps that went up to the front door; it was situated on one of those typically steep San Francisco hills that always scare anyone who has never lived in a city like that. The 29th Avenue house, pale yellow or dirty white, was located in the Sunset district, about five blocks from the bay, and two or three miles from the Pacific Ocean and the beach, where there was a seal house and seal rocks and an enormous building, Fleischaker Pool, that had three or four pools, some with salt water and some heated -- quite an exciting structure and for many years a great meeting place. Nearby was the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the 1915 World's Fair.

That was the normal topography of my life. As a child, I would go with my parents and sister, and with cousins and uncles and aunts, for Sunday picnics in Golden Gate Park, one of the largest and most beautiful urban parks in the country, and I remember all our drives through it. There was the area for buffalo, and the large aquarium, and a Japanese teahouse and garden with its little bridges, and Kezar Stadium, home of the San Francisco Seals, the double-A farm team of the New York Yankees, where Joe DiMaggio and Dom DiMaggio played and were trained by the famous batting coach Lefty O'Doul. I saw my first football games in that stadium. The city was also the cultural center of California, for everything except movies. There were theaters, the Geary and the Curran, and the Opera House and the Veterans Auditorium, a huge public library, and beautiful stores . In those days, no lady went downtown without wearing a hat and white gloves. There were few high-rise buildings. To this day, I remember the sound of the foghorn and the rich sea scent of the fog as it rolled into the Bay Area from the Pacific. There were only ferries then to take you across the bay to Oakland and the trains, and to Marin County. The ferries left from the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, the dock area, where all the ships came in and were loaded and unloaded. In Chinatown, the largest in the world outside China, the street signs were all in Chinese; the district had its own telephone central, in Chinese. The Fillmore area, thick with drugs and rock music during the sixties, was the Jewish shopping district when I lived in San Francisco. There were stores where you bought herring and pickles and lox and rye bread. Fillmore and Divisadero Streets were like the lower East Side in New York. That was the world I grew up in.

I remember that my mother sometimes sang and my father played the piano. When I was six, I started piano lessons, shortly before my sister, Eva, was born. At that time, we were living on a street about three blocks from the northern side of Golden Gate Park. Across the street from us lived a family named Koblick, with whom my parents were friendly. They had a son named Nathan. When I was eight years old, Nathan was already playing the violin.

I've often said that I didn't return home from a concert one day and plead for a violin. Nor did I begin, at the age of five or six, to pick out melodies on the piano. None of that; nothing so mysterious, so romantic. My friend Nathan Koblick was playing the violin; therefore I wanted to play the violin. I can't recall what Nathan loo...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679451307
• ISBN 13: 9780679451303
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336