Love Will Find A Way–Indifference Will Find An Excuse
Ukrainian Proverb
Once Upon A Time In America
With a Grandfather who immigrated from Kyiv, Ukraine, I’ve ever been immersed in the history of the centuries of cruelty and genocide by Russia upon this exquisite and little understood nation. My focused attentions include detailed investigations into the decades-long debacle of the monstrous Chernobyl global nuclear catastrophe—you do know you have strontium atoms from Chernobyl’s reactor core in your bones, yes?—as well as the Soviet murderous, empiricidal illegal war in Afghanistan, where I’m a devout student of resistance General Ahmad Shah Massoud, the forever legendary Lion Of Panjshir, an almost superhuman strategist, leader and fighter even greater than Ho Chi Minh and Che who would cunningly bedevil the Russians all day and read poetry by dim lamplight in his tent by night.
Massoud a few may recall was conveniently assassinated on 10 September 2001 by a member of a film crew with a bomb vest. Seems someone knew the yet-to-be-attacked Americans would need big help with a somehow already-guaranteed invasion response in the coming fortnights.
The Art Of War
As a young man I also studied warfare and warcraft with a West Point graduate and historian, which beget a lifelong interest in all aspects of war, including intelligence, spy craft and statecraft, and this includes over a decade in particular study of Vladimir Putin, especially the wholly engrossing masterwork by Fiona Hill.
So, naturally current events are a Story of Stories of Stories for me and I’ve been superglued to the television, military journals and other sources for weeks, and then of course nothing short of wall-to-wall media since late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning when I caught Putin’s seemingly and perhaps intentionally unhinged speech and the immediate aftermath of what was supposed to be a surprise “shock and awe” style blitzkrieg but was foiled by an ingenious American strategy of publicizing their best intelligence and slowing him down by at least a month, which was beautiful fuel to all things Insurgency & Resistance.
Yes, and goodness gracious have the Ukrainians proved yet again their soaring courage, humanity, mettle and moxie. Awe-inspiring freedom-loving people of highest culture and hardest times. While Russia now bans social media and their state television blares donald trump and his pathetic tool mike pompeo praising Putin as a genius for the invasion, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy—whom trump criminally extorted for congressionally-mandated arms aid—has refused U.S. offers for safe harbor in exile, donned military gear, and shot video from the hallowed streets of Kiev looking calm, loving and resolute.
Would that anywhere in the west feature so true a leader.
My people.
Across The Sea
Along those lines, I observe a lot of foreign coverage as well as domestic, and the one grand omission by all is a failure to note the emigrations from Ukraine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries common era. The Russian genocide pograms against Jewish people—entirely trumped up by false accusations of Jewish involvement in the assassination of a czar—led to waves of urgent fleeing across the land and across the sea into total unknown.
Many of these people went on to profound success in America, virtually founding or dominating the film and music businesses for example, or for those more hardscrabble, forming Jewish mafias equally ruthless, brutal and effective as any other, only without a Coppola masterwork to enshrine them in popular consciousness.
Yet here we are in a time of rampant ethnic obsession, massive hyper-diagnosis of and fixation on “trauma,” and racial hypersensitivity and hyperbole anywhere we turn–verging on or in psychological contagion—but in this most epochal and consequential event, not a soul has noted the plight of the Ukrainians who fled mass slaughter from the far end of Europe with the clothes on their backs and babes in arms, worked their ways to ships in the west, crossed the Atlantic in steerage, were processed in pens and quarantine cells on Ellis Island by the thousands, and summarily dumped into wretched tenements on the rat-infested Lower East Side of Manhattan to struggle disliked, denigrated and downtrodden for a handful pennies a day.
My Grandather, who on top of the pograms that threatened his life had contracted tuberculosis in a Kyiv hat factory—friends down the decades might note my own habit to haberdashery, particularly of the milliner variety—and was thus forced to work outdoors, however in the world he got through Ellis Island with that condition. This took his employment prospects from near zero to near minus zero. He was one of nine siblings and so together they scraped enough pennies to buy one cow, whom they milked by hand and fed by cutting wheat by hand with a scythe.
In eventual time, The Feins Dairy was founded, grew, prospered locally, and an American Dream was manifest.
Soldiers Of Fortune
This week in between much deep weeping in front of the plasma screen—and indeed a yet serious pondering of the prospect to enter the country through Poland and serve as a solider of fortune for my paternal homeland—one of those old Ukrainian immigrants came to mind, the songster of songsters of all time America: Mr. Irving Berlin.
Irving Berlin was born Israel Beilin, hailed from Imperial Russia to a family north of Kyiv in1888, and was merely five years old when he arrived at Ellis Island in the United States where he was placed in a pen with his siblings and others until immigration officials decided they could enter the country.
After arrival, the name “Beilin” was changed to “Baline.” As an adult Berlin noted no memories of his first five years in Russia except for one: “Lying on a blanket by the side of a road, watching his house burn to the ground. By daylight the house was in ashes.” Even as a young adult, Berlin was unaware of being raised in abject poverty since he knew no other way.
The Berlins were one of hundreds of thousands of Jewish families who emigrated to the United States at that time, escaping discrimination, poverty and brutal pogroms. Other such families included those of George and Ira Gershwin, Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, L. Wolfe Gilbert, Jack Yellen, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, and the Warner brothers. Just a few of later famous Ukrainian Americans include Vladimir Horowtiz, Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, Mel Brooks, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Herbie Mann, Barbara Streisand, Dustin Hoffman, Sylvester Stallone, David Copperfield, Leonard Nimoy, Jack Palance, Paul Muni, Andy Warhol, Steven Tyler, Johnny Bucyk, Wayne Gretzky, Chuck Wepner, Wilhelm Reich, Noam Chomsky, Philip Roth, David O. Selznick, Billy Wilder, Norman Lear, Lee Strasburg, Milton Friedman, Paul Wellstone, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Abraham Zapruder.
I once landed a flash gig to lead a French film crew on a gonzo journey through the west to interview American authors and in Berkeley our subject was a notable historian, one of whose subjects was Ukraine. When I related my origin story, he shook his head and pronounced, “We’re everywhere.“
A Star Is Born
When “Izzy” Berlin began to sell newspapers in the Bowery to help support his family, he was first exposed to the ranging music and sounds coming from saloons and restaurants that lined the crowded streets. What a dazzling galaxy of sonic wonder that had to be. Before Berlin was fourteen, however, his meager income was still adding less than his sisters’ to the family’s budget, which made him feel ashamed and worthless. In fact, he was once knocked over by a crane into the river and literally was on his way down for the third time to drown before he was finally saved—still clutching the five pennies he’d earned that day.
Berlin then decided to leave home and join the city’s ragtag army of other young, hungry immigrants. He lived in the Bowery—anyone remember what horror that was back when?—taking up residence in one of the lodging houses that sheltered the thousands of other homeless boys in the Lower East Side, who were described as “Dickensian in their meanness, filth, and insensitivity to ordinary human beings.”
Berlin learned piano in a bar after hours, knowing no music and only the key of F# at first, and began playing cover songs, but modifying the rhythms that he felt were “boggy.” His first hit was the mammoth “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911, which sparked an international dance craze in places as faraway as Berlin’s native Russia, which reportedly “flung itself into the ragtime beat with an abandon bordering on mania.” The tune was still an enormous hit a year later and a feature of the legendary ultra-heroic band that played on deck to calm souls until the very last possible moment as The Titanic sank.
Over the years Berlin was known for writing music and lyrics in the American vernacular: uncomplicated, simple and direct, with his stated aim being to “reach the heart of the average American” whom he saw as the “real soul of the country.”
Berlin wrote the story of our country, capturing the best of us and our dreams like no other songwriter. Even Cole Porter saluted him as the king.
Many songs became popular themes and anthems including “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Easter Parade,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “White Christmas,” “Happy Holiday,” “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” His Broadway musical and 1943 film This Is The Army with Ronald Reagan had Kate Smith singing Berlin’s “God Bless America” first performed in 1938 and that continues to this day as a most enduring anthemic classic, frequently preferred to “The Star Spangled Banner” by those who find the latter far too full of rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air among other heinous war imagery to be a national heirloom song.
On The Level
Berlin was my fellow Freemason, a member of Munn Lodge no. 190, New York City, and my fellow member of the Scottish Rite, in his case Valley of New York City, where I was born.
As with all Masons, Berlin was a staunch advocate of civil rights, which led to his investigation for many years by notorious attack beast J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. Berlin’s “Supper Time,” for example, now seemingly completely forgotten, is as simple and searing a depiction of the ravages of racial violence as has ever been written and accomplishes far more in a few expert short images and lines than many entire artist catalogues and even entire genres have been able to muster.
Many days my favorite of his is “Blue Skies,” as gorgeous and uplifting as they come, but with my Ukraine background—and late night proclivity to the more heartrending than the popular—a secret favorite has always been “Russian Lullaby.” Years ago in another life I gave it a half-hearted attempt but was vexed by the arrangement for some reason and let it go. This week the song swiftly arose in my consciousness and I reached for my National Steel guitar that has been Rig #1 of favor of late. Got a version going but even with the sound just fine somehow the steel seemed just a touch alien for this one. I went to a Gibson ES 330 hollow body in a stunning and rare cobalt blue—aka ”Lady Azul”—and while the tone and sustain was favorable, the fact is sometimes–oftentimes—putting electricity into things is Wrong.
So I pulled out a ravishingly handsome and regal Cordoba classical guitar that I’ve never really become rightly conversational with. Steel string is my language, but I do love the nylon too any old time I give it a chance, and even abandoned steel for a year upon purchase of my first classical axe. Prolly too much shoptalk, so herewith is a version of Irving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby,” my first full workup on the Cordoba. Please forgive the vocals. I have a face for radio and voice for the page.
Russian Lullaby—Glory To Ukraine
This of course goes out to The People Of Ukraine.
Glory To Ukraine.
May this little song remind you of the far, far deeper humanity, story, and everlasting influence of these people and their legacy in this perfidiously darkening passage of the still sacred and yet cherished American Dream.
❏