Musical Ambassador. - Review - book review

Judaism, Summer, 2000 by Harriet Spiegel

Isaac Stern: My First 79 Years. Written with CHAIM POTOK. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999

How does one capture in words a life of passionate commitment to music? Apparently it is not an easy assignment, even with the help of a professional writer. Isaac Stern: My First 79 Years is at its best where words serve well: describing a long and impressive public commitment to music-its teaching, performance, and friendships-to Israel, and to a life of service as cultural ambassador to the world. Stem's campaign to save Carnegie Hall, his championing of young musicians, and his staggering itinerary both in miles traveled and concerts performed, are well documented, and are accompanied by a rich treasury of photographs. Yet Stem's voice often lacks the persuasive confidence he articulates as necessary for a solo artist: "You can't walk on-stage and say to the public, 'Excuse me, I'm here.' You must believe in yourself and make immediately clear to everyone, 'I'm going to play. Listen!'" (3). The book too rarely compels us to stop and listen.

At ten months of age, Stem arrives with his family in San Francisco from Russia. While keeping their Russian culture ("you can take a Russian out of Russia but you can never take Russia out of a Russian" [8]), Stern's family did not keep a Jewish home--"no challah, Friday night candles or prayers." Stern's family speaks both Russian and English at home; Stern's Russian will later prove useful in his travels to the Soviet Union and, to his surprise, China. While he notes that "Religion played no part in my family's life" (8), as a young child Stern was nevertheless sent to Hebrew school where he quickly learned to read Hebrew but "understood not a single word" (11). By age ten Stern was already a young star; at 15 he gave his debut recital. Age 15 also marks the termination of formal schooling; he never attended high school or college.

This first chapter, on Stern's childhood, is disappointing. While 70 years may be a long way to think back, Stern displays a vivid memory for some things San Francisco: Golden Gate Park, the Golden Gate Theater on Market Street, and a "fabulous ice cream parlor" on the corner of Union and Van Ness. His family, however, gets mysteriously short shrift. His father "Solomon, a dour man... born in Kiev" and his mother, Clara, from Kreminiecz on the Russian-Polish border, never come to life in the book. Even more puzzling is Stern's report, with no retrospective assessment, of his mother's travel to New York City to set up an apartment when Stem is only eleven so he can study violin, leaving behind, in San Francisco, his father and sister. To a family with limited financial means, this must have been a considerable sacrifice, yet it passes almost undiscussed. Later, the family makes many trips from coast to coast, eventually leaving other family members and their Russian immigrant community, to settle in New York City for the sake of their son. For readers who expected a classic story of an immigrant Jewish prodigy overcoming humble origins at great personal sacrifice to become a star, this is not the book. Nor does Stem ever convey much awareness of his parents' lives. Of his family's final move to New York (1944), Stern notes only: "My parents and sister had decided to move permanently from San Francisco to New York. They settled into an apartment in Manhattan... and I moved in with them" (45-46). And later, when Stern and his first wife, Nora, move into the apartment, he notes only: "My mother had moved to another apartment some weeks before" (75). Almost all we know of Stern's relationship with his father is more about Stern himself: "We became very close during his last years. When I began to succeed, there was no one more proud of me, though he would never say it, never show it. But he would carefully take my music and put it into marked folders, sew them together, and place them neatly in a drawer so I could ea sily find whatever I needed. He had been present at my 1944 success in Carnegie Hall, and he knew then that I would make it as a solo performer. I only wish he had lived five or ten years longer; he would have enjoyed my career as no one else could have" (52).

However, it may be best to see this book not as conventional autobiography but as testimony to "a passion for music--how it was brought to realization in me, and my lifelong effort to share it with others" (5), and that is the book's major appeal. Accordingly, he portrays his friends in the musical world dazzlingly (he seems to have no enemies; he never mentions fierce or mean competitiveness), a tribute to his own gregarious and generous personality. Portraits of musicians are offered with an intimate and loving eye to detail. Leonard Bernstein:

He had one of the greatest minds I've ever known, intelligent, curious, involved, almost frightening in its brilliance. It was a mind that absorbed ideas from all sides, like a sponge. He'd received a rigorous education: Talmud from his father, a general education at Boston Latin School, then Harvard. He was virtually Serge Koussevitzky's adopted child. "Lenoushka," Koussevitzky called him. He once gave Lenny a pair of cuff links, and Lenny wore them at every concert. Just before coming on-stage, he'd kiss the cuff links and say a brief prayer. He couldn't go out on-stage without those cuff links and that prayer. (54)