The Gershwin Family

Understanding the Gershwins begins with reading their name. The onomastics of Eastern European Jewry rests on a simple principle: the surname preserves, frozen in time, the memory of an ancestor. Gershowitz designates the descendants of a man named Gershon or Hersh, a name borne since biblical antiquity in memory of Gershon, eldest of Levi and root of one of the great Levitical families entrusted with the service of the sanctuary. The name itself, in Hebrew, evokes the stranger passing through: ger sham, "a stranger there," according to the etymology that the biblical text attributes to Moses naming his own son Gershom. There is an irony of history in this: a name that signifies exile and sojourn in foreign lands was destined to fall to a family whose fate was precisely one of migration and rooting in new soil.

The great works of Jewish onomastics establish that patronymic suffixes in -ovitch dominate in the provinces of the Russian Empire, while the Judeo-German provinces favored other formations [Dictionaries of Jewish Surnames in Eastern Europe and Judeo-German, Beider–Menk, Avotaynu]. The form Gershowitz, with this Germanized -witz, testifies to an area of circulation between the Slavic world and the Yiddish-speaking world. In this scrupulous attention to the transmitted name is read a discreet yet essential virtue of the Jewish tradition: fidelity to the memory of fathers, refusal of forgetting, the conviction that a name is a deposit and not merely a label. Judaism has made transmission — masorah — a cornerstone; the Gershwitzs, in bearing the name of a Levitical ancestor, inscribed themselves unknowingly in this long chain of remembrance.

The earliest documented generation of the lineage is that of Jakov (Yakov) Gershowitz, paternal grandfather of George. According to concordant biographical records, Jakov Gershowitz was born in Odessa and served twenty-five years as a mechanic in the Russian imperial army in order to acquire the right of free movement and residence as a Jew, before retiring near Saint Petersburg. This detail, seemingly anecdotal, condenses the entire condition of Jews in tsarist Russia. Most Jews of the Empire were confined to the "Pale of Settlement," forbidden residence in the capitals. To escape it, one had to belong to privileged categories: merchants of the first guild, skilled artisans, degree holders — or soldiers who had completed long military service. Jakov's quarter-century in uniform was the price of freedom of movement, and one can measure there what Jewish dignity cost in a State that trafficked in it.

It is in Saint Petersburg that the next generation comes together. Moishe (Morris) Gershowitz, son of Jakov, encounters Rose (Roza) Bruskin, daughter of a furrier. Moishe Gershowitz, whom she had known in Saint Petersburg, married Rosa Bruskin on July 21, 1895 in New York — for in the meantime, both had crossed the Atlantic. This family's relationship to the army and the tsarist State is not insignificant: where military service was, for so many Jews, synonymous with harassment and forced conversion, it became for Jakov the paradoxical instrument of partial emancipation. This capacity to turn constraint into a margin of freedom is part of a survival intelligence that the collective memory of Israel has cultivated throughout its successive diasporas.

The family's emigration was part of the great wave that, between 1881 and 1914, drove nearly two million Eastern European Jews toward American shores, fleeing pogroms, numerus clausus, and destitution. Genealogical sources fix Moishe's arrival: he reached New York on August 14, 1890, and married Rose Bruskin on July 21, 1895. The couple, united in New York but formed in Saint Petersburg, illustrates these journeys where the old world and the new are stitched back together: they found each other in Manhattan to seal a union sketched on the banks of the Neva.

The Americanization of the name kept pace with integration. The couple was naturalized as American citizens on January 15, 1898, under the surname Gershwine, which eventually became Gershwin. This graphic shift—Gershowitz, Gershvin, Gershwine, Gershwin—is not betrayal but adaptation: each spelling is a layer of the migratory journey. The eldest, named Israël, was born under the name Israel Gershowitz; their parents, Morris (Moishe) and Rose, Russified and then Anglicized the name to Gershvin well before their sons attained fame. In the 1900 census, the spelling still faltered: a certain "Isidore Grsheven," aged 3, appears there as the son of "Morris Grsheven" in Brooklyn. This modest family—Moishe was successively a restaurateur, bathhouse keeper, and owner of businesses that he changed with the fortunes of fate—embodied the industrious energy of immigration, that hishtadlut, that human effort which Jewish tradition holds as the duty of man faced with uncertainty.

From the union of Moishe and Rose were born four children, of whom American memory retained above all the two eldest. Rose was the mother of Ira, George, Arthur and Frances Gershwin. The eldest, Ira, born Israel Gershowitz, was the eldest of four children; his parents, Morris and Rose Gershovitz, were Russian Jews who came to the United States, and his brother and sister were George, Arthur and Frances. George, whose real name was Jacob, came into the world in Brooklyn: George Gershwin was named Jacob Gershowitz at his birth, in Brooklyn, on September 26, 1898.

The household was not particularly inclined toward religion practiced with rigor; it was an immigrant home more concerned with social advancement than with scrupulous observance. But Jewishness was a cultural fact of life there, a second language of the soul: Yiddish at home, the music of the synagogue within earshot, the acute awareness of belonging to a people. It is from this matrix — secularized but permeated — that the work would spring. Ira, the thoughtful and learned eldest, would become the lyricist; George, the turbulent younger brother who discovers the piano bought first for his brother, would become the composer. The complementarity of the two brothers, one wielding the word, the other melody, replayed in its own way an ancient Jewish ideal: the alliance of speech and song, of text and its musical setting, which has structured the liturgy since the Psalms.

It is with George that the lineage enters the universal. A self-taught composer who became one of the greatest names in American music, he achieved an unprecedented fusion between European classical music, African-American jazz, and a melodic sensibility in which musicologists have often recognized the inflection of synagogal cantillation and the modes of Jewish liturgy. Rhapsody in Blue (1924), with its opening clarinet rising in glissando, and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935), a monument born from the encounter between a Jewish composer and the Black world of the Carolinas, remain his flagship works [existing notice].

The gesture of Porgy and Bess deserves our attention. In choosing to bring to the operatic stage the life of a poor Black community, in immersing himself for a summer in the songs of the Gullah to capture their truth, George Gershwin accomplished an act of recognition of the other. The son of Jewish immigrants, himself descended from a people long despised, he extended his hand to another oppressed people — not out of condescension but out of a profound intuition of solidarity among the excluded. There is here, transposed into artistic creation, the echo of a cardinal commandment of the Torah: "You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." The very name of the lineage, Gershon, "the stranger there," seems here to recover its full meaning: the family of exile becomes the voice of the exiled.

George Gershwin died prematurely in 1937, at thirty-eight, from a brain tumor, leaving an unfinished work and an immense posterity [existing notice]. His sudden death sealed the myth. But the legacy was not merely aesthetic: through his success, he embodied the fulfilled promise of Jewish emigration — that American freedom, denied by Tsarist Russia, finally allowed the flourishing of a talent that the Pale of Settlement would have stifled.

If George was the lightning, Ira was duration. A lyricist of rare refinement, he gave their words to songs that became the common heritage of America, before and after his brother's death. The success that the two brothers achieved through their collaboration was considerable; Ira, as a child, was shy. After George's death, Ira devoted part of his life to preserving, cataloguing and bringing to life their shared work — work of an archivist and devoted keeper that amounted, in his mind, to a duty of Memory.

It is here that transmitted tradition and the archive answer one another. Family memory, as biographers have gathered it, insists on the piety of this fraternal remembrance; catalogues and inventories, for their part, confirm the reality of persons, dates and names — this Israel become Ira, this Jacob become George. The virtue that Ira embodied is not brilliance but the tsedaka of remembrance: to watch over the heritage, to refuse to let the work of the dead brother sink. In the Jewish tradition, to honor the memory of the departed — zekher tsaddik li-vrakha, "the remembrance of the righteous is a blessing" — is a religious act in its own right. Ira, as a scrupulous keeper, fulfilled it on the scale of a work. To this he added the discreet role of the elder brother supporting his younger siblings, Arthur and Frances, in a family solidarity that extends the involvement in collective life dear to the tradition.

The Gershwin lineage — Gershowitz — did not produce great deciders of the Law nor Talmud commentators whose names would fill the colophons of manuscripts. Its greatness is of a different order, and therein lies its representativeness of an immense portion of modern Jewry: that of migration, secularization, and creation. In three generations, it passes from a mechanic in the tsarist army purchasing through twenty-five years of service his right to exist, to a couple of emigrants naturalized in Brooklyn, then to two brothers whose works are performed today on every stage in the world.

Of all the virtues that Jewish tradition has carried, the one that this lineage will have best expressed is perhaps the welcoming of the stranger and fraternity among the oppressed — a virtue inscribed even in the root of their name, ger, the stranger. George, son of exiles, lending his musical voice to the Black people of spirituals; Ira, keeping watch as a brother over memory; Jakov, wrenching his freedom from a State that denied it: all, in their own way, have made the condition of stranger not a complaint but a source of creation and solidarity. In this, the Gershwin family fully participates in that collective Memory of Israel which, from Egypt to America, has made the experience of exile the foundation of an ethic of hospitality. Their music, which unites without conflating the synagogue and the blues, learned Europe and popular America, remains one of the most beautiful testimonies to what a diaspora can achieve when, at last free, it sings.