Of Christmas and Dreidels

Christmas Songs
As I was saying.
Having torn the calendar page of the American Thanksgiving holiday, the Christmas Holiday Season begins in all its fierce glory. Oh! Can you hear it?!? The sound of cash registers beeping, with a counterpoint of bell ringers for the Salvation Army hoping for a bit of the sale's leftover change? Lovely. Music to our ears to be sure.
Speaking of music, there are many songs of this season that have become nearly, well, anthems of the holidays, particularly of the Christmas Holiday. I have been known to listen to, and perform them, myself. During December I'd like to talk just a bit about a few of them, and about those scribes who invented them, since their origins are rather interesting.
White Christmas
This song is perhaps the anthem of the holiday, at least one that was written as a popular tune and not as a hymn. Made famous by the singer Bing Crosby, it has sold more single recordings than any other song. Ever. More than 50 million copies. Maybe as high as 100 million. The writer? A dizzyingly talented fellow named Irving Berlin, born Israel Isidore Baline, a Russian Jewish immigrant who came here as a little child with his family in 1893 to escape persecution in Russia. He was already famous as the author of many popular songs when he penned White Christmas in 1940, supposedly while sitting poolside at the Biltmore in Phoenix, Arizona. But, there is a story that Irving Berlin claimed "it's the best song I ever wrote, maybe the best song anybody ever wrote." It was certainly very, very popular, in large measure due to its release by the great Crosby and the fact that WWII was underway. Yet, Irving's story is one of survival, talent, and determination. How else could it be that he would have ever been in the position to write White Christmas, get it performed by the most popular singer of the day, when he himself could not even read or write music, and could barely play the piano, and then in only a single key? Read on.
Irving Berlin grew up on the streets of New York City's lower east side, a land of immigrants and crowded tenement dwellings. From a young age he spent most of his time on the streets since there was nearly no room in the small apartment. Their home was on the 3rd floor of a brownstone house originally designed as a single home, now divided up. His family, 8 in all - mother, father, 4 girls and 2 boys - shared but 3 rooms. And, they took in a renter to help save money! Can you imagine it? Nine people living day and night crammed into a trio of small spaces in a smelly, unsanitary fire-trap of a building. No wonder he lived on the streets. It was that, or the roof.
His family was desperately poor, as were most all living on the lower east side. According the wonderful book As Thousands Cheer, the Life of Irving Berlin (Laurence Bergreen, author) young Israel was enchanted by the Christmas tree of his poor Irish neighbors in the tenement. He never forgot how beautiful their tree seemed, even though later in life he came to realize that they obviously had to find the cheapest, smallest, most broken tree. It didn't matter at the time, he wrote later that "...that first tree seemed to tower to heaven."
When Izzy (as he was known then) was 13 years old, his father died. He'd already lost a sister, now his father, and the family was worse off than they had been upon arriving eight years past. Finally, the next year, Izzy left home to live on the streets. He was small, had no real skills beyond being able to hawk newspapers. No real skills save one: his father had been a cantor in the synagogue, the person who sings religious music and leads prayers. From him young Izzy had learned a little about singing, and about music. He couldn't read or write music. Didn't play an instrument. He sang, and learned songs by memory.
He began his career as a boy by singing popular songs of the time for a few pennies in booze joints in the rough section of New York called the Bowery. The rough-neck sailors, dock-hands, laborers and others might throw him a penny, or they might throw him out. He stuck with it. He got a brief job singing in the chorus of a new musical, but was let go. He got a job plugging songs for publishers at shows. This meant that during the show he'd be in the audience, pretending to be a regular customer while actually being paid to be there. When a song ended, he was supposed to clap like mad and insist that the song be sung again. Maybe he'd sing along and get the rest of the audience to, also. A bit of early advertising, right? At any rate, he had jobs, lost them, continued to sing in the whiskey joints of the dark underbelly of New York.
Within another year, Izzy landed a job as a singing waiter in a "cafe" in Chinatown. Really, it was just another seedy establishment visited by gangsters, and by wealthy uptown residents out for an evening of "slumming." Izzy would sing for tips, and also wait on the customers. The owner of the tavern suggested, mainly for promotion, that Izzy and the piano player write a song. Izzy was known for being able to make up funny versions of popular songs on the spot, could he write a real song? Marie of Sunny Italy was the result. It was okay. But, most importantly, the name of the lyricist was not Israel Baline, nor Izzy. It was Irving Berlin. He was 19 years old. And a legend was born.