My parents first met in January 1932, when Dad was a 16-year-old senior at Boys High School in Brooklyn and Mom was a junior at Erasmus Hall High School, also in Brooklyn. But they didn’t connect through any of the customary vehicles that society provided, then and now, for matching prospective mates: school, say, or parents, or a common neighborhood, or a job, or sports, or a church or synagogue.
Quite the contrary. Herman, my father, was playing clarinet in a youth chamber orchestra organized and led by an earnest 23-year-old music teacher named Bernard Carp. At some point Bernie Carp realized that his violin section needed bolstering. So, he prevailed upon his wife to enlist her kid sister, a budding violinist named Lenore Goldstein who had just turned 15.
On arriving at her very first rehearsal, Lenore seated herself on a folding chair which promptly collapsed, sending her sprawling onto the floor. As my father told the story years later, “I saw those legs kicking in the air, and I thought, ‘That’s for me!’”
One man’s band audition
That initial physical attraction obviously led to something deeper, because they were married six years later. What strikes me now about their relationship is the role played by music— not just in bringing them together, but as a sustaining force that kept them together through more than 40 years of marriage.
They were never professional musicians. But Dad played clarinet in the Penn band, along with his best friend since third grade, Herb Gold, who played the piccolo. Everyone in their circle, it seemed, played something. One of the few who didn’t, their decidedly non-musical friend, Lazar Levinthal— a rabbi’s son and future talented greeting card cartoonist— auditioned for the bass drum in the Penn band, just to stay near his buddies. (He was told, memorably, “Beat it.”) At that time and place, music was in many cases the common thread that connected people.
Even before they were married, Lenore and Herman joined the New York Choral Society. They performed with that group at the New York World’s Fair in 1939-40. Mom, who had a beautiful soprano voice, was part of a small madrigal group formed from that chorus.
Gilbert & Sullivan
When my brother and I came along in the ’40s, our household became early subscribers to Young People’s Records, a mail order subscription club that endeavored to find painless ways to introduce classical music to resistant kids like us. I remember, for example, Richard Strauss’s tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, which my mother hoped would resonate with me at age four. It didn’t then, but when I hear it today, at age 84, it takes me back.
Both my brother Bob and I were enrolled at music schools, where we tried a variety of instruments— in my case, piano, violin, recorder, clarinet, and— the only one that stuck— the banjo uke. But music was a constant backdrop in our lives. In our Upper West Side apartment, Mom would start singing on the least pretext— say, some song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe
— and then Dad would join in with the harmony, or vice versa.
Nothing venture, nothing win,
Blood is thick, and water’s thin.
In for a penny, in for a pound,
It’s love that makes the world go ’round.
At least that’s how I remember it.
A folk-dance impresario
Their phonograph seemed to be constantly playing operas like La Traviata or La Boheme, which I (like most teenagers) studiously ignored— until, years later, when I started attending operas myself and found myself thinking, “Hey! I know that aria!”
After Bob and I were grown, Mom resumed her concert singing by joining the Collegiate Chorale, which appeared regularly with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. In the 1970s she subsequently sang with the New York Choral Society.
Meanwhile, during the 1950s, Dad became interested in folk dancing, taking extensive lessons as both a dancer and teacher. In 1962, when he was 46, he sold his interest in his ladies knitted wear company to devote himself entirely to the seemingly cockamamie idea of spreading global good will through folk dancing. He subsequently taught folk dancing and ran the cultural activities at International House, New York’s residence for foreign graduate students. That role led to his creation of an international touring dance company, which at its peak performed as many as 300 shows a year for schools, colleges, corporations, civic organizations, foreign governments, and the U.S. Armed Forces, all in the service of spreading its motto: “Joy in Every Land.”
A portable record player
But here’s my point: This stuff was in my parents’ bones even before they were born. Around 1910 my grandfather, Marc Rottenberg, was courting my grandmother, Rosalie Margulies, by dragging a portable, wheeled record player— a rare contraption at the time— from his house to hers for the entertainment of her family. Rosalie was a good pianist from childhood; at parties as a teenager, she would sight-read songs or play them merely from having heard the tune sung. Later she taught piano privately and as a volunteer at the Hebrew Day Nursery in Brooklyn.
For many years, Marc and Rosalie’s voices were mainstays of their synagogue, the Society for the Advancements of Judaism on the Upper West Side. In the 1950s they were early organizers of the New York Pro Musica Antiqua. From about 1960, Marc was president of the Hebrew Arts School for Music and Dance (later the Kaufman Music Center).
But something had changed by the time I reached young adulthood. Music remained a presence, but it no longer seemed to be the central organizing force. At parties in high school, I teamed up with one of my best friends, Peter Rothman, to entertain folks with our banjo ukes. We gathered frequently with two or three other friends at my home to tape record songs. But it wasn’t until some years later that Pete Rothman and I discovered that we both shared a common love of the songs of George M. Cohan. There simply was no context in which that subject would have come up.
A mother’s ambition
Similarly, it wasn’t music that first attracted me to my wife. Barbara and I met on the Penn campus, where we were both students. A mutual friend introduced us. Our courtship consisted mostly of fraternity parties, movies, football games, and drives to the Jersey shore— interspersed, to be sure, with occasional visits to the Philadelphia Orchestra or the ballet. Barbara’s parents had a piano in their living room, but that made no impression on me, any more than their sofa and china cabinet: In those days it was a basic piece of furniture that every home possessed.
Not until we were engaged did I discover that Barbara was a dedicated pianist who was already teaching, or that her parents had once been serious pianists as well. The subject just never came up, presumably because our lives now embraced many other diverse interests.
The last half-century has produced more ways to find mates: singles bars, “personals” ads, and now the Internet.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Barbara’s paternal grandfather manufactured dental instruments. His wife harbored dreams that her son— Barbara’s father— would move in a more artistic direction. On the day he graduated from medical school, she chastised him: “So, you’re a doctor. But you could have been a piano teacher!”
Her family needed one more generation to realize that ambition. The music was there all along, just waiting to be seized.
But tell me: How did you find your spouse?
Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com
From reader Robert Zaller:
Music had nothing to do with my meeting my wife. I picked her up on the street (or maybe it was the other way around). But I proposed to her immediately after hearing a concerto grosso by a 17th-century Italian composer named Torelli. It was the best gift music ever gave me.
Dan...a couple of items in your parents' story jumped out at me. My mother was also a singer. In her 30's, she would entertain mostly women's groups. She would take a Broadway show (Most Happy Fella was one), tell the story and sing some of the songs in a 1/2 hour show. She died way too young...at 40. My father and grandfather set up a music scholarship in her name at Adelphi University. My Dad is an Erasmus grad...played the violin as did a classmate of his by the name of Henny Youngman. On my Dad's 80th birthday (1986), my brother got the idea to call Henny Youngman. Youngman actually answered the phone and he and my Dad talked about old times at Erasmus. The comedian even invited my Dad to have lunch at The Friars' Club. My brother and I were shocked that Dad turned down his invitation. He was too busy.
Mike Groothuis