It’s very clear. David Lehman’s passion for the great American songbook is here to stay. So much so, he could write a book. And he did.
“A Fine Romance” is Lehman’s tribute to the music of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers and Harold Arlen. All geniuses. All Jewish. In his book, the author attempts to trace a line from cantorial melodies to the Broadway stage.
Lehman, 61, will be in San Francisco to talk about his book — and to sing some of the songs he writes about — in a June 1 joint appearance with Cantor Sharon Bernstein at the Jewish Community Library.
A poet by profession, Lehman takes a lyrical and personal approach to his topic. Not only does his book detail the biographies and musical innovations of these songwriters, Lehman also weaves in his lifelong reverence for their art.
It’s kind of his funny valentine.
“There are thousands of words written about these
people and their songs,” Lehman says from his Manhattan home. “So I had to think of a new way to present. It never occurred to me until I started writing to include me as a character. I put myself into it to make the storytelling easier.”
Being Jewish himself, he says he identified with these great men (and, in the case of lyricist Dorothy Fields, women, too). After all, before Gershwin wrote “Summertime,” before Arlen wrote “Over the Rainbow” and before Berlin wrote “God Bless America,” they were all Yiddish-speaking Jewish kids from New York.
What was it about the times they lived in that allowed so many doors to open? Aside from sheer talent, these songwriters thrived at a time when art and commerce merged as never before, when anti-Semitism failed to register and when technology changed everything.
“Around 1900 to 1910, piano and sheet music are the primary sources of home entertainment,” Lehman says, “but during the next 20 years, radio becomes the center of the home. The microphone emerges in a way that the Al Jolson style of singing will be supplanted by the Bing Crosby style.”
Having grown up Orthodox in New York as the son of Holocaust survivors, Lehman felt a kinship with the great songwriters. Though he came of age at the time of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, his aesthetic leaned toward the standards.
“I identified with these characters who are brought up with Hebrew names,” Lehman says. “Like Chaim Arluck, who then becomes Harold Arlen. He is the son of a cantor and observant mother, but he embraces America and the secular life. A lot of what would have been his Jewish identity has been transmuted into something else via the vehicle of art.”
“Showboat” composer Jerome Kern, arguably the originator of the modern American song, became a jolly raconteur, with apparently little left of his Jewish roots. Gershwin drew on jazz and African American music for inspiration. Berlin wrote “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade.”
“Many of them wanted very explicitly to be identified as American composers,” Lehman says, “thinking if you are tagged as a Jewish anything, it’s a limiting phrase. Richard Rodgers’ idea was that if people knew he was Jewish, so much the better. Then his contributions would be added to the list of positive things Jews had done. But he wasn’t someone who wanted to go to temple.”
Lehman has written on Jewish themes elsewhere, most notably in his most recent volume of poetry, “Yeshiva Boys,” his seventh book of verse. He is also the editor of the Best American Poetry series, and author of books on poetry and literature.
He says the disciplined brilliance of lyricists like Ira Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein has rubbed off on him, and some of his poems even have been set to music.
But he waxes rhapsodic at the mere thought of some enchanted collaboration that can never be.
Says Lehman: “If I had been born 50 years earlier, it would have been the grandest thing in the word to write for Arlen or Kern.”
A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs” by David Lehman (249 pages, Shocken Books, $23)
David Lehman will discuss his book, with songs performed by Sharon Bernstein, at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 1 at the Bureau of Jewish Education’s Jewish Community Library, 1835 Ellis Street, S.F. Free. Information: (415) 567-3327.