Do you have any idea how lucky we are?
I mean that genuinely, not rhetorically. For all the shit in this world, I get to write about beautiful lives and the beauty the livers of those lives left us.
While the market attempts to metaphorically rise up from the ashes, we can ... remove ourselves from what often seems like the huddling masses of individuals and escape to a world in which individuals have moved masses.
So it is with today's honorees, a Russian Jew and a Ukrainian Jew, who died Sept. 22, 1989, and Sept. 22, 2001, respectively.
Art wept.
For Irving Berlin Jr., who died at 29 days old in 1928 and was reunited with his father 19 years ago today.
And for hobbits.
We lost Irving Berlin 19 years ago today.
We lost Isaac Stern (as opposed to Itzak Stern, Oskar Schindler's accountant) seven years ago today.
They're still here.
Oh, to be sure, they're dead. Their hearts stopped beating several years ago. Funerals, eulogies, nary a dry eye in the house, all of that.
But listen to this and tell me Irving Berlin is dead:
Bing Crosby "White Christmas"
Berlin's words and music (though he couldn't write the notes on sheet music; he had assistants do that).
And listen to this and convince me Isaac Stern is dead:
Jack Benny & Isaac Stern play Bach @ Carnegie Hall
Jack Benny on the violin. Funny what you find when you aren't looking for it.
There's ... a bit more.
1982 Oscars Irving Berlin Tribute, part 1
(Make sure Bernadette Peters' ... dress ... doesn't distract you, eh?;))
Isaac Stern: Speech; From Mao to Mozart (Ending)
Leonard Cohen was born of ancestors at least some of whom most likely would have died in the Holocaust had they not emigrated.
Israel Beilin, who later became Irving Berlin, was an Ashkenazi Jew from Belarus or Russia. His family emigrated from Eastern Europe when he was 5.
If he had stayed behind, he would probably have died. It looks that simple to me (though I am not a historian).
Isaac Stern's family moved from Ukraine when he was 10 months old. He'd have been dead either way. (If only Anne Frank's father had started trying earlier. Yes, we would lack her diary, but we would have had her family.)
But Isaac Stern was more than a violinist. Among the talent he helped foster are two people you might have heard of.
Yo-Yo Ma plays the prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1
Itzhak Perlman 13 years old Mendelssohn Violin Concerto
Itzhak Perlman (Schindler's List)
(A few days ago, on another Web site I frequent, someone raised the topic of songs that make you weep uncontrollably. I have no heavenly or earthly idea why I forgot that one, but it should have been first on my list.)
Yesterday's beauty, first visited through blind luck, is today's beauty, achieved through random chance. Isaac Stern, Irving Berlin, Itzhak Perlman, so many of them could have been lost to us forever, Stern and Berlin to Hitler, Perlman to polio.
Even Bernadette Peters' ... dress ... can't pry me away from that. How horrifyingly close we came to missing such precious art.
But how far away we are from losing it.
Crying is no way to end a diary -- not this one, at least. There's too much to be grateful for, especially in memory of two men (and their families) who immigrated to this country and gave and give it and the rest of the world such beauty:
Kate Smith - God Bless America