Does that make everyone Ukrainian?
mainThe first post-Soviet print edition of New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians defined David Oistrakh as ‘Ukrainian violinist’.
Only a Kremlinologist could understand why. Until 1991 musicians from the USSR were described as ‘Soviet’, regardless of their heritage or politics. When the USSR broke up, desperate lexicographers reverted to place of birth.
Oistrakh was born in Odessa, a mixed port city with a large Jewish population. He moved to Moscow in his late teens and lived there for most of his life. His internal identity papers gave his nationality as ‘Jewish’.
For Grove, that was enough to make him Ukrainian. At least for a while, until protests prompted a revision. Oistrakh was Russian by language, Jewish by heritage. If he spoke Ukrainian at all, it was as his fourth language. Most people know that by now.
Still the mislabelling lives on. American scholars and journalists, unable to define musicians by race as the Russians did, have reverted to birthplace. In recent weeks, I have seen Leonard Bernstein described as ‘son of Ukrainian immigrants’, likewise Isaac Stern and Bob Dylan. All belong to Jewish families that fled Tsarist pogroms. The reason for their flight was the fact that they were Jewish.
They were as Ukrainian as bagels.
Got that?
Isn’t it the status quo to give the origin by the country of origin?
Soviet or Ukrainian would thus be correct.
Religious affiliation is secondary in this.
Do we really have to follow the categorization of Stalin and Hitler, as suggested here, to have Jew as the first line in the passport?
Isaac Stern’s folks emigrated 1920. Hardly Tsarist evoked.
Let’s read Yuri Slezkin – The Jewish Century – Princeton University Press 2004
Thanks for your comments Norman! I do appreciate it very, very much!
Isn’t this just part of a wider, US-influenced, academic literalism that avoids the (to a certain mindset) messy complexities of European historical geography by simply acting as if the contemporary is eternal? I’ve seen Mahler and Korngold called “Czech” and Bartok called “Romanian”. Of course calling Mozart “Austrian” is just as incorrect…
So how would you describe Mozart?
(And please don’t say “citizen of tbe world”)
Mozart was born in Salzburg which by his birthday belonged to the Kingdom of Bayern. Thus, Germans have claimed Mozart to be German.
Interesting. I had understood that in the 18th century Salzburg was an independent prince-bishopric within the Holy Roman Empire. That doesn’t square with being “owned” by the Kingdom of Bavaria.
Assigning nationality in the German-speaking lands prior to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and subsequent unification of Germany (and beyond, in fact) is clearly inherently problematic.
Mozart would have thought of himself as being German, as would his contemporaries. Any German speaking person living under the Hapsburg monarchy would have considered themselves German pretty much until the first world war (e.g. even after German unification, which excluded the Austrian Germans). Note that German speakers in Bohemia or Moravia, would have also thought themselves to be German.
Describing Mozart as Austrian is an anachronism.
Salzburg in Mozart’s lifetime was an independent principality. The Archbishop was head of state. It was not part of either Austria or Bavaria.
Read some history, it’s not THAT hard.
Mozart was a subject of the Archbishop of Salzburg. Salzburg throughout his life was an independent principality and although part of the Holy Roman Empire was not part of either Bavaria or Austria.
Read some actual history, why not? It won’t hurt you.
I did read the history. That’s why I replied as I did to Pianofortissimo.
Read the comments before posting your own It won’t hurt you!
In Kaliningrad in1994 I assisted in a performance of Bernstein’s Jeremiah symphony. In the pre-oerformane talk to the audience the conductor explained “Bernstein’s parents came from Russia so he must of course be considered a Russian composer.”
In Kaliningrad in1994 I assisted in a performance of Bernstein’s Jeremiah symphony. In the pre-performance talk to the audience the conductor explained “Bernstein’s parents came from Russia so he must of course be considered a Russian composer.”
This is exactly my case. “Former Soviet” sounds wrong, “Russian” sounds wrong, too, though I grew up Russian-speaking. I’ve never lived in Russia, except when I was singing/recording there. “Ukrainian” is how I’ve often been described, which is really wrong, since I’m in no way culturally Ukrainian and don’t speak a word of the language (though my parents do). The Jewish part is even trickier. In the US, we used to identify ourselves as Russian-Jewish. Now I try to be a Franco-American soprano. At a pinch, of Soviet descent. Or something like that.
Following this why then Mahler Austrian?
He was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian (Hapsburg} empire all his life, and born in Moravia now part of the Czech republic. He was of course Jewish until baptised but in that particular empire being Jewish was not a nationality, just a religion. Central Europe is really quite complicated.
Indeed, I am not even sure whether there was such as thing as citizenship of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or whether Austrian and Hungarian citizenship were two distinct categories.
There was indeed. Even Poles in Galicia had Austrian papers.
But Galicia was part of the Austrian Empire, not the Kingdom of Hungary, so it does not surprise me that Polish residents in Galicia would have been citizens of the Austrian Empire. My question is whether that citizenship was citizenship of Austria-Hungary or whether there were two distinct categories of citizenship, one for residents of the Austrian part of the union and another for residents of the Hungarian part.
In the late C19th the Habsburg monarchy comprised two separate states: the semi-autonomous Kingdom of Hungary (modern Hungary with parts of Slovakia, Croatia and Romania) and the Crownlands (the “Austria” of Austria-Hungary: roughly modern Austria, Bohemia, Galicia, Bukovina, parts of Italy and Slovenia). Subjects of the crownlands – especially the German-speaking Jewish community, who were under the personal protection of the Emperor – were often referred to collectively as “Austrians”. The idea of Austria as a small German-speaking Alpine state is a concept that postdates 1918.
Yes, I know that Austria and Hungary were two separate states in a union under the Habsburg monarch, but my question was about citizenship. Mike Schachter above said “He was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian (Hapsburg} empire”. My question is, is it correct to say “citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire” or were Austrian and Hungarian two separate citizenships held by subjects of that empire depending whether they were identified with its Austrian part or its Hungarian part. I, for example, am a citizen of the United Kingdom, not of England, but my ancestors prior to 1707 were English, not British, since England and Scotland were at the time still separate kingdoms.
I’ve seen various composers referenced as “Austro-Hungarian” because they were born during the time of the Habsburg Empire. This includes Smetana, Dvorak and Busoni.
Indeed. Correctly.
FS60103, at the risk of heading off at a tangent. Is your name a reference to Flying Scotsman under its British Rail number ? Or is that coincidental.
a dear friend was born and raised in Fiume in Feb. 1924. Fiume was a free state from 1920 to March 1924, when it was annexed and spent 20 years as part of Italy. After WWII it became part of the Republic of Yugoslavia. At the end of Yugoslavia, Fiume became part of Croatia. My friend grew up speaking Veneto dialect, and studying Italian in school. In the thirties her family escaped Europe, and she has lived in Brazil ever since. What would Grove, bless their hearts, call her? (She’s still thriving at age 94).
My mother was born in Fiume in 1921, was ethnically Slovenian but grew up speaking Italian, and did not have Italian citizenship. As a displaced person after the war, she immigrated to the U.S. in 1955 and eventually became a U.S. citizen. When people would ask her “Where are you from?,” they didn’t know what they were in for.
I had a work colleague whose parents were born in Yugoslavia but considered themselves ethnically Italian and owned a successful Italian restaurant in Manhattan
I have a friend in the United States who is as culturally Hungarian as one could possibly be. His parents escaped from Hungary in the 1950s, but the culture lives on. His forebears worked in government service during the days of the Empire. Perhaps smartly, the government preferred to post workers in different corners of the Empire so that allegiance to the Habsburg crown would trump ethnic persuasions.
So, my friend couldn’t be more “Hungarian” culturally (and linguistically) … and yet his ethnicity is Romanian, Croatian and Italian. He doesn’t have one drop of Hungarian blood actually.
….everyone knows, Bagels are from Montreal. What constitutes as a Bagel in New York and beyond is a sham…..not unlike violin competitions as of late.
At least he didn’t refer to bialys, which (as everyone knows) are Polish.
Is being a Jew race or religion? I always thought it was the latter.
Many Jews are atheists. It’s a tribe, with its own culture and religion. And its own genetic diseases, I might add. I was told I had the Easter European Jewish cancer variant, which had recently been discovered. I took a genetic test, and the result came back with 99.9% Ashkenazy Jewish. They didn’t ask me about my religious preferences.
Definitely not a “race”. Could be a religion but, as Julia Kogan correctly explained, not necessarily.
A tribe.
Have fun defining “race.”
In these PC times I wouldn’t dare.
One must read Sand’s very interesting research on the subject.
He shows how the idea of a Jewish people who can trace a common genetic ancestry back to the tribe who lived in Palestine 2000 years ago is most likely just a myth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_the_Jewish_People
Commonality exists among the Askenazy variant, since they can trace back their ancestry many hundreds of years to Eastern Europe.
But the lineage does not continue consistently to the Jews in Palestine.
Of course there is a fierce ideological opposition to Sand’s findings, since it shows the fundamental idea of Zionism, the right to the ancestors homeland, to be based in mythology only.
Most, if not all, Askenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars, who converted to Judaism en masse in the 13th century.
Nonetheless, to refer to the Jewish claim to Israel as “mythology” is essentially to claim that all religious beliefs are mythology. The claim to a Jewish homeland is based on two things: (a) the religious belief that God made such a promise, and (b) the historical fact that Jews have been slaughtered and/or expelled from everywhere else.
Even fundamentalist Christians seem willing to fight for Israel to the last Jew…
That’s all irrelevant.
Relevant are international law and the human rights.
Yes, all religious beliefs are based on mythology. Obviously, no?
Um…while many Khazars did, as an historical fact, convert to Judaism, they are unlikely to be the ancestors to the Ashkenazi Jews. Not least, because the Khazars are Turkic and the Ashkenazi Jews are not (their language is a variety of German). I think the best to say is that we don’t really know where they came from.
Is the right to a homeland based on ancestry? Peoples migrate. 12,000 years ago the island on which I now live was probably uninhabited. If we all went back to our ancestral homeland we’d all be living in Africa. Just look at the way borders have shifted in central, eastern, and southeastern Europe over the past 100 years. Old empires have broken up, new countries have come into existence, in some instances new countries have then broken up into yet more new countries, territory has been gained and ceded. There are Hungarian nationalists who dispute the existence of countries such as Croatia and Slovenia and argue that much of Romania and Serbia rightfully belong to Hungary. In Britain we have many people who were born British citizens who have no ‘ancestral’ claim to British identity (i.e. their ancestors hundreds or thousands of years ago did not live on the Atlantic archipelago), but who are nonetheless British on account of their having been born in British colonies which we populated with Africans.
Serious question: What do you mean by ‘race’?
In the case of David Oistrakh (and in many similar ones), no designation is perfect; however, something like “Ukrainian-born Russian-Jewish” would be as close to the truth as one can get, because he was born in Ukraine but culturally he was certainly predominantly Russian-Jewish.
A good reminder of Isaac Stern’s quip from the 1950s, describing the then-commencing “cultural exchanges” between the US and the USSR: “we send them our Jews from Odessa and they send us their Jews from Odessa.”
After 1917 revolution Ukraine became a one of republic in Russia-not independent state. Odessa wasn’t in Ukraine till 1950th, so Crimea. Oistrach can’t be Ukrainen subject as S.Prokofiev, V.Horowith, writer Joseph Conrad and many others.
A good point. In 1908, when David Oistrakh was born, Odessa and the rest of Ukraine was a part of Russian Empire, which means that calling him Russian-Jewish is correct and should be sufficient.
David Oistrach got his last name from his step-father. Biological father wasn’t Jew. Alexander Goldenweiser was born in Kishinev, Moldova today. His Jewish father converted to Christianity in order to marry his non Jewish mother.
You are right about David Oistrakh’s last name but very wrong about his biological father. With a name such as David Kolker in Odessa he could not be anything but Jewish. And Alexander Goldenweiser has nothing to do with it.
Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was never a Ukrainian subject! He was born a subject of the Russian Empire and was a naturalised British citizen. In terms of ethnicity, language, and culture he was born a Pole, the scion of a szlachta family of the coat of arms of Nałęcz.
I’m reminded of the Duke of Wellington’s remark when someone called him “Irish” because he was born in Ireland: “Just because one is born in a stable, it does not make one a horse”.
My family all came from towns that are now in 1 & 2) Belarus, 2) Poland, 3) Lithuania, when all were part of the Russian Empire. They considered themselves Russian, or Russian-Polish, (Litvaks). But as far as their gentile neighbors were concerned, they were neither: all they were were Jews.
If it’s good enough for the US government…
During WWII, my fathers Army papers listed his ethnicity as “Jewish”. To this day, when I fill out a census form, I can’t bring myself to claim I’m white (I’m certainly not Caucasian, i.e., from the Caucasus), and I’m neither Asian, nor Latino, nor American Indian — so I check “other” and write “Jewish”.
Having been born here, I’m as much a “native American” as anyone else whose ancestors — no matter how far back — came here from somewhere else, which is to say, everyone. There is no evidence that humans evolved on this continent: we’re all descended from immigrants.
Everywhere, everyone’s ancestors came from somewhere else. Everywhere.
Now I’m wondering what happens, if some Native American tribe comes forward, claiming their God promised them the land between the two oceans.
And what if the Spaghetti monster promised my neighbors all the land in our neighborhood?
We have a copy of my father’s birth certificate (1932, Brooklyn NY) where his ethnicity is listed as “Hebrew”.
I suspect that part of the problem that Mr. Lebrecht was with listing Oistrakh as Ukrainian is because of Ukrainian nationalists’ collaboration with Nazis. I do not believe he would have an issue with identifying a Jewish musician born in Denmark Danish or for that matter, a Jewish musician born in the U.S. as American.
Er…a Jewish person born in Denmark would usually consider themselves to be Danish, and be considered Danish by their contemporaries. Neither condition holds for Ostraikh being Ukranian. He would have thought of himself as a Russian-Jew, and so would his contemporaries.
The headline of this article does bear quite a bit of irony involuntarily.
So Oistrakh’s father was a Jew who converted to christianity, and his mother was a born Christian. Now, with the author’s words and astonishment:
Does that make everyone Jewish?
The irony is, that some Jews feel like they want adopt the false racial laws of Stalin and Hitler, when it comes to claiming the cultural ‘ownership’ of people of merit.
In Russia throughout David Oistrakh’s lifetime, being Jewish was a very particular condition that could not be mistaken for anything else. His biological parents and his stepfather were all Jewish, he was Jewish in his own mind, he was identified as Jewish in his Soviet passport, he was perceived as Jewish by those who knew him as well as by his audiences and he was treated as a Jew by those in power. There was no doubt about any of that, in spite of the fact that “culturally” he was predominantly Russian.
Yes, I agree. The best description would be a “Russian Jew”.
Or, even better, “a fine human being and a great violinist”.