Word: bernsteining
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Reason sometimes seems to check emotion, the head to rule the heart ? in his music as in his life. And yet, there is in Bernstein's character a power of belief, a religious strain so insistent that it drives him at times to the mystic verges. In his music, too, there can arise, like an ancestral memory, a whisper of Semitic mys tery, a shadowy Hasidic laugh...
...Discovery. If, in the minds of some, hutzpa is the key word to Leonard Bernstein, his father uses another Jewish expression to describe his hopes for his son. It is ruach Elohim, the godly spirit...
...tried to give it to him through learning, understanding and religion," says Sam Bernstein. "With ruach Elohim a man does not become dizzy when he reaches high places. Without it he is nothing, and the food in his mouth is like straw...
...Samuel Bernstein, the son of a Hasidic scholar, fled Russia when he was 16, to escape both the Czar's draft and the ghetto life. In New York City, in 1910, he found a job cleaning fish underneath the Brook lyn Bridge, for $1 a day. After a while he managed to get himself "in hair" ? he worked in a wigworks that made "rats" and "transformations." By the time Lennie was born, Sam had moved to Boston's Allston section and was building a prosperous business of his own as a beauty-parlor supplier...
Everybody told Sam Bernstein that his boy was a born musician?which was exactly what Sam was afraid of. He thought of the musicians he had known as a boy in Russia as klezmer, the ghetto pagliacci, living from one free meal to the next, and he shuddered for his son's future...