Irving Berlin wrote about fifteen hundred songs and lived to 101
Born Israel Beilin in Russia in 1888, Irving Berlin reached America at five after his family fled Tolochin pogroms. He sold Marie from Sunny Italy for thirty-three cents in 1907, then spent sixty years writing an estimated 1,500 songs that still prop up the Great American Songbook.
Though his family came from Tolochin in present-day Belarus, Berlin later learned his birthplace was most likely the Siberian town of Tyumen, where his father, an itinerant cantor, had brought the family. The only memory he kept of Russia was lying on a blanket by a road watching his home burn. The family sailed from Antwerp and reached Ellis Island on 14 September 1893, part of the same wave of Jewish emigration that brought the Gershwins, Al Jolson and the Warner brothers.
In New York his father worked in a kosher meat market and taught Hebrew until he died when Israel was thirteen. With only a few years of school, the boy sold newspapers from age eight, once reportedly staring so hard at a departing ship that a swinging crane knocked him into the river. Feeling he contributed less than his sisters, who wrapped cigars, he left home before fourteen, slept in Bowery lodging houses and sang in saloons for tossed coins.
By 1906 he was a singing waiter at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown, where he taught himself piano after closing time without ever taking a lesson. A publisher's staffer, Max Winslow, raved about him until Harry Von Tilzer hired him, and in 1909 the Ted Snyder Company took him on as a staff lyricist. He started writing tunes as well as words almost by chance.
Emma Carus introduced Alexander's Ragtime Band in 1911, and it made him an instant celebrity; a Time critic later noted it is really a march that quotes a bugle call and Swanee River. He was famous before thirty, his songs were nominated for eight Academy Awards, and Gerald Ford presented him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. The composer Douglas Moore ranked him with Stephen Foster and Walt Whitman as a great American minstrel.
Source: Irving Berlin
