MendelsSongs' Beginnings
Not too long ago, Eddie the telephone repairman met Rose, a German-Jewish widow, who faced a pricey phone repair because she didn’t have “wire insurance.” Seeing a piano in her living room, Eddie came up with an unusual payment plan.
Their story, “Rose and Eddie,” is set to Mendelssohn’s Opus 30, No 3, the song she played. Over the years more Washington Heights immigrants who fled Nazi Europe contributed their stories about emigration, love, crime, and growing older to the project.
Then there’s Richie – an Irish-Ukrainian Catholic who grew up in the neighborhood and fell in love with a German-Jewish girl – who provides an entirely different perspective.
The German Jews of Northern Manhattan
The first German-Jewish immigrants to upper Manhattan arrived circa 1895.
The second and largest wave of German-Jewish immigration followed Germany’s Kristallnacht – the Third Reich’s November 9-10, 1938 pogrom, during which German and Austrian Jews were murdered, arrested, their businesses looted and their livelihoods destroyed.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, other Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and its aftermath continued emigrating to Northern Manhattan.
This influx of these new German immigrants to Washington Heights earned the area near the river the nickname “Frankfurt-on-Hudson”, while lower Washington Heights, around 155th Street and Broadway, was dubbed “The Fourth Reich.”
Being German in a country fighting the Germans posed its own set of problems, as did being German-Jewish among American Jews. As a result the German Jews tended to stick together, though their businesses served the entire neighborhood.
American and Israeli Jews referred to the German Jews as Yekkes.
The German Jews – especially those from the urban areas – brought their love of European music, literature, and art to their adopted Manhattan community. As music was an integral part of many of their lives, many who arrived before Kristallnacht brought their own pianos from Germany – others rented theirs as soon as they could. And several of them had copies of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words – or Lieder ohne Worte – in their piano benches.
Why Mendelssohn?
Though a convert to Lutheranism – and dead for 80 years before Hitler’s rise to power – Felix Mendelssohn shared the German Jews’ fate during the Nazi regime.
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn, aka Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) – pianist, organist, conductor, writer and painter – was Germany’s favorite composer of the Romantic era. His grandfather Moses devoted his life to making Judaism more palatable to German leaders and encouraged Jewish assimilation into German society. His banker father converted the family to Lutheranism. They socialized with other famous Germans of the time, including cultural icons like Schlegel, Goethe, and Schumann.
Wealthy, respected and happy during his life, in death Mendelssohn became a target of Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitic writings, later adopted by Hitler. As the Nazis embraced the idea of a “pure” German culture unsullied by “alien” (Jewish) influences, Mendelssohn’s work, beloved in Germany for over a century, was ascribed to other sources, ignored or banned. In 1936, two years before Kristallnacht spurred the largest emigration of German Jews, his statue in Leipsig was hacked to pieces.
His reputation as one of the world’s greatest composers is still being restored.
Alison Loeb and Felix Mendelssohn