Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins

Book by Vaill Amanda

Prologue

In the end, he came home.

Four days earlier, on July 25, 1998, he had suffered a catastrophic stroke and was rushed to New York—Presbyterian Hospital, where a CAT scan revealed that the entire right hemisphere of his brain had been flooded with massive amounts of blood. His doctors had wanted to put him in intensive care, but it was clear they could do nothing more for him there. So the terms of his living will had been invoked and he had been brought back to the house he had lived in for thirty years and to the circle of family, friends, and lovers who had gathered to say good-bye.

Now he lay in his third-floor bedroom, the once quicksilver body still, the sharp eyes unseeing, the voice–which could warm you or raise blisters on your skin–silent. His breathing was ragged: sometimes he seemed not
to be breathing at all, and then suddenly he would take deep, gasping breaths, as if he were desperately trying to fill his lungs with oxygen. “Is he afraid?” his sister had asked when she arrived at the house from her home in Vermont; when she was reassured that no, he wasn’t, she said, “I am.”

Downstairs, in the office that was the center of a million–dollar–per–year theatrical business, the telephones rang with concerned calls from associates, colleagues, friends, but upstairs it was quiet except for the rounded cadences of Bach’s French Suites on the bedroom CD player. He always liked to have music playing, particularly if it was something he was working on, and in recent weeks, although he’d been far too frail and forgetful to work, he had been listening to this Bach recording—as if he drew comfort or certainty from Bach’s clear phrasing or from the confident structure that always brought him back to where he had started.

On his bedside table a photograph of a beautiful woman, a dancer stricken with polio at the height of her fame, smiled at him from the antique frame in which he had placed it; on the desk beyond the foot of the bed another photograph, of the young man he had loved and nursed through his final illness, gazed across the room at him. On chairs ranged around the bed sat his sister, two former lovers, his assistants, an old friend and confidant, and the friend’s young wife, a physician; it was she who made sure that someone was always holding his hand. The minutes ticked by. Then suddenly his dog, an affable cream–colored mixed breed who had adopted him some years before on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, jumped on the bed and started to lick his cheek. And just as suddenly he opened his eyes and rose up in bed, seeming to take in the faces grouped around him, looking at each one in turn.

“You’re fine,” said his friend’s wife, squeezing his hand. “You’re fine.” There was a silence. He subsided on his pillow, his eyes turned to the ceiling. The dog barked twice. “All right,” his friend’s wife said now, soothingly.
“You’re free.” The dog let out a long, keening cry. It was over.

The next day the New York Times—like other newspapers on two continents—would carry his obituary on the front page: “Jerome Robbins, 79, Is Dead: Giant of Ballet and Broadway.” The lights on Broadway’s theaters would be dimmed for a moment and the flags at Lincoln Center lowered to half-mast, as the world remembered a man who had put an indelible stamp on American theater and dance with ballets like Fancy Free and The Cage and Afternoon of a Faun and Dances at a Gathering and musicals like On the Town and Peter Pan and West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof; a “theatrical genius” (in the words of the actor Montgomery Clift) who had won five Tony Awards, four Donaldson Awards (precursor to the Tonys), two Academy Awards, and an Emmy and had been awarded the National Medal for the Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors, as well as being made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.

For their part, some who had worked with and known him would recall a martinet who “could be monstrous...toward performers” and whose “dancers hated him”; others, “a father, teacher, and eternal friend” who was “generous,” “a wonderful person, a lot of laughs.” For Jerome Robbins was a man of contradictions: a nonobservant Jew whose most successful theatrical work was that paean to Jewish folkways Fiddler on the Roof; a college dropout who learned Russian so he could read Chekhov and Tolstoy; an entertainer who could be paralyzed with shyness in gatherings where he knew no one. If, in his professional, creative life, “he was always right”—as the lighting designer Jennifer Tipton would put it—in private he could be conflicted, vulnerable, and torn by self–doubt. “Where does the talent come from, I wonder,” he wrote in his diary once, “when I have felt such a hoax?”

When he wrote those lines he was involved in a romantic relationship that afforded him a refuge from loneliness and self-doubt—a relationship that felt, he said, “like home.” Robbins spent much of his life searching for such a haven of love and acceptance, and that same place was arguably also the goal of much of his best work, from West Side Story to Dances at a Gathering. He was always coming close to it; perhaps, when he opened his eyes for those few seconds just before his death, he found he’d got there.
1
“It was all lovely ”

Although it is gone now, there was once a village called Rozhanka, which stood in the vast, flat plain that stretches between Poland and Russia, the land that is now Lithuania and Belarus. In the old days these miles of pasture and cropland, punctuated by patches of forest and the onion domes of churches, belonged to the kings of Poland, but by 1888,when Herschel Rabinowitz was born, they had come under the rule of the czar of all the Russias.

Almost equidistant from the bustling towns of Vilna and Bialystok, Rozhanka was a rural backwater of less than a thousand residents, two-thirds of them Jews, who lived in wooden houses, some with only earthen floors, that were built around the central marketplace and along the village’s four streets—Mill Street, Bridge Street, the Szczuczyn Road, and the Connected Street. There were butchers and bakers, blacksmiths and tailors, cobblers and carpenters; there were two flour mills near the river, an eighteenth-century stone church for the gentiles, and a wooden synagogue of somewhat later date for the Jews. In addition, because the synagogue had no furnace and could not be used in the winters, there were two bet midrashim, the houses of worship and study where the faithful gathered for prayers and earnest yeshiva students came to learn and read the holy books.

There was a mikvah, a ritual bath for women’s monthly cleansing; a cheder, the one-room school where the little boys sat on wooden benches and learned their lessons over the squawking of the rebbe’s wife’s chickens; and a bustling market where farmers brought their produce and livestock, merchants sold pots and pans and crockery and cloth, and villagers came to poke and pinch and buy and sell and exchange news and gossip. And there were Sabbath evenings when candles were lit in all the houses and braided bread was laid on the tables and prayers were said over the meal. Rozhanka was a place out of time—“an unforgettable place,” as the writer Sholem Aleichem said of another shtetl in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, which he called Voronko—“small but beautiful and full of charm.With strong legs, you can traverse the entire village in half an hour. It has no railroad, no sea, no tumult. . . . Although it’s a small village, the many fine stories and legends about it could fill a book.”

In this village of Rozhanka, Herschel, the third son of Nathan Mayer Rabinowitz, the baker, was born on September 11, 1888. He and his brothers, Julius, Samuel, and Theodore, attended the cheder while their sister, Ruth, stayed home to learn from their mother, Sara, how to keep the house; they made wooden swords for Tishah b’Av and dreidels for Hanukkah; they swam in the river and played in the fields. And when they grew older, they worried not about the Torah portions they had to learn to chant for their bar mitzvahs but about becoming one of the Jewish boys who were conscripted each year into the czar’s army, where they were often mistreated or forced to convert to Christianity.

It was to avoid this fate that first Julius and Teddy, then Herschel, and finally Samuel fled to America, where other emigrants from Rozhanka had found a new home.When Herschel came of age for conscription, his father, Nathan, fearing reprisals for draft evasion, bought a burial plot and bribed an official to issue a death certificate for his son. The family took off their shoes and covered their looking glasses and sat shiva for him and put an empty coffin in the earth; his mother, Sara, sewed money and a steamship ticket into the lining of his coat; and Herschel,who at sixteen had never seen anything beyond the horizon of Rozhanka, set off alone for the goldeneh medina on the other side of an ocean he could only imagine. He traveled on foot at night to escape detection, staying clear of towns and checkpoints, of barriers and strangers, sleeping in barns or haystacks, and scavenging food where he could. He was lonely and afraid, but then he acquired a comrade, a handsome, strapping young Russian deserter who showed him how to cross the borders, stepping carefully to avoid the raked areas that would show the slightest footprint. One night the two of them dared to get their dinner in a tavern, and they were served by a pretty young village girl; the soldier flirted with her and she blushed and giggled at his attentions, and young Herschel watched the byplay with yearning. The next day the two young men went on, making their way across Poland to Germany and then on to Holland; and when Herschel came to the pier in Rotterdam and “realized that the wall rising up beside him was the side of a ship”—he told his own son many years afterwards—“he burst into tears. For he had never seen anything so enormous.”

Herschel Rabinowitz debarked from the SS Statendam in New York on January 4, 1905. His welcome to the United States was the cacophonous inquisition of the Registry Room on Ellis Island, where immigration agents pinned a numbered tag to his coat bearing the page and line in the Statendam’s manifest on which his name appeared, and barked a series of questions: Name? Age? Occupation? Marital status? Herschel Rabinowitz told them he was eighteen; he was a baker, he said, and unmarried.

When the agents let him through he took the ferry to Manhattan, under the stern bronze gaze of the Statue of Liberty, to stay with Julius and Teddy, who had preceded him to New York. But the tenement apartment his brothers lived in was crowded, and within a few days Herschel had to move out. A Yiddish delicatessen owner took pity on him and offered him a job: he was to receive four dollars a week and all the food he wanted, and he could sleep in the shop, on a shelf behind the counter. It was just the chance he had been looking for. Soon after, he began calling himself Harry, because now he was an American.

Even so, he was still an observant Jew, and went to a cousin’s house for the evening meal on the Sabbath. But one Friday his boss kept him late, so that the sun set before he could reach his destination and he arrived after dark, in tears of self-recrimination. Never mind, said his host, it’s not your fault you had to travel after sundown, so no harm is done; and this reassurance, Harry’s son was later to say, started Harry thinking that maybe the old ways had to change in his new country.

Eventually all the Rabinowitz siblings found their way to New York from Rozhanka, along with a number of other landsmen from the village—enough that there was an association of Rozhanka dwellers who met regularly for feasts and dancing and sent money back to the village to help pay for a library or a new bet midrash. Harry and his brothers were no less successful: they managed to buy their own business, a delicatessen on upper Madison Avenue in Manhattan, in a neighborhood where the brick apartment buildings of European immigrants–Italians to the south and east, Russians and Jews to the north and west—coexisted with the limestone mansions that industrial barons were building along the perimeter of Central Park. And Harry found a bride, a young woman whose family had emigrated from Minsk to Iowa in the 1890s and ultimately settled across the Hudson River from Manhattan, in Jersey City.

Lena Rips was twenty–one, a year and a half younger than Harry, and unlike him she had graduated from an American school and attended a Des Moines women’s college for two years. Her father, Aaron, a gray-bearded man with the dark eyes and hawk face of a gypsy, was a garment cutter and a founder of the local synagogue, Congregation Mount Sinai, which his grandchildren would refer to as “grandpa schule.” His blue-eyed wife, Ida, was a pillar of Jersey City Jewish society: founder of the local Hebrew school, director of the Hebrew Home for Orphans and Aged, active in Hadassah and other religious and social organizations. The two of them had seven children: a son, Jacob, followed by six daughters, Anna, Lena, Mary, Gertrude, Jean, and Frances–and although Lena was only the third eldest she was the alpha female in the pack (a nephew later described her as “wearing the pants in the family”). She had inherited her father’s chiseled cheekbones and gypsy features, which made her seem more decisive than her stocky and soft-faced fiancé; unlike him, also, she spoke unaccented English, the result of her years of American schooling—Harry still sounded as if he’d just got off the boat. She didn’t have Harry’s sense of humor, but she did have a flair for drama and a passion for music and the arts.

She and Harry were married on the evening of February 9, 1911—Lena enveloped in a cloud of white lace, Harry resplendent in white tie and tails—with a reception afterwards at Jersey City’s Arion Hall. The newlyweds moved into an partment in Manhattan at 51 East Ninety-seventh Street, on the corner of Madison Avenue, in the same building as the delicatessen, along with Harry’s sister, Ruth, and younger brother, Sam. It was as if the familial closeness of Rozhanka had been re-created half a world away in New York—a similarity only underscored by the presence of the Russian Orthodox cathedral of St. Nicholas, with its five onion domes, down the block. A little more than a year after the marriage, Lena gave birth to a daughter, Sonia, a fair, blue–eyed baby who showed an early aptitude for singing and dance: by the age of four she was appearing in recitals, ballet slippers on her chubby baby legs and her little arms held in perfect rounded fifth position above her head. She also had an independent streak: at five she used to play hooky from Sunday school and take the Fifth Avenue bus to the bottom of Central Park, where she could ride one of the fat ponies around and around the pony ring.

On October 11, 1918, her little brother, Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, was born at the Jewish Hospital (now Beth Israel Hospital) on Fourteenth Street; but Sonia hardly noticed him—except fo...