Irving Berlin — composer with roots in the Russian Empire
Irving Berlin was born Israel Beilin on 11 May 1888 in the Russian Empire. The exact place is uncertain: the family is usually traced to the town of Tolochin in present-day Belarus, while other accounts give Tyumen in Siberia, and Berlin himself said little about it. His father, Moses Beilin, was a cantor. When Israel was five, the family emigrated to the United States, arriving at Ellis Island on 14 September 1893 and settling in a basement flat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
His father died in 1901, and the boy left school and home to earn a living, selling newspapers, singing for coins in saloons and working as a singing waiter in Chinatown. His first published lyric, "Marie from Sunny Italy", appeared in 1907 with his name misprinted as I. Berlin, which he kept. He never learned to read or write music well, and composed almost entirely on the black keys in F-sharp, later using a piano with a lever that transposed the keys.
"Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911) made him internationally known. Over a career of some sixty years he wrote about 1,500 songs, among them "Blue Skies", "Puttin' On the Ritz", "Cheek to Cheek", "Easter Parade", "There's No Business Like Show Business" and "God Bless America", whose royalties he gave to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. "White Christmas", written for the film Holiday Inn (1942), won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and remains one of the best-selling recordings ever made.
He wrote scores for Broadway shows including Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and Call Me Madam (1950), and for films with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers such as Top Hat (1935). He served in the army in the First World War, wrote the soldier show Yip! Yip! Yaphank, and in the Second World War toured This Is the Army, donating its proceeds to army relief. He co-founded ASCAP and set up his own music publishing company.
He received a Congressional Gold Medal in 1955 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. He died in New York on 22 September 1989, aged 101.
"The Beilin family arrived at Ellis Island on 14 September 1893 and settled on the Lower East Side."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Tyumen (probably) / Tolochin (Belarus)
Born Israel Beilin in 1888 in the Russian Empire — the exact place is disputed; Tyumen and Tolochin are both given — he arrived in New York with his family on 14 September 1893, at the age of five.
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Tyumen (probably) / Tolochin (Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
""The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success.""