Yehudi Menuhin — violinist with roots in the Russian Empire
Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York on 22 April 1916, the son of Moshe Mnuchin and Marutha Sher, Jews born in the Russian Empire who had met in Ottoman Palestine. For the first two decades of his career, publicity material gave his birth date as 22 January 1917.
His father was born in Gomel, now in Belarus, on 12 November 1893, into a religious Lithuanian Jewish family descended from a line of rabbis; at about ten he was sent from Odessa to live with his grandfather in Jerusalem. His mother came from Yalta in Crimea and moved to Palestine at fifteen, where she lived next door to him. Both went on to the United States, and they married in New York on 7 August 1914. In late 1919 they became American citizens and changed the family name to Menuhin. The family moved to San Francisco, where his sisters Hephzibah and Yaltah, named after her mother's home town, were born.
He studied with Louis Persinger, appeared as soloist with the San Francisco orchestra at seven and made his New York debut on 17 March 1926. Taken to Europe in 1927, he continued his studies with George Enescu and Adolf Busch, and in 1932, aged sixteen, recorded Elgar's Violin Concerto with the composer conducting. Bartók wrote his Sonata for Solo Violin for him, and Menuhin gave its first performance in New York in 1944. In 1945 he played with Benjamin Britten for survivors of the concentration camps, including Belsen.
In November 1945 he gave his first concerts in Moscow, invited by the Soviet authorities, and played Bach's Double Concerto with David Oistrakh, who became a lifelong friend; in his memoirs he wrote of his pleasure in meeting Soviet musicians and of the classicism of their Tchaikovsky. He returned for a longer tour in 1962, with his sister Hephzibah, and again in 1987-88, when Bruno Monsaingeon filmed his concerts and rehearsals with Gennady Rozhdestvensky.
He settled in Britain, directed the Bath Festival from 1959 to 1968, founded the Yehudi Menuhin School for young musicians in 1963 and in 1977 co-founded the charity Live Music Now with Ian Stoutzker. He received the Order of Merit and in 1993 was made a life peer as Baron Menuhin. He died in Berlin on 12 March 1999, aged eighty-two.
Tracing the roots — Gomel, Mogilev Governorate (father) and Yalta, Taurida Governorate (mother) (now Belarus and Crimea)
Born in New York in 1916 to Moshe Menuhin (originally Mnukhin), a native of Gomel (now Belarus), and Marutha Sher, a native of Yalta in Crimea — both then in the Russian Empire.
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Gomel, Mogilev Governorate (father) and Yalta, Taurida Governorate (mother) (now Belarus and Crimea). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.