Yip Harburg — lyricist (wizard oz) with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born Isidore Hochberg on the Lower East Side of New York in April 1896 - a few sources give 1898 - the youngest of four surviving children out of ten. His parents, Lewis Hochberg and Mary Ricing, were Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from the Russian Empire. They worked in a ladies' garment sweatshop and their son packed clothes there beside them. He said later that the family had not known it was poor, being too busy living.
When an older brother died of cancer his mother lost her faith, and he followed her out of it. He kept the ethical part and dropped the rest, and it stayed in the work for sixty years.
At Townsend Harris High School he met Ira Gershwin over a shared enthusiasm for Gilbert and Sullivan; they worked on the school paper together and remained friends for life. He graduated from City College in 1921, wrote light verse for newspaper columns, and went into business, becoming co-owner of an electrical appliance company. The crash of 1929 destroyed it and left him between fifty and seventy thousand dollars in debt - a sum he insisted on repaying in full over the following years rather than declaring bankruptcy.
Out of work at thirty-three, he turned to lyrics. Gershwin introduced him to the composer Jay Gorney, and in 1932 they wrote Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, which became the song of the Depression, and which is written from the point of view of the man asking. April in Paris followed the same year.
In 1939, working with Harold Arlen - born Hyman Arluck, the son of a Lithuanian cantor - he wrote all the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz, conceived the integration of song and script, wrote the Munchkin sequence, served as final script editor and contributed to the dialogue. Over the Rainbow won the Academy Award. The film opened a few months after Kristallnacht, and its central song, a ballad about somewhere else, was written by the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants.
On Broadway he wrote what he wanted: Hooray for What! against war in 1937, Bloomer Girl on suffrage and race in 1944, Finian's Rainbow on class and racism in 1947, and later shows on colonialism and consumerism. He described himself as a socialist and was never a member of the Communist Party.
From 1951 to 1961 the House Un-American Activities Committee blacklist kept him out of film, television and radio; he declined to name others. Broadway was not subject to the same machinery, so he went on working there for the whole decade.
He wrote the words to more than six hundred songs and died in Los Angeles in 1981, aged eighty-four.
"Parents emigrated from the Russian Empire before 1896"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Russia (Jewish)
His collaborator on The Wizard of Oz, Harold Arlen, was born Hyman Arluck, the son of a Lithuanian cantor - so both the music and the words of Over the Rainbow were written by sons of the Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire.
Born Isidore Hochberg on the Lower East Side to Lewis Hochberg and Mary Ricing, Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews who emigrated from the Russian Empire and worked in a garment sweatshop. The parents are named in the record; no city of origin inside the Empire has been established.
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Russia (Jewish). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.