The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (31 page)

C
asimir Funk, the son of Polish Jews, was the discoverer of vitamins. Before Funk’s original findings, James Lind in 1757 had shown the rich benefits of eating fruit to fight scurvy. Indeed, the British navy recognized in 1794 the usefulness of citrus juices by mandating their provision for lengthy sea voyages. At the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century, scientists such as Bunge, Eijkman, Pekelharing, and Hopkins added to the general knowledge of nutrition with important observations and discoveries. Using mice or birds for study, they found that some substances necessary for a complete diet must exist in milk, vegetables, and meat. Building on his predecessors’ work, Cas-imir Funk discovered compounds in rice bran capable of curing beriberi in pigeons. He called the substance “vitamine.”

Vita
is the Latin word for life. “Amine” means chemical compounds with nitrogen. When it was discovered that every vitamin did not contain nitrogen, the original name was shortened by dropping its final
e.
Funk’s original vitamine was later identified as vitamin B, a complex of multi-vitamins.

Funk’s discovery was more influential than simply for its identification of a substance called the vitamin. Owing to the great influence of scientists such as Louis Pasteur and Paul Ehrlich, the medical community of the period focused solely on the ways infection caused disease. Funk’s vitamin find shifted researchers’ attention away from cure to effective means of prevention. His studies inspired legions of other investigations into nutrition and dietetics.

Young children could be raised with vitamins supplementing their everyday meals. They could be brought up with proper nutrition and have a chance to lead normal, healthy, productive lives. Minimum requirements of nutrition could be recommended by governmental health departments for the general welfare of the citizenry. Attention to proper nutrition changed how people ate and grew, why they would care about their diet, and whether they were what they should eat. Funk’s remarkable paper “The Etiology of Deficiency Diseases,” published in 1912 in the British
Journal of State Medicine,
and his book
The Vitamin
(1913, published in English in 1922) revolutionized biochemistry and medicine.

Although Funk felt that most important vitamins were found in a well-balanced diet, after him, food would never taste quite the same. Vitamin deficiencies could be caused, he wrote, by eating quantities of foods that have simply lost their potency. Food could be “devitalized” because of lengthy periods of storage or transport, the growing of plants in soil weak in mineral content, or just overcooking (the vegetables grandma fed you were probably boiled too long!). Vitamin supplements were necessary often to make up the nutritional difference because of mistakes in food processing, preparation, quantity, or just in the food itself.

Funk also stressed that many vitamins, not only one or a few, were required for good health. The savage food deficiency diseases, such as scurvy, beriberi, and rickets, were preventable if a person had sufficient intake of all the vitamins required, not just a few. Out of Funk’s ideas came the MDA or minimum daily allowance of vitamins recommended by the U.S. government on every vitamin jar (and most cereal boxes).

Casimir was born in Warsaw to Jacques and Gustawa Zysan Funk. Jacques Funk was a respected dermatologist who influenced son Casimir’s choice of biochemistry (instead of medicine) as his field. Biochemistry was then a growth field. He studied at the University in Berne, Switzerland, writing his doctoral thesis on a compound that would later be used as a substitute for a vital female hormone.

After research positions at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the University of Berlin, and Wiesbaden Municipal Hospital, Funk in 1910 began to work at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine. It was at the Lister Institute that he identified the vitamin compound out of an incredibly small portion of rice bran. His discovery led later to the separation of thiamine.

International travels followed to the London Cancer Hospital (1913-15), research with two pharmaceutical companies in the United States (and becoming a U.S. citizen in 1920), at Cornell Medical College and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons during and after the First World War, and in the 1920s to the State Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw (to work in a fourteen-room laboratory sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation). Reacting to the growing fascist threat, Funk left Poland, first to Paris where he set up a private laboratory, calling it “Casa Biochemica,” and then escaped and returned to America to work as a research consultant with another pharmaceutical company (many of his compounds became the first commercially available vitamins). After his groundbreaking work on vitamins, he made other important contributions to medical science, including the therapeutic use of sex hormones and the relation of diet to cancer.

M
ovies are made from stories such as George Gershwin’s life (and one was,
Rhapsody in Blue,
starring Robert Alda and Oscar Levant). Gershwin at age nineteen sat down one night with a childhood friend, Irving Caesar, and wrote
Swanee.
Al Jolson picked up the song and made it into America’s greatest hit of 1920. In his early twenties Gershwin had entered a select circle of prominent American composers whom he would dominate until death from brain cancer at the age of thirty-eight.

Most of Gershwin’s music is very familiar and is among the most often played of any composer. The
Rhapsody, Concerto in F, American in Paris, Porgy and Bess,
and the show and film tunes are as popular today as when they were first written. Gershwin insisted that a song had to be played over and over again to become popular, that is, “plugged.” His music has survived countless repetitions, still filling concert halls and theaters with enthusiastic crowds (the 1992 Tony Award for Best Musical on Broadway went to the “new” Gershwin musical
Crazy for You
and 2011 saw a controversial new production of
Porgy and Bess
open at the Nederlander Theater
).

Gershwin’s music is so attractive because it is so filled with sun and hope, yet often laced with a disarming melancholy. His tender melodies rise up from rich harmonic underpinnings, Jazz Age rhythms pulsating in his scores, missed beats and rapid-fire notes thrusting his brother Ira’s lyrics almost ahead of the music. George brought the sounds of urban life, from the streets to the penthouses, into the concert hall, Broadway show, and opera theater. His personal amalgam of popular songwriting with African-American spirituals, Jewish cantorial singing, ragtime, swing jazz, and symphony heralded an age where, in colleague Cole Porter’s words, “anything goes”—but only something expressive, moving, and abundantly musical.

The son of Morris (a leather worker) and Rose Gershovitz, Russian immigrants, George grew up in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. While his older brother, Ira, could best be described as bookish, reading constantly and writing short, amusing pieces on contemporary mores, George was athletic, active, and vibrant. He was not a child prodigy, but in his teens displayed a growing aptitude for and interest in music. At fifteen George went to work as a song plugger on Tin Pan Alley, the area in the West 20s in Manhattan where most of the prominent music publishers of the time were situated. A song pounder sat at an upright piano all day in a small room plugging the publisher’s newest releases to customers who wandered in. Sheet music was big business before radio and television made access to popular music easier. Gershwin learned quickly how and which music made the fastest and best impression. Never a conservatory student, he was trained in the tough competition of New York’s musical marketplace. Gershwin’s idols were Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin. Indeed, George tried to work for the slightly older and brilliantly successful Berlin, who turned Gershwin down, urging him to write his own songs.

Swanee
proved to be the biggest single hit of his songwriting career. Al Jolson’s remarkably warm and energetic performance riveted audiences and made Gershwin a sought-after talent. When writing
I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise
and other songs for George White’s
Scandal’s of 1922,
Gershwin met bandleader Paul Whiteman. Their meeting would have an enormous effect on the history of American music.

Gershwin was asked to write a composition for Whiteman’s first jazz concert, intended to show serious music listeners that jazz was “respectable.” On a train ride to the Boston tryout of his new (and to be unsuccessful) show,
Sweet Little Devil,
George was inspired by the rhythms of the rails to begin the composition of the
Rhapsody in Blue.
He completed the work in three weeks. Ferde Grofé, later the well-known composer of the
Grand Canyon Suite,
orchestrated the
Rhapsody
for Whiteman’s jazz band. It is said that Ira titled the work after a visit to an art gallery. With its now famous opening clarinet glissando piercing the air, the
Rhapsody
with the composer at the piano made Paul Whiteman’s “experiment in modern music” a historic event.

Gershwin’s next show was
Lady, Be Good
starring Adele and Fred Astaire.
Fascinating Rhythm, Oh, Lady Be Good!, Half of It Dearie Blues,
and
The Man I Love
(which incredibly was dropped from the show when it received a lukewarm response) were premiered in the musical comedy. Each show that followed had the same formula of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, but also sparkling songs by George and partner Ira. These shows, including
Tip Toes, Oh, Kay!, Funny Face
(which contained Fred Astaire’s first routine with high hat and tails),
Strike Up the Band,
and
Girl Crazy,
are now mostly forgotten, their books very much of the period. Songs that are standards today and usually played out of their original dramatic context first appeared in these Broadway musicals.
Sweet and Low-Down, That Certain Feeling, Do, Do, Do, Someone to Watch Over Me, ‘S Wonderful, High Hat, Liza, Strike Up the Band, Embraceable You, Bidin’ My Time, But Not For Me,
and
I Got Rhythm
stand alone now, apart from the frivolous stories that once contained them. The music beneath the titles of each of these songs has become an irrevocable part of American culture. Just speak the titles, and you’ll surely start singing them.

Between the production of the shows Gershwin continued to study harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. In later years, Ira repeatedly asserted that his brother was a learned musicologist who in his early twenties was analyzing Arnold Schoenberg’s scores and continually playing the piano works of Claude Debussy. Walter Damrosch, the conductor of the New York Symphony, commissioned the popular young Gershwin in 1925 to write a jazz symphony. Gershwin responded with the energetic and bluesy
Concerto in F.
The
Concerto,
even more than the
Rhapsody,
confirmed George’s mastery of musical form and inventive design. The work’s rhythms are so infectiously wild that one is rocked about, glad for the ride.

Similarly, his orchestral work
An American in Paris
in 1928 brought the cacophony of French taxicab horns into the concert hall. A lonely musical tour of Parisian streets,
An American
was a huge success, first performed by Damrosch’s symphony, eventually by every major orchestra. At age thirty, Gershwin was the most famous and acclaimed composer in the world. His music began to have wide influence on composers as disparate as Ravel, Stravinsky, and Berg.

Of Thee I Sing,
with a book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind and lyrics by Ira, premiered in 1931 and won the Pulitzer Prize for
drama
(not for music!). The show targeted the U.S. government in a sarcastic lampoon of our most cherished institutions.
Who Cares? Love Is Sweeping the Country, Because, Because,
and
Of Thee I Sing (Baby)
were in critic Brooks Atkinson’s words “funnier than the government, and not nearly so dangerous.” The show’s more complicated dramaturgy prepared Gershwin for his greatest challenge, the folk opera
Porgy and Bess.

Porgy
is quite simply the greatest stage work written by any American composer. Black life in the ghetto of Catfish Row was treated with love, clarity, and an innovative respect that still resounds with truth. Gershwin’s music was no longer just Broadway show tunes or pseudo grand opera, but the music of the people, of real feelings, fears, lust, hope, something higher. As in most of his larger works, he brought all his musical experiences together in beautifully moving expression. In Stephen Sondheim’s words, there is
Porgy and Bess,
and then there is everything else.

His remaining two years were spent in Hollywood writing more immortal songs
(They Can’t Take That Away from Me, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, They All Laughed, A Foggy Day (in London Town), Love Walked In,
and
Love Is Here to Stay),
dating gorgeous actresses (Simone Simon and the then Mrs. Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard), suffering the tyrannical whims of producer Samuel Goldwyn, enjoying the company of his transplanted New York friends, and trying to make enough money so he could devote the rest of his life to serious composition. His death from a brain tumor before his thirty-ninth birthday was as great a tragedy as the early ends of Purcell, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Bizet.