Nobody's Looking at You

by Janet Malcolm

  The New Yorker, 2014

  THE ÉMIGRÉ

  In the spring of 1939, the father of the historian Peter Gay had a fateful premonition. As Gay writes in his memoir, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, he and his parents were booked on a ship called the St. Louis, scheduled to leave Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba, on May 13. But something told the father to switch to a ship called the Iberia, leaving for Havana two weeks earlier. On May 27, a fortnight after the Gays (or Fröhlichs, as they were then known) safely reached Havana, the St. Louis arrived and was overtaken by a ghastly tragedy. Nine hundred and seven Jewish refugees on board never set foot on Cuban soil. The Cuban government, with inexplicable callousness and arbitrariness, revoked their landing permits and barred them from leaving the ship. The St. Louis circled the Caribbean, seeking asylum for its passengers, but no country, including our own, would take them. The ship finally returned to Europe, where four countries—Belgium, France, Holland, and England—accepted a quarter of the passengers each. The 287 refugees who went to England were the fortunate ones. Of those who went to Belgium, France, and Holland, only around forty survived the Nazi occupation. Gay remembers standing in the harbor of Havana and watching the tragedy unfold. “It was thanks to [him] that we were looking at the St. Louis rather than traveling on it,” he writes of his prescient father, and adds, “Would I have survived if we too had been passengers on that ill-fated ship, to end up an American citizen, an American family man, an American professor? The simple figures tell the story: the odds would have been against it.”

  Among the other fortunate passengers on the Iberia was a nineteen-year-old Hungarian Jew named George Jellinek, whose father, too, had been prescient, though, as it turned out, not prescient enough. Jellinek senior, who owned a restaurant in Budapest, felt the necessity of getting his son out of Hungary as war appeared inevitable and conscription in the Hungarian army probable, but did not foresee the unimaginable. Jellinek’s parents stayed in Hungary and perished in the Holocaust. His sister, Eva, who also stayed, survived by means of false papers.

  Jellinek eventually reached New York—Cuba was only a way station for refugees waiting to be admitted to America—and became part of an emigration whose impact on postwar American culture has yet to be fully chronicled. If he is not among this emigration’s most imposing figures, he is surely one of its most genial spirits. For thirty-six years, his hour-long radio program, The Vocal Scene, has given extraordinary pleasure to large numbers of listeners, and when it goes off the air, at the end of the year, its like will surely not be heard again.

  Devotees of the program tend to be older people. I listened to The Vocal Scene on WQXR many years ago and began listening to it again after happening upon it one evening last April. It acted on me like a madeleine. It powerfully evoked my childhood in the 1940s, when there was no television and families sat around in the evening listening to the radio—in the case of my family, to classical music. I could scarcely believe that Jellinek was still alive—he must be in his hundreds. Later, I discovered that my memory of listening to Jellinek when I was a child in the forties was a false one; The Vocal Scene did not begin until 1969. But such is the period flavor of the program, such is its atmosphere of anachronism, that my mistake is understandable.

  “Hello, this is George Jellinek,” says a voice at the outset of The Vocal Scene. This voice is at least as integral to the pleasure of the program as are those of the opera singers that fill the hour with gorgeous sound. It is a voice with a slight hoarseness and a pronounced foreign accent. It is a voice also inflected by cheerfulness, kindliness, intelligence, and slight hamminess. The program on the night I rediscovered The Vocal Scene was entitled “Eight Ways to Sing an Aria,” and began with this Jellinek commentary:

  In the third act of Gounod’s Faust, the rejuvenated Faust comes to Marguerite’s house. He is already fascinated by the girl, and Mephisto has already awaked in him a physical desire for her. But the music Gounod wrote for this scene is almost entirely devoid of sensuality. The tone is almost worshipful in the aria “Salut, demeure chaste et pure” (I greet you, chaste and pure dwelling). We may know the outcome of Faust’s visit, but at this juncture the tenor should not sound like a seducer. He should project a passion restrained by a sense of spirituality that transforms Marguerite’s garden into something like a shrine.… We are about to hear this aria performed by eight different tenors ranging over sixty years of recorded history. This may seem like a reckless venture on my part, but I feel confident that you will find this hour neither dull nor monotonous.

  Jellinek’s confidence was not misplaced. “Salut, demeure chaste et pure” is one of French opera’s most ravishing arias. One does not have to see the opera’s setting of a dark garden; one hears it in the music’s lush sweetness. After listening to the aria once, one wants to hear it again; after eight times, one is satisfied but not sated. The eight tenors—César Vezzani (singing on a 1931 recording), Georges Thill (1930), Helge Roswaenge (1928), Jussi Björling (1949), Beniamino Gigli (1931), Plácido Domingo (1979), Richard Leech (1991), and Ivan Kozlovsky (1949)—gave eight conspicuously distinct interpretations. Some sang in French, and others in German, Italian, or, in one case, Russian. A little drama was provided by the high C that comes near the aria’s end. How would the tenors dispatch it? Like baseball players at bat, they swung at the C. Some of them hit it out of the park; others didn’t. “His high C is impressive,” Jellinek said of Vezzani, but added, “That high C should not be judged in isolation. It is contained within a long legato phrase, ‘où se devine la présence,’ and Vezzani, like most tenors, takes a breath before ‘la présence’ in order to be able to negotiate that high C. No serious damage is done, but the legato arc is broken.” Björling earned Jellinek’s praise for taking “that entire crucial phrase … on one unbroken breath.” At the same time, Björling’s French “is only passable.”

  * * *

  When I visited Jellinek at his home, in Hastings-on-Hudson, a few weeks later, I had to revise my image of him as a frail, very old man with a deeply lined Central European face and a shabby ill-fitting suit. In actuality, Jellinek is a sturdy, vigorous man of eighty-four, with a full, handsome face and the air of someone who knows that his suit is well cut. Moreover, he does not seem particularly foreign, nor does his accent seem as pronounced as it does when it comes from his disembodied voice. When we size each other up, our eyes evidently trump our ears; the actual Jellinek comes across as a fairly, if not entirely, regular American.

  I come from a refugee family myself, and some of what has always drawn me to The Vocal Scene is my association of Jellinek with the New York émigré community to which my parents belonged during and after the Second World War. One of the striking characteristics of this community was its achievement—you could even say its overachievement—of mastering English. These émigrés made it their business to speak and write English that was not only grammatically correct but idiomatic beyond the requirements of ordinary usage. The pride that my father and his fellow émigrés took in their ability to stroll through the language as if it were a field of wildflowers from which they could gather choice specimens—of stale standard expressions and faded slang—is touchingly evoked by Jellinek’s radio commentaries. His accent only magnifies the predictability of the language he writes in—which, of course, is the language that all but the poets among us use. Just a few degrees separate Jellinek’s English from that of the native-born. However, those degrees give it its character and flavor and place it in a time that is not our own.

  Jellinek and his wife, Hedy, a retired economist, live in a two-bedroom apartment with a view of the Hudson in an unpretentious brick apartment building near the shore. Like Jellinek’s commentaries, the Jellinek apartment gave me a feeling of déjà vu. It is furnished with the mixture of fifties American modern furniture and upholstery and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European pictures and objects that constituted the homes of the émigrés I used to know. The
Old World relics at the Jellineks’—photographs of Austro-Hungarian grandparents and great-grandparents in ornate gold frames, old prints and drawings, vases and bowls of European crystal and porcelain—derive almost entirely from Hedy’s side of the family. She and her parents left Nazi Vienna in 1938. Among the very few traces in the Jellinek apartment of George’s prewar life is an oval studio photograph of him as a boy in short pants with a violin tucked under his arm and a wonderful, schmaltzily serious look on his six-year-old face.

  As Hedy served tea and pastries at a long table in a dining alcove, George spoke of his early life. Hedy confined herself to the role of hostess and supportive spouse, disclosing almost nothing about herself, and occasionally allowing a sense of tartness to emerge. George said he had studied the violin for eleven years, but never practiced enough to become a virtuoso performer. He came to opera late—he saw his first opera, La Traviata, at the age of sixteen. “I was a typical chamber-music snob,” he said. “We chamber-music people looked down on opera. It seemed like just a lot of noise and gestures, while chamber music was pure and refined. But, when opera hit, it hit me with a vengeance. I had no exit strategy.” Jellinek’s father’s restaurant was near the Budapest opera house, and George went to the opera almost every night. The opera season in Budapest ran from September to June, and George attended a hundred and fifty performances during each of his last two years in Hungary.

  “I was rather deficient in my knowledge of French opera,” Jellinek said, and when he went on to attribute this deficiency to the Francophobia by which Hungary was gripped between the world wars, I felt yet another stir of childhood memory. I remembered the condescending way my Czech parents used to talk about Hungarians. Though not in the same league with the seriously bad Germans, Hungarians were regarded as inferior and somewhat absurd in our household. We used to sing a song that went:

  Nem sere fe pekete

  Gulásem se nacpete.

  The first line is nonsense, a kind of parody Hungarian. The second line is Czech and means: “With goulash you will stuff yourselves.” When I reported these deplorable memories to Jellinek, he remembered, in turn, his own anti-Czech feelings. He recalled vile things that his teachers said about the (I always thought) innocuous second president of Czechoslovakia, Edvard Benes. All this enmity and jingoism, of course, came out of the alliances of the First World War and its aftermath. Hungary, which had fought alongside Germany, was carved up by the victorious French and English. Its most deeply resented loss was the vast region of Transylvania, given to Romania; the newly formed Czechoslovak Republic was given the smaller region of Slovakia but was only slightly less resented. As a consequence, Jellinek said, “the Hungarian government saw to it that we did not play the music of Enescu, we did not play the music of Smetana, we did not play the music of Dvorák.”

  After the Holocaust shattered the delusion of assimilation to which German and Central European Jews had clung until it was too late, a surviving Jew could hardly be expected to feel much of the old nationalistic pride. And yet I have to confess to the twinge of disappointment I felt when I learned that Jellinek, though his name is Czech, isn’t Czech; and Jellinek himself continues to helplessly identify with his native culture. When he accepted an award from the American Hungarian Foundation in 1986, he felt it imperative to insert a bitter note: “I don’t know what would have become of me in Hungary, because my native land rejected me, and my parents—who had held out bright hopes for me—were destroyed during those few years when Hungary brought disgrace to its heroic thousand-year history.” But he went on to express his gratitude “for what my Hungarian heritage gave me: a terrific fundamental education, a basic understanding of history, an interest in languages, an immersion in a wonderful literature that is unfortunately unknown to much of the world, and the beginnings of my musical education.… And not the least of this Hungarian heritage is the recognition that, as a son of a small nation, speaking a language that is foreign to most of humanity, in order to succeed, one simply must try harder.”

  * * *

  Jellinek’s career in America is a kind of textbook example of trying harder. After he arrived in America from Cuba in the fall of 1941, he worked as a waiter in the Catskills and then—with the Spanish he had picked up in Cuba—became the Spanish correspondent for a New York export firm. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942 and served as a lieutenant in the infantry from 1944 until 1946. He considers his graduation, against all odds, from the tough officer-training school at Fort Benning, Georgia, the triumph of his life. In an article about the Fort Benning experience published in the magazine On the Air in 1977, Jellinek recalled walking in the woods practicing the officers’ art of barking commands: “Night after night I walked among the trees that darkly towered over me, piercing the nocturnal calm with my ferocious shouts.” He went on, “Do I find public speaking difficult? It’s a piece of cake to the Benning graduate.” At the tea table, one of the few remarks that the reticent Hedy allowed herself was to point out that, of two hundred candidates, George was one of a hundred who did not flunk out at Fort Benning.

  Jellinek went overseas and fought in the final battles of the war in Europe; after the armistice, he used the German it was obligatory for every Hungarian to learn to interrogate suspected war criminals. Back in New York, he worked at a succession of jobs in the recorded-music field: first as a salesman at a record store called the Merit Music Shop; then at an organization concerned with music rights called the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers; then at, of all places, the Muzak Corporation; and, finally, at WQXR, which hired him as its music director. He created The Vocal Scene as a corrective to what he felt to be the station’s inadequate coverage of operatic music. During these years, Jellinek also wrote two books, Callas: Portrait of a Prima Donna (1960) and History Through the Opera Glass (1994); reviewed records for The Saturday Review of Literature, Opera News, and the Times, among other publications; appeared on the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday-afternoon broadcasts; taught at N.Y.U.; and built the enormous personal collection of vocal-music records—even more enormous than WQXR’s collection—that has been the backbone of The Vocal Scene. He and Hedy were married during his second year in America (they had met through a cousin on his first day in New York), and their daughter, Nancy, was born in 1948.

  The walls in the Hastings-on-Hudson apartment that are not filled with the relics of Hedy’s European past or with shelves of records and CDs are crowded with tributes to Jellinek’s achievements in America. There is an honorary degree from Long Island University, an award from N.Y.U. for outstanding teaching, a Grammy, and dozens of inscribed photographs of opera singers and conductors, among them Ezio Pinza, Richard Tucker, Eugene Ormandy, André Kostelanetz, Victoria de los Ángeles, Maria Callas, Marilyn Horne, and Jarmila Novotná.

  During the past decade, Jellinek has been winding down his enterprise. In 1984, he retired as WQXR’s music director. He has gradually sold or donated more than a thousand of his records, and he has written no new scripts since 2000. What one has been hearing on The Vocal Scene is slightly emended repeats of old broadcasts. Jellinek told me of his decision to permanently retire The Vocal Scene at the end of this year, and invited me to come to WQXR to observe the taping of his farewell program.

  * * *

  The taping was a quiet affair. The broadcast engineer, a handsome young woman named Juliana Fonda, sat at a large computerized control panel while Jellinek sat in a darkened recording booth. Before entering the booth, Jellinek discussed technical matters with Fonda. They talked in the calm, settled way of people who have worked together for a long time and know what to expect of each other. Jellinek handed her the CDs from which she was to play excerpts at the proper intervals, and disappeared into his booth. The program was devoted to music of farewell and began with a duet from the fourth act of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, sung by Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna. The duet’s trembling sweetness, like that of “Salut, demeure chaste et pure,” takes o
ne about as far from the present moment as it is possible to get. It evokes the nineteenth century’s impossible romantic yearnings. It summons images of beaded velvet costumes and flats depicting ancient parks and forests. That the velvet is threadbare, the beads grimy, and the flats faded only adds to the music’s nostalgic pull. The geographic accident that put my parents in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that did not have to peevishly abjure French culture but, on the contrary, worshipped it makes me feel the pull especially strongly.

  Jellinek next offered Bidú Sayão’s rendition of Manon’s farewell to her little table in Act II of Massenet’s opera; followed by Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti saying addio to each other in Rigoletto; and Mirella Freni and José Carreras singing the finale of Don Carlo. I glanced over at Jellinek as he read his commentary, and realized anew how great a part of the pleasure of The Vocal Scene is the pleasure of listening to George Jellinek. He is an artful broadcaster, reading with a storyteller’s deliberation and an actor’s grasp of cadence.