West Side Story:Background

When I caught the new West Side Story in Paris, Robbins’s movement remained urgent. The derisive hips and scissoring leaps, the defensive swagger – all still shimmer with heat and fear. The notion of updating Romeo and Juliet first sparked when Robbins’s then lover, Montgomery Clift, was working on Shakespeare at the Actors Studio. Robbins initially proposed a story of tensions between Jews and Catholics, but when Bernstein and the playwright Arthur Laurents became involved, it developed into a clash between white and Puerto Rican street gangs, the Jets and Sharks.
Reflecting the febrile tensions of the New York streets, West Side Story was unknown territory for the original cast. Chita Rivera is now a panther-like Broadway legend, but when she created Anita, the heroine’s confidante, she was a fiery hoofer who had never been required to act. How did Robbins galvanise the young dancers? “Through fear!” Rivera snaps, her throaty laugh roaring down the line from New York. More precisely, it was fear allied to method acting. “He made us all go home and make up our own stories about our characters’ lives,” Rivera explains. “Then he would throw questions at us and build these people up. We became excited, because we were living their lives.”
Robbins slid the story under the skin. He kept the Jets and Sharks apart and mutually distrustful during rehearsals, and one day slapped a news cutting about a local slaying on the studio wall. “It had happened in a schoolyard two blocks away,” Rivera says,still sobered. “Jerry said, ‘This is your life.’” The cast also improvised key scenes, such as the Jets assaulting (and all but raping) Anita. “We sat in a line of chairs and started reading,” Rivera recalls. “Jerry said, ‘Move how you feel.’ It was really surprising. Every day we would figure it out more.” He allowed them to rehearse the sequence only once a day, so Rivera continued to find it raw. “I would feel the presence of these guys around me, and it got really scary. When they finally got me down, it was shocking.” Even in performance, she admits, “it was very hurtful to hear those voices – especially if Chita was feeling a little emotional. It could really get to me”.
The scene remains disturbing, and the current director, Joey McKneely, admits he pushed his cast to achieve this sense of “hatred”. The term disconcerts Rivera, but she concedes it. “At the time, the gang business was very much alive,” she says. Some Broadway spectators walked out, finding the material hit too close to home. Performances were highly charged: during the “rumble” sequence, the guys often went too far and actually beat each other up. Someone even broke an arm. “Real life got into the theatre,” Rivera says.
It was stylised real life, of course. Robbins twisted balletic and athletic movement into a belligerent new idiom. As the piece’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, described it to me: “What Jerry did in the show was something between dance and stage action. It was choreographed action.” McKneely has rethought some spoken scenes, and downplayed the period design, but the movement is Robbins’s: “Without it, it’s not West Side Story.”
The young Robbins had resolved to be “firm and straight and even cruel to be faithful” to dance. In practice, this involved being cruel to dancers. Russ Tamblyn, who appeared in the 1961 film of the musical, remarked: “I don’t think he was happy with a dancer unless their feet bled.” When Robbins finally finished with the song Cool, the dancers burnt their battered kneepads outside his office. Exasperated by his pernickety perfectionism, the studio removed him from the film – Sondheim recalls the producer lamenting that by the end of the second day of shooting, they were already 10 days behind.
Despite – or because of – his boiler-room intensity, the dancers adored Robbins. His other collaborators, not so much. Laurents never forgave him for naming names during the McCarthyite witch-hunts, and his friendship with Bernstein became strained.When I spoke to Sondheim in 2005, he described the choreographer as “not only demanding, but unpleasant and cruel. I’m not telling tales out of school, it’s the general consensus. Immediately after work hours, he was just wonderful company – but after 6pm”.
Robbins was a hugely conflicted man, especially around his Jewishness and bisexuality. His appearance before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1953 was impelled by terror of being exposed as gay, but his testimony haunted him for ever. More than three decades later, he confessed: “I can’t escape the terrors of that catastrophe.” Even so, for years he engineered simultaneous relationships with a woman and a man, always scuppering his security. It’s hard to watch West Side Story’s yearning number Somewhere without feeling that Robbins, too, craved a still point where his knotted psyche might rest.

West Side Story:Settings-Romeo and Juliet Vs West Side Story

Having watched the film my self, I took notes about the different settings of West Side Story, and compared them to the settings of Romeo and Juliet:

Firstly, I was aware that Kenneth MacMillan's Ballet Production of Romeo and Juliet was theatre based, whereas Jerome Robbins's Film version of West Side Story was in fact Broadway, therefore I expected Jerome Robbin's settings to be more studio based with some form of actually filming on the locations as well.
 The main difference between Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story is that they are set in two different times, with West Side Story being more modern. This reflects how the setting is created and portrayed to the audience. Here is a table of comapring the settings of MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet and Robbins's West Side Story:

West Side Story	Romeo and Juliet
-Commercialised and industrialised Setting (New York) Neighbourhood setting -Urban	-Theatre Setting-set on stage
-Costumes reflects the setting: Costumes represent the different cultural backgrounds:- Jets, yellow, bold bomber jackets. Sharks, Red exotic colours which stand out from the urban backgrounds.	-Costumes act as identification : Costumes creates a divide for the different classes:- higher classes wear rich coloured clothing, the dresses are heavier and big.
-Maria’s flat/apartment is small, and compact, the washing line is out of the balcony escape. Her room is small, with red bright, bold colours, exotic reflecting her culture.	-Juliet’s house is grand, and big. Her room is large, with tall heavy curtains framing her balcony. Her bed is the centre point of the room, the colours are quite contemporary.
-Tony working has more responsibilities, a job.	-Romeo has no responsibilities, quite immature.
-Maria’s white dress signifies purity, light and flows, lower neck line, red around the waist signifies passion, more grown up, a woman	-Juliet’s dress, white signifies purity, light and flows, has some form of gold embroidery.
-Characters sing and dance their solos.	-Characters dance their solos.
-Constant meeting  place: The bar	-No meeting place
-Maria’s brothers wife, Anita looks after her.	-Juliet has a nurse.
-The gangs tag their own area with graffiti. Own territory.	-The Montagues and The Capulets stay in their own grounds.
-When Tony is alone, there is red sky, red everything, to signify passion (Solo)	-Romeo has his own spotlight, when dancing (Solo)

West Side Story:Key themes of Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story

The overriding theme, of course, between the two stories – Romeo and Juliet and The West Side Story is love – deep, intense and passionate love. The kind that defies everything even families and loyalties.

The love Tony felt for Maria and Romeo for Juliet made them defy their families, their friends and their social world. Their love is strong and forceful, so much so that it made them revolt against the very world they revolved in and, sometimes, even against themselves.

The women, on the other hand, exhibit logic, objectivity and strength. Juliet, for instance, showed her determination when she first obeyed her parent’s request to try to love Paris, their favored suitor. The same way, Maria showed force of will over emotions when she agreed to marry Chino.
Their objectivity comes across when Maria decided to flee the city with Tony to leave the chaos behind them. When Romeo killed Tybalt, Juliet did not follow Romeo right away. Instead she made a logical decision to allow her love for Romeo to guide her priorities. Both Juliet and Maria, in essence, decided to cut themselves loose from their social connections when they decided to follow their love. Juliet cut herself off from her Nurse, her parents and her social status when she followed Romeo. Maria cut loose from her family, her dead brother’s memory and her social circle when she decided to run away with Tony.

There is no specific morale that one can gather from both stories on love and relationships. Both stories seek to portray the chaos and obstacles that surround passion and love.

Violence brought about by love is another theme that permeates in both stories. In both stories, love is linked to death. As in the case of Tony who died at the end of the story in West Side Story. The same goes to Romeo and Juliet, who met untimely death at the end of the story.
Violence is very pronounced in both stories as we are being made painfully aware from the very start that the two protagonists come from feuding clans such as in Romeo and Juliet or feuding culture such as in The West Side Story. We have this unshakeable feeling that trouble is brewing as soon as the story commences.

Another theme in the story is the conflict of individual self with society. What the protagonists in both stories Romeo and Juliet wanted were different from what the society expected from them. Romeo and Juliet fought for their private feelings to the end by committing the ultimate act of privacy- suicide. In the same vein, Maria and Tony fought for their private love but they did not really resort to extreme means. Tony’s death is not brought about by suicide although he challenged the villain Chino to come to kill him when he thought Maria was killed. Still, Tony’s death is not self-inflicted or voluntary as in the case of the lovers Romeo and Juliet.

West Side Story: Cultural Background and Rivarly of the Sharks and Jets

West Side Story presents the Jets, an American gang, and the Sharks, a Puerto Rican gang, who rival over who will rule the streets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the late 1950s. The main characters, Tony, an American and ex-Jet, and Maria, the sister of Bernardo (leader of the Sharks) fall in love at a dance. They secretly meet afterward and profess their pure and innocent love for one another. It is heart-breaking to watch Tony and Maria, because viewers can sense that due to their very different cultural backgrounds and traditions, their union will never be accepted by society. In addition, the Sharks and Jets are scheduled to rumble. Tony and Maria, who want peace, can do nothing about this. Tragically Maria loses her brother when Tony accidentally kills him in an attempt to stop the rumble at Maria's request. Maria also loses Tony when Bernardo's avenger Chino kills him. In the end, Maria declares to the Jets and the Sharks that they both killed Tony. She brings to everyone's attention the deadly consequences of killing for the sake of greed and prejudice.

West Side Story: Key Events in the 1950s

• The 50's were the time when the shape of the political landscape in the world could be clearly defined between the Soviet dominated East and the capitalist West.
• The cold war became a grim reality because both sides had the power and technology for a Nuclear holocaust, but equally both knew any war could not truly be won.
• During the 50's and following decades more and more of the old colonial empires would be forced to allow allow countries their independence.

• New York teams rule 50s baseball with the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers

• Popular Culture in the 50's can be captured in just a few words which speak volumes. "The Cold War", "Baby Boomers" , "Korea" , "The Red Scare",. This was the decade where people built Bomb Shelters, had babies and the news was filled with what the reds were doing or going to do.

• The other important change was in how teenagers were viewed up until the 50's teenagers were just children and were treated as such the 50's and future decades changed that where teenagers became an important section of society when politicians and others realized teenagers would very quickly become voters and consumers and a new generation of pop stars including Elvis Presley were created whose main target audience was teenagers.

• As the radio had done in the 20's providing the masses with news and entertainment so the TV did in the fifties originally broadcasting in black and white but later in color.

West Side Story: 1950 Influences

American fashion influence

Living standards improved rapidly during the 1950s. Launderettes and home washing machines made looking after clothes easier. The Rock and Roll and American influence was everywhere. American culture made bomber jackets and casual shirts in bright prints popular with men. Teenagers were identifiable as a distinct group with spending power of their own.

As the fifties progressed, youth culture expanded. Rock and roll caught on, young men took their fashion cues from James Dean, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and other luminaries of popular culture.
In spite of the sartorial conservatism of the 1950s, the foundations were being laid for a fashion revolution, in which convention went out the window and individualism and teen style took centre stage.

1953 in Puerto Rico
The largest migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States mainland occurred, with 69,124 emigrating (mostly to New York, New Jersey and Florida).

West Side Story: Similarities and DIfferences between Romeo and Juliet and West SIde Story (the plot)

Here are  a few extracts outlining the similarities and difference of Romeo and Juliet and West Side  Story:


Key: Green=Romeo and Juliet (difference)
        Orange=WSS (difference)
        Red=Similarity

Laurence's West Side story is an apparition of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet differ in many ways. Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona in about 1594. West Side Story takes in New York City in 1957. Tony is the modern character of Romeo and Maria is the modern character of Juliet. In the two tragedies the major conflict is two opposing families, or gangs, do not agree of the relationship of their child. This conflict was resolved in a very tragic manner, one of the two couples killed themselves the other couple just one got killed. When the death of the persons happened it brought the two foes together. West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet is indeed different in many ways...




Three incidents show Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story differs from one another. The first thing shows the difference between Maria and Juliet, and Romeo and Tony. When Juliet finds that her lover Romeo is dead Juliet kills herself. Maria does not kill herself but instead she puts her sadness into treating the two gangs with a gun. When Romeo finds Juliet supposedly dead he drinks poison to kill himself too. Chino killed Tony because Chino was in love with Maria but so was Tony. This is just one way that Romeo and Juliet differ from West Side Story...

Another way the two stories differ is the wealth of the two families, or gangs. At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare describes the Montague's and the Capulet's houses. The size of the two houses shows how wealthy the families are. In West Side Story the author only tells about the Sharks dwelling. The Sharks live in an apartment which shows that the Sharks are not wealthy. The Sharks and the Jets are very poor compared to the Capulets'' and the Montagues'...Swords were used in Romeo and Juliet and guns were used in West Side Story. The reason guns were used in West Side Story was to make the story more modern. Swords were really used in the time of Romeo and Juliet. These are just a few ways that Romeo and Juliet differ from West Side Story...


Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, two timeless dramas that will live forever. One main difference is that in Romeo and Juliet the sililoquy is spoken while in West Side Story there is sililoquy, but it is in song.  While both equally express the character's feelings at the moment, it is my feeling that West Side
Story's musical style brings the viewer/listener further into the play and makes the play more effective.  An example of this is when, in Act II, Scene II, of Romeo and Juliet, otherwise known as the balcony scene, Romeo expresses his thoughts in a sililoquy until Juliet shows up.  While in Romeo and Juliet all of this is spoken, in West Side Story, this is written as music shared between Maria and Tony...

Another major difference between these two stories is that in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet sees Romeo dead and decides to kill herself.  While, in West Side Story, Tony (the Romeo of the play) does die - shot by Chino- Maria is not so stricken and overshelmed that she decides to kill herself.  This is very important because in Romeo and Juliet, neither Romeo or Juliet is allowed to move on with their lives.  In West Side Story, however, I'm sure Maria, although not shown in the film, moves on and gets over Tony...My theory on why the above is true, is that Romeo and Juliet are kept apart by family ties or blood; Juliet a Capulet and Romeo a Montague.  Blood ties are what family is all about and tend to be very strong bonds.  In West Side Story the only thing holding each other back from one another are their ties to gangs; Maria, the Sharks and Tony,the Jets.  This, in my eyes, makes Romeo and Juliet's love for one another stronger than Maria and Tony's.  This is why it is easier for Maria to get over Tony...
Also a major difference between these tragedies is the issue, or non- issue as it were, of marriage.  Marriage is another tie that Romeo and Juliet have that Tony and Maria don't.  In Romeo and Juliet's case marriage is seriously brought up almost immediately after they meet.  In Tony and Maria's case marriage is brought up but, only in a joking/kidding manner.  To me this indicates that Romeo and Juliet are more grown up and ready to tackle life's challenges, while Tony and Maria are a little more childish and unprepared for what they've gotten themselves into...

Although not a major difference, there is the absence of Tony and Maria's parents.  This may not affect the story too much, but Romeo and Juliet's parents come into major play in William Shakespeare's love story or love tragedy, depending on your point of view.  In Romeo and Juliet, without Lord Capulet there is no wedding conflict and much of the quick "thinking" doesn't have to take place...

West Side Story-Historical Rehearsal-Original Cast members

West Side Story: Juliet and Maria's dress

West Side Story: Costumes Influences

                                                                            

Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon in Damn Yankees - Who's Got the Pain

Jerome Robbins: West Side Story

The impetus for West Side Story had come almost a decade earlier when Robbins brought the idea of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet to Bernstein and playwright Arthur Laurents. The project stalled for several years until an article in the Los Angeles Times about gang violence renewed their interest. Instead of star-crossed lovers of Jewish and Irish Catholic descent, as Robbins had originally suggested, the protagonists became a Polish-American boy and a Puerto Rican girl in New York City. Bernstein brought in the untried Stephen Sondheim to write the lyrics.

"As its choreographer-director," writes Long, "Robbins was indispensable and in absolute control of West Side Story; and under his supervision dance came to have an ever greater and more important role in the musical." Every performer had to be a dancer. He cast dancers Carole Lawrence and Larry Kert over opera-trained singers Anna Maria Alberghetti and Frank Poretta. He rid the choreography of classical ballet and strove to have his cast move and look like street kids. The prologue, a scene that usually would have a song or dialog to introduce the characters, became just dance. "Robbins made the whole show like a long ballet," says choreographer Peter Gennaro. Long writes, "In West Side Story there is no dance portion of the show; it is all dance, all movement."

Robbins expected his cast to live their parts, using only their characters' names during rehearsal and sitting with their fellow gang members for lunch. The character named Anybodys, a girl who was shut out from being a Jet, was forced to eat alone. And Robbins insisted on eight weeks of rehearsal when four was the norm.

"Jerry Robbins is an incredible man, and I'd work with him in a minute," says Kert, "but he is a perfectionist who sees himself in every role, and if you come onstage and don't give him exactly what he's pictured the night before, his tolerance level is too low, so in his own way, he destroys you."

No one was out of Robbins's range, including his dear friends and fellow creators. Carole Lawrence remembers "one morning when we were rehearsing in Washington, Jerry asked Lenny to change something in the Scherzo. . . . We were all sitting on the floor and Lenny brought out the score and played it for us and it was beautiful. And Jerry turned and said: 'That's worse than you had before. Go write it again.'"

Robbins's perfectionist streak ran into trouble when he directed the 1961 film version of West Side Story. He took too much time and went over budget trying to film the scenes on the streets of New York. After he left the project, veteran Hollywood director Robert Wise took over and moved the scenes back into a studio in California. The film ended up winning ten Academy Awards, including one for Robbins as best director.

Jerome Robbins: Dance Training and Choreography Style Part II

 

While Robbins was working in musical theater, he continued to create works for the concert stage and formed his own experimental ballet company called Ballet U.S.A. In 1969, Robbins left theater work and returned to the New York City Ballet after a ten-year leave of absence. It was a prolific period, and he created twenty-two new ballets in the 1970s alone, including many that are still in the company's repertory, such as The Goldberg Variations and Dances at a Gathering. After Balanchine died in 1983, Robbins continued for a while as artistic director with Peter Martins. Although Robbins officially retired in 1988, he choreographed a solo work in 1994 for Mikhail Baryshnikov called A Suite of Dances. "He would show me one of those combinations that are so his, and so beautiful," says Baryshnikov, "the twists of the shoulder, the open, relaxed steps gradually changing into smaller, more delicate movements."

Robbins's legacy, stresses Nichols, lies not just in the body of work he left behind, but in his contributions to the development of the dance world. "He was constantly working to create a tangible history for dance," says Nichols. Robbins used a percentage of the royalties made from Fiddler on the Roof to support the dance collection at the Library. He played an important role in the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts and set up organizations for dancers' security and health such as the New York City Ballet Emergency Fund. He promoted international dance groups and folk dance and encouraged young choreographers.

Beyond all that, Robbins helped establish a new vocabulary for American dance. "He put a human face and a Yankee accent on classic choreography," wrote critic Clive Barnes for Dance Magazine in 1998. From an exuberant sailor to a stripper with a trumpet, from a New York gang member to a classical soloist, Robbins showcased the movement of Everyman. Robbins said, "The possibilities of the human body are endless. Why not use them all? Why limit ourselves to a set language which, in spite of its good qualities, is no longer fit to express the feelings and problems of today?"

Jerome Robbins: Dance Training and Choreography Style Part I

Robbins, who learned from De Mille as a dancer in Oklahoma!, would go on to make musicals where the leads danced and sang and acted, and the dancing moved the plot as much as the lyrics.

Robbins's innovative approach began with Fancy Free, his 1944 ballet about three sailors on shore leave in New York City during World War II. "What Fancy Free did most impressively," writes dance critic Marcia Siegel, "was to integrate classical and colloquial dances within a context of carefully observed characters. . . . Robbins achieved it for the first time in a contemporary ballet. He gave gesture and the acting of real people the same validity on the concert stage that Fred Astaire gave to dancing in the quasi-realistic milieu of movie romances." Fancy Free was Robbins's first collaboration with the up-and-coming composer Leonard Bernstein, and it played 160 performances in its opening season. The same year, the ballet was transformed into the Broadway musical On the Town and established Robbins and Bernstein as formidable talents in American theater.

In a career that lasted six decades, Jerome Robbins choreographed for Broadway, film, and two major American ballet companies. He developed and choreographed some of the most popular American musicals--West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof--and was sent in to rescue shows on the edge of disaster such as A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Funny Girl. He collaborated with Agnes De Mille, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and George Balanchine, and his protégés, including Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett, would become stars of Broadway.

Gluck-Sandor noticed Robbins's varied talents. "He was eighteen or nineteen at the time. I needed a copy of Hamlet and borrowed his. Besides his notes, the margins were full of music he composed. He was always writing stories. He did wood carving and also drew. He had what you might call a photographic memory. Once he saw something, he could do it backwards."

Robbins was ambitious, and although he danced with the newly formed Ballet Theater and worked in several Broadway shows, he desperately wanted to choreograph. He spent his summers at Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos that was known as a springboard for emerging talent. It was run by Max Liebman, who would go on to produce the television program Your Show of Shows, and brought up entertainers such as Danny Kaye, Imogene Coca, and Carol Channing. At Taminent, Robbins was able to stage his first pieces, among them a version of Thorton Wilder's Our Town, which would go on to Broadway as part of Liebman's Straw Hat Revue in 1939. "Although he received no credit for having choreographed them," writes Long, "he did manage to have his choreographic work presented on a Broadway stage by the time he was twenty." 

Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part VI

Dance
Jerry's large circle of relatives-he had twenty-eight first cousins-provided a number of theatrical and show-business influences. Bob Silverman described some of the other dancers in the family. "My father, Jack Silverman, was a professional ballroom dancer and met my mother at Roseland, when it was a big social place where young people went for ballroom dancing, and they paid ten cents, something like that, for a partner. My Aunt Jean [Davenport] used to go there all the time, and Jean was probably the best dancer of the six sisters. My father-don't ask me how it all came about-found himself as a young man living with two other guys, Bing Crosby and George Raft. Now you gotta get this picture. These three were among the shortest men ever born, like Edward G. Robinson, who was also related to the family. The three, Bing Crosby, George Raft and my father, started out as ballroom dancers. Ten cents a dance....So there was this dancing gift, if you will. And Jerry, of course, knew all about this stuff."
    In fact, Edward G. Robinson had been born Emanuel Goldenberg and was indeed related to Jerry's uncle Benjamin Goldenberg, who had married Lena's sister, Mary, before going into the corset business with Harry. At least one of Jerry's aunts, Jean Davenport, visited with Robinson when he was filming one of his early movies along the Palisades. Jean also played the piano for the silent movie houses in and around Jersey City. But she was the only one of the sisters who displayed such musical talent.

Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part V

His mother's side of the family represented an ideal of conventional family ties that would remain absent in Robbins' life. Aaron and Ida Rips had raised seven children. Lena had five sisters, Anna, Mary, Jean, Gertrude and Francis, and a brother, Jacob, the eldest, who died of appendicitis in 1926, leaving behind a wife and two children. A second brother was said to have died in infancy back in Minsk. The three eldest sisters, Anna, Lena and Mary, and their brothers had been born in Russia. All of the sisters married and raised families of their own. None of them ever divorced (though two were widowed and remarried). Together, they were an aggressive, formidable matriarchal force. Their tight-knit stability and mutual support were later a source of pride and fascination shared by all of their children, including Jerry. Like their parents during hard times, they took in less fortunate family members and loaned them money, with generosity felt as an obligation. They celebrated holidays together and had seder at each other's homes-though they also marked Christmas with an exchange of gifts, perhaps feeling that doing so would help them assimilate into the non-Jewish world.
    Jerry's cousin, Bob Silverman, pointed out one area where the sisters may have been lacking. "None of them had a sense of humor....You can't say any one of them was witty or verbal. They were all very middle-class Jewish women, busy raising their families, living extremely conventional lives, as the second-generation children often had to do."
    Of the six sisters, Lena was the dominant one. She ruled the roost in her own household and usually prevailed over the others with her strong will and practical intelligence. Sonia suggested that her mother played the role of family martiarch "very much like Ida Rips," and remembered that "in our culture, women had to be strong." According to Silverman, who later became a successful composer and publisher, "Jerry often talked about writing a book or play about the six sisters....Lena was the man in the family. She wore the pants, she made the decisions. When some decision had to be made and the sisters got together, that would have been Lena organizing things like that. When the family got together, it was often at Lena and Harry's place out in Jersey. They had the largest apartment, and they were seemingly making a bit more than the rest of us during those years."

Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part IV

  According to friends and family, he made no secret early on that he deplored being Jewish and poor and from what he saw as the wrong side of the tracks, although his family never descended to poverty even in the depths of the Depression. Many decades later, in one scene of his autobiographical Poppa Piece, Robbins depicted himself mocking his Hebrew tutor behind his back. Like many of his peers, he was caught between two worlds, that of the largely conservative Jewish community and that of mainstream America with all of its lures and temptations. Though the latter would win, he would still feel the conflict keenly for the rest of his life.
  During an interview in the 1940s, Robbins remembered the town as "about three blocks deep and nine wide...grubby, ugly and uninspiring." His opinion softened with the nostalgic hindsight of later years. Looking east from 57 Hudson Place, where his parents rented an apartment, the skyline of Manhattan was visible. At night, the lights would beckon, exciting his imagination. Family lore includes affectionate tales of him dancing on the rooftop and giving puppet shows in the front windows of the apartment. "We were the same age," said Viola Zousmer."We were brought up together. At seven years old, we went up on the roof, two kids, and Jerry climbed on the edge of the roof and said, 'Come on, join me. I'm a bird.' I said, 'Oh no, not me.' Seven years old, and he was a daredevil."

Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part II

The neighborhood at the edge of Carnegie Hill and what is now Spanish Harlem was then largely Jewish. More than fifty other families lived in the building, all of them immigrants representing the stratified Jewish world of Europe, with Germans at the top and Russians, Poles and Hungarians at the bottom. Harry's younger siblings, Samuel and Ruth, also lived in the apartment and worked in the deli, as would Harry's future wife, Lena, and her sister, Jean. Harry would prove himself an able provider, but by the time Jerome was born, the inherited dream of success had magnified beyond anything his lower middle-class father might have imagined. Like many of his generation, Jerry would embrace the idea of putting as much social distance as possible between himself and his origins.

 At the age of twenty-four, Harry Rabinowitz had married Lena Rips, who lived just across the river in Jersey City. The nuptials took place on February 9, 1911. Cousin Viola Zousmer recalled, "Lena was my mother's best friend and introduced her to Harry. My mother's name was Honey Zousmer. My mother and Jerry's father were first cousins." Lena, the bride, was two years younger than her husband, and, according to relatives, she soon proved herself opinionated and outspoken on all domestic matters. She was also ahead of her husband in education, having graduated from high school and spent two years at a college in Des Moines, Iowa, and unlike her husband, she spoke English with perfect diction. On June twenty-seventh of the following year, Lena gave birth to their first child, Sonia.

The marriage made for a large extended family with strong ties to the Old World and the old ways. The Rips clan had immigrated from Minsk in the early 1890s and settled in the largely Jewish, Hudson City district of Jersey City, an area known as "the Heights." The family was devoutly Orthodox. Lena's father, Aaron Rips, worked as a cutter in the garment trade and later owned a candy store. He was also a founder of the local synagogue, Congregation Mt. Sinai. Lena's mother, Ida, helped establish the first Hebrew school in the district. She was a member of Hadassah and first director of the Hebrew Home for Orphans and Aged. Jerry's cousin, Jack Davenport, recalled that Ida "was one of the driving forces and founders of the Sherman Avenue Talmud Torah. Grandma Ida Rips was the energy and drive in the Jewish community in Jersey City."

Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part I

He was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz on October 11, 1918, exactly one month before the end of World War I. He came into the world at the Jewish Maternity Hospital (later incorporated into Beth Israel Hospital) at 270 East Broadway, in the heart of Manhattan's Lower East Side immigrant neighborhood. At the time, the Rabinowitz family lived in a large apartment house at 51 East Ninety-seventh Street, at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue. The birth could have taken place at nearby Mt. Sinai Hospital, but Jerome's mother and father, Lena and Harry Rabinowitz, favored a Jewish hospital that provided kosher food and Yiddish-speaking doctors.

  From his earliest days, Jerome was called "Jerry" by family and friends, and according to his sister, Sonia, his middle name, Wilson, reflected their parents' patriotic enthusiasm for the current President. The family name meant literally "son of a rabbi" and was never one that Jerry liked; it marked him as the son of Jewish immigrants, a stigma that he resented in his youth and which he identified with his parents, especially with his father, who retained a thick Yiddish accent and the habits of the Old World.

  Harry (originally Chane) Rabinowitz was born September 11, 1888, and emigrated from his native Russia in 1904 while still a teenager, traveling first to England and then to America. His departure had required subterfuge in order to avoid serving as cannon fodder in the Russian army. Robbins' sister recalled that their father "managed to escape the draft in Russia by being declared dead...which he would have been if he had been drafted." Harry's father, Nathan Mayer Rabinowitz, made his living as a baker, a trade that he passed on to his children. His wife, Sara Luniansky Rabinowitz, had apparently died relatively young. As an elderly widower, Harry's father remained behind in the village of Rozanka, a tiny rural community in the province of Vilna near the shifting Russian-Polish border. As was common for such impoverished Jewish families, the Rabinowitz clan emigrated one at a time. The first to leave was Harry's oldest brother, Julius, who established himself in Manhattan and later arranged passage for the others-first Harry, and eventually two more brothers, Samuel and Theodore, and their sister, Ruth.
    The Rabinowitz siblings were part of the great wave of Jewish immigrants who came to this country to escape the pogroms and outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence that were occurring throughout Eastern Europe. The world of the shtetl was one of privation and miseries endured. A familiar adage of the shtetl was the heartfelt lament, "If God lived here, His windows would be broken." For a poverty-stricken community increasingly under siege, religious faith served as both a solace and essential bond. But in the New World, faith was coupled with a practical ambition for material success, a dream now at least within reach for the uprooted Rabinowitz family.