Rousseau mini biography george

University years>

Growing up in New York

Two memories punctuate my childhood in Brooklyn: getting up before sunrise to write on empty pads, and entreating my parents to buy me a piano.

By the time they did I had filled many pages with scribbles and doodles.

Jean-jacques rousseau quotes

The piano was a cheap, black upright that cost twenty American dollars, more than they could then afford, but my mother saved up from her weekly grocery allowance to buy me this great gift for my fifth birthday. It was carried up two flights of stairs of a tenement house as the Second World War was ending, at a time when my father – the son of Sephardic Jews who had immigrated from Istanbul to New York - was earning twenty-five dollars a week working as a junior civil servant in Manhattan.

The gift was four-fifths of his week's salary.

By six I was taking weekly piano lessons, encouraged by my parents, and worked my way up to ever-better teachers. Then, at ten, impresario Samuel Chotzinoff heard me play a