Satchmo and the Jews

[Mediocrates]

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/vi...the-jews-15265

From news article:

Armstrong’s lack of prejudice extended to Jews, an attitude that was comparatively rare among blacks of his generation. Outside his marriages, his closest adult relationship was with Joe Glaser, a Jewish gangster from Chicago who became his manager in 1935 and with whom he was intimately associated from then on. Armstrong described Glaser as “my dearest friend,” and those who knew both men well agreed that this was nothing more than the truth.

He was similarly admiring of the Karnofskys, a family of Jewish peddlers from Lithuania for whom he had worked as a boy in New Orleans. In 1969 he wrote a lengthy memoir of his relationship with the Karnofskys called “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907.” In it he told of how surprised he had been to discover that they “were having problems of their own—[a]long with hard times from the other white folks[’] nationalities who felt that they were better than the Jewish race. . . . I was only Seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for.”

The young Armstrong saw the Karnofskys’ problems up close, for they took him under their wing, treating him almost like a relative. “They were always warm and kind to me, which was very noticeable to me—just a kid who could use a little word of kindness,” he recalled. He shared meals with them and borrowed money from them to buy his first cornet. Thereafter he would identify with the Karnofskys and the other Jews of New Orleans so closely that he became an ardent philo-Semite who wore a Star of David around his neck (Joe Glaser gave it to him). “I will love the Jewish people, all of my life,” he wrote in “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family,” adding that he learned from them “how to live—real life and determination.”

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One of the most striking aspects of Armstrong’s memoir of the Karnofskys is the explicitness with which it compares their conduct to that of New Orleans’s black community. Armstrong was impressed by the way in which the Jews whom he knew banded together in the face of prejudice, seeking to better their lot through work, and he was dismayed by the contrast with the irresponsibility of the fathers of the black children in his neighborhood. “Many [black] kids suffered with hunger because their Fathers could have done some honest work for a change,” he wrote. “No, they would not do that. It would be too much like Right. They’d rather lazy around + gamble, etc.”

Among the men whom Armstrong had in mind was his own father. Not only did Willie Armstrong refuse to marry Mayann Albert, Louis’s mother, but he left her for another woman on the day his son was born and apparently made no attempt to support Mayann or the two children whom he had by her. Armstrong did not spend any significant amount of time with his father until he was a teenager, and in later years he shunned Willie, whom he regarded with contempt. “Didn’t go to his funeral and didn’t send nothing,” he told a reporter in 1967. “Why should I? He never had no time for me or Mayann.”


Beyond describing Willie as “tall and handsome and well built” in Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, his 1954 autobiography, Armstrong would never have anything good to say about his father. In the same breath that he praised Willie’s looks, he added that “my father did not have time to teach me anything; he was too busy chasing chippies.”
In “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family,” he was franker still:

The next time we heard of him—he had gone into an uptown neighborhood and made several other children by another woman. Whether he married the other woman, we’re not sure. One thing—he did not marry [Mayann]. She had to struggle all by herself, bringing us up.

Armstrong revered Mayann, who did her best to raise him and his younger sister as well as she could. Not so Willie, whom he took as a role model—in reverse. As a boy he worked hard to help feed his family, and as a man he labored no less ceaselessly to perfect the artistry that made him rich and famous. “I think I had a beautiful life,” he told an interviewer in 1970. “I didn’t wish for anything I couldn’t get, and I got pretty near everything I wanted because I worked for it.”