Peggy Stone

Peggy Stone (born March 19, 1907 in Berlin ; died October 16, 2009 in New York ; née Rosa Goldstein ) was a German-American jazz pianist and diseuse who first became known in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Live and act

Rosa Goldstein was born as the third daughter of Natascha Gottlieb (from Riga) and the Bialystok textile merchant Jakob Goldstein on March 19, 1907 in Berlin. This is where the parents and their two older daughters Sonja and Hella had fled from an impending pogrom. In 1908 the family returned to Białystok .

Moscow / World War II and October Revolution

From 1914 the Goldsteins lived in Moscow , where Peggy received classical piano training at the age of seven in a music school for gifted people. After the October Revolution of 1917, when the Communist Bolsheviks came to power, the wealthy “bourgeois” family was threatened. Natascha Goldstein and the three girls flee back to Bialystok, which was occupied by the Germans during the First World War (August 13, 1915 to November 11, 1918). The father never got out of Moscow and was missing for four years. In 1922 Jakob Goldstein met his family again in Berlin, where his wife and daughters had since moved.

Weimar Republic

At twelve, Rosa Goldstein was nicknamed "Peggy" (because of her talent for dance, singing and acting and her resemblance to the American child actress Peggy Montgomery ). In 1927/28 she gained her first stage experience: in suburban cinemas in Berlin, while changing roles, as a Josephine Baker imitation, in a revue of the Theater des Westens as a choir girl and as an extra in two silent films - "Fräulein Else" with Elisabeth Bergner in the leading role and " The Road of Lonely Souls ”with Pola Negri . Both films directed by Paul Czinner , Bergner's husband. In 1928 Peggy turned to light music and founded the duo "Lil and Peggy Stone" (also: the Stone Sisters), two women at two pianos. With her first partner, Laelia Rivlin, she was discovered and promoted by Kurt Robitschek , co-founder of the cabaret of comedians (KadeKo). With current hits, jazz improvisations and a potpourri in several languages, 'Lil and Peggy Stone' could be seen on all important cabaret stages in Western Europe and Scandinavia, including the Mascotte, the Moulin Rouge , the Scala, the Tivoli, the Trocadero and the Wintergarten.

Peggy's first husband was the Polish violinist and concert master at Westdeutsche Rundfunk AG ( WERAG ), Bronislaw Mittmann. They married in Berlin and lived in Cologne from October 1932 until the National Socialists came to power .

National Socialism and Emigration

When Mittmann was pressured by WERAG to voluntarily resign, the couple emigrated to Sweden in the late summer of 1933. After her divorce from Mittmann, Peggy gave concerts in Moscow in 1935/56 with her third partner (the second was Joa Jeckert), the jazz pianist Bella Smoljanski. Then "Lil and Peggy Stone" went on a tour of the Caucasus as guest stars of the jazz theater band of Leonid Utjossow, one of the most popular entertainers, pop singers and band leaders in the Soviet Union.

On September 23, 1936, Peggy married for the second time: her cousin Alexander Silberblatt from Bialystok, son of the textile manufacturer Chone Silberblatt (the family company was called "Silberblatt und Filip"). When the Red Army marched into Bialystok in 1939 and was threatened with arrest, Alexander Silberblatt and his brother Moissej fled in the direction of Wilno to apply for an exit visa and then to catch up with Peggy. However, the brothers were betrayed to the Bolsheviks and sentenced to labor camps and exile in Siberia. Peggy went into hiding and made her way to Moscow.

The Nemerowitsch-Danchenko studio introduced her to Natalja Konchalowskaja (poet and wife of Sergei Michalkow , the author of the new Soviet anthem), who worked out a repertoire in Russian for her. When the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Peggy was in danger due to her status as a Russian abroad. A helper in need was Sergej Tschemadanow, an engineer friend who worked in a meat canning combine. When the evacuation order for the combine was issued in October 1941, he passed Peggy off as his "fiancée" and obtained permission to take her away.

First, the combine in Omsk was rebuilt. Peggy worked as a painter of war propaganda posters ("Okna TASS"). After a few weeks, because of the onset of harsh winter, we went on to the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Republic.

In November 1942 Peggy Stone was hired as a guest star of the Chernivtsi Jazz Orchestra under the direction of Herrmann Hönigsberg, a classically trained violinist who is well known in Romania. The orchestra fulfilled its troop support assignment and toured from Novosibirsk to Vladivostok and back to Sverdlovsk. They performed in munitions factories, played in the open fields for flight pilots, in small officers' clubs and in large underground hospitals of the Red Army.

Shortly before the end of the war, in the spring of 1945, Peggy Stone fled with the three Hönigsberg brothers Hermann, Ernst and Max, first to Czernowitz (Russian-occupied Romanian territory) and in spring 1946 to Bucharest .

post war period

In 1950 Peggy and Hermann Hönigsberg, meanwhile married, emigrated legally to Israel . Here Peggy found her sister Hella and brother-in-law Jakob Chasidov. Chasidov, a staunch Zionist, took part in the Israeli War of Independence as an officer and then renamed himself Ben Atar (Hebrew: son of the crown, mother's maiden name). In the young state of Israel, Peggy and Hermann had little opportunity to earn a living. The country is still too poor, the economic situation is too tense due to the wave of refugees from Europe and Jewish immigrants from all over the world, too few top hotels and entertainment theaters where they could have performed.

In 1953 the Hönigsbergs embarked on their last departure: to New York to see Peggy's eldest sister Sonja and brother-in-law Alexander Knischinski (now Americanized "Kenn"), who had fled to France with their two children in 1933 and finally came to the USA from Marseille . In New York, Hermann Hönigsberg performed with a handpicked orchestra first in the restaurant of the Hotel Waldorf and later got a permanent job in the noble restaurant "Monsigneur", where Aristotle Onassis and the young Elizabeth Taylor frequented. Peggy started from scratch as a copyist in the fashion industry. She worked her way up to become a designer in Ida Lehmann's studio, whose clients included famous designers such as Oleg Cassini and Oscar de la Renta.

Hermann Hönigsberg died in 1980 in a New York hospital. His wife outlived him by nearly three decades. Peggy "Stone" Hönigsberg died on October 16, 2009 after two strokes at the age of 102 in her New York apartment.

literature

• Regine Beyer: evening dress and felt boots. The jazz pianist and Diseuse Peggy Stone. Berlin: AvivA Verlag 2010. ISBN 978-3-932338-42-7 .
• Barbara von der Lühe: The music was our salvation! The German-speaking founding members of the Palestine Orchestra. With a foreword by Ignatz Bubis. Series of scientific papers by the Leo Baeck Institute, Volume 58. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1998. ISBN 978-3-16-146975-6 .
• Birgit Bernard, Stefan Kames, Hans-Ulrich Wagner: Media and music journalism in Cologne around 1933. Contributions to the history of music in the Rhineland. Volume 166. Berlin: Merseburger Verlag 2005. ISBN 978-3-87537-306-6 .

Web links

• Peggy Stone visited Berlin in 2002
• Peggy Hönigsberg remembers the golden twenties