Natalia Sazonova
Ed. The anchor of the Mediterranean, Naples 2008
pagg.149
The author, historian and screenwriter, in this book with the preface by Professor Elena Dundovich, narrates the life of Eddie Rosner, German Jew, born in Berlin on May 26, 1910, whose real name, however, was Adolf and who began "His brilliant career as a trumpet player in 1928 when he joined the Weintraubs Syncopators, the legendary Berlin orchestra of the time," and where he assumed the pseudonym of Jack, a name that accompanied him for 10 years, until 1938.
During these years, already famous for his number in which he played two trumpets at the same time, he enchanted Marlene Dietrich and measured himself against Armstrong who, after the competition, christened him the white Armstrong. His fame spread throughout Europe and also in Poland, "Where he moved to the rampant anti-Semitism in Germany and founded the Jack band, the first Polish national jazz orchestra."
After the capitulation of Warsaw, on 28 September 1939, the Nazi troops entered the city on 1 October and began the raids. Eddie, then, going to the Gestapo headquarters, passing himself off as a German citizen residing in Poland and eager to join the Wehrmacht to serve his homeland, managed to obtain a Petty Officer uniform and, thus disguised, together with his wife and mother-in-law , crossed the border, reaching Bialystock, a city in Belarus occupied by the Red Army. Here, recognized by one of his great admirers, the "First secretary of the Belarusian Communist Party, Panteleimon Ponomarenko, was commissioned to organize the first national jazz orchestra in Belarus." Eddie was in fact the pseudonym that he assumed in 1939, in Belarus. So it was that the name Eddie Rosner somehow became synonymous with orchestra.
In the spring of 1941, while on tour for the army, he was asked to go with his orchestra to Soci, a seaside resort on the Black Sea. After a few days of stay, the orchestra was ordered to prepare for play. This happened in a theater with an apparently empty audience. A few days later Eddie received a phone call from the Kremlin, where the "boss" compliments were reported to him. In the room that day, Stalin was present who, evidently, had appreciated the performance. The orchestra moved to the Ministry of Defense and had to move to Moscow.
On June 22, 1941 the USSR entered the war. The Luftwaffe began to bomb Soviet territory. Eddie, with his orchestra, was transferred to Frunze, Kyrgyzstan. Here, since many musicians left for the front, he lost some of his best elements. Subsequently, Pomarenko had a sleeping car made available to the orchestra, with the task of "To travel, despite the war, all the republics of the USSR to play jazz." It was always thanks to Pomarenko that Eddie's career was on the rise again, so much so that he was nicknamed the "Golden Trumpet".
At the end of the war, in 1945, the government offered him the great privilege of performing on Red Square. Less than a year later "The Politburo launched a campaign against cosmopolitanism and western influence in general." It was a campaign that concerned both the ideological and art spheres. "The term jazz was banned and instruments such as saxophone, cornet and accordion were officially banned."
Eddie Rosner, having lost the opportunity to request repatriation as a foreign citizen thanks to the "law of return", made the mistake of going directly to the Polish embassy in Moscow to return to Warsaw.
"In Lviv, where in the meantime he had moved pending a visa, he was arrested on November 28, 1946." Assigned to Lubyanka, he was tortured for seven and a half months until he signed a bogus confession where he declared himself a foreign spy.
"Sentenced on the basis of article fifty-eight as an enemy of the people, he was transferred to the Chabarovsky lager, in the heart of western Siberia, more than seven thousand kilometers from Moscow." Eddie Rosner became a zek, a deportee. "According to some zeks, who had known Hitler's camps, the Stalinist camps were replicas of the Nazi ones, but without gas chambers." Eddie's fame, however, preceded him and so he was given the task of organizing the Chabarovsk Gulag band, consisting of two saxophones, a trombone, a guitar, an accordion, two violins, a clarinet and a drummer. "Despite his professional shortcomings, the pitiful Gulag band soon became incredibly popular."
After three years, at his request, Eddie was transferred to Kolyma - the largest gulag in the Soviet Union, which, due to the high mortality rate, was called the Soviet Auschwitz - with the hope of being able to see his wife and daughter. Here, thanks to the theater of Magadan, capital of the gulag empire, Eddie, like thousands of other zeks, survived. In fact, he played many times both in this theater and in the dismal fields of Kolyma, saving the life of his orchestras. "What interest drove the direction of the fields to have their own theater? [...] The zeks, these slaves of the twentieth century, were used to satisfy the manic taste for the arts of their tyrants. As once the servants were to entertain the Russian aristocrats, so the prisoners of the gulag had the mission of embellishing the daily lives of their torturers. " On March 5, 1953 Stalin died. In the summer of 1954 Eddie Rosner returned to being a free man but “Jazz was still a clandestine art for a long time. Jazz records were nowhere to be found in the official market. Unfortunately it was unthinkable to legally record that kind of music. [...] In the absence of vinyl, a material that was expensive and nowhere to be found at the time, the Soviet sound technicians had found a replacement support, medical radiographs. So forbidden music affected those unusual anatomical visions. ”
He resumed playing and became one of the most popular musicians of Soviet varieties, one of the most applauded and most loved men, the richest. He had become the Tsar. In the Soviet Union, where he could not go far, he met Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Indeed, with Nixon's visit to the Soviet Union in April 1959 and, above all, with that of Khrushchev a few months later, the climate for Soviet musicians seemed to change. “But as would have happened in other fields of Soviet culture, the new openings were short-lived. The arrival of Brzzev in power in 1965 sanctioned the return to a not too veiled neo-Stalinism. "
Eddie was fired from the Hermitage theater and went to conduct a small philharmonic in Belarus. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he applied for expatriation, which was granted to him in 1972, to move to Berlin. “In the USSR, a citizen who leaves abroad against the will of the regime, is automatically registered on the list of traitors of the country, and deprived of all his possessions. If he is an artist, everything is even more cruel and complex: the authorities do everything to erase his name from history. " And so it was with Eddie Rosner. The Ministry of Culture, in fact, gave orders to block the production of its discs and to send those that were on the market to the pulp. He also had all his recordings demagnetized in the archives of television and radio. There was nothing left of his passage over there. "Eddie Rosner died in misery and in complete anonymity in Berlin on August 8, 1976."
Gianlorenzo Capano
