The old man may have grieved the loss of his songs to the public domain, but much of his catalog had made that journey years before, migrating from Tin Pan Alley straight into national lore. Now the songs were leaving him: in 1982, 'Marie from Sunny Italy,' his first published number, written when Irving Berlin was still Izzy Baline, a nineteen-year-old singing waiter in a Chinatown saloon in 1984, 'My Wife's Gone to the Country (Hurrah! Hurrah!),' his first hit in 1986, 'Alexander's Ragtime Band,' his career-making smash, whose clarion opening line - 'Come on and hear' - announced not just the arrival of a national troubadour but a young country's liberation from Victorianism and swaggering emergence into the century it would claim as its own. His ownership of those songs had been as tightfisted as the law would permit he frostily refused permission to reprint his lyrics even to friends working on fawning tributes. During the last several of his 101 years, Berlin faced a peculiar indignity: watching the copyrights expire on his earliest published songs. Irving Berlin was born in the nineteenth century and nearly outlived the twentieth. All the same, I hope that the tune I am about to hear is not Bing Crosby's 'White Christmas'.Goodbye, cruel world! - KURT VONNEGUT, Mother Night Too bad that I, like my father, unlike my musical mother, am tone-deaf. They say a hanging man hears gorgeous music. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin.'White Christmas.' - PHILIP ROTH, Operation Shylock By Jody Rosen Scribner Copyright © 2002 Jody Rosen

White Christmas by Jody Rosen