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What was it like to grow up as the daughter of Leonard Bernstein, chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, composer of West Side Story, television star, humanitarian, and one of the 20th century’s most influential and charismatic celebrities? That is the intimate, deeply moving, often funny, and bravely honest story that his eldest daughter, Jamie Bernstein, will share with us in an Amram Scholar Series lecture on Sunday, January 5 at 10:30 am at Temple.
In this centennial year of her dynamic father’s birth, Bernstein’s newly published book, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein, explores the emotional complexity of her childhood and gives us a glimpse into her family’s private world. A glittering circle that included illustrious friends like the Kennedys, John Lennon, Stephen Sondheim, Mike Nichols, and Lauren Bacall, it was a luxurious yet suffocating environment. At the center, her sometimes troubled but always larger-than-life father taught Jamie to love the world in all its beauty but made it difficult for her to discover her own identity.
“The author grew up wriggling inside a paradox, struggling to become a self when so much of her was defined by her brilliant parent,” said The New Yorker in a review that described the book as providing a “startling inside view…encompassing family love, Jewish-American style, with all its glories and corrosions. No one lives easily on the slopes of a volcano; Jamie Bernstein has been faithful to her unease. Truth-telling, rather than dignity, is her goal.”
Jamie Bernstein comes to Washington Hebrew through a partnership with the Jewish Book Council.