Jamie Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein
By Talya Zax November 30, 2018
Reflecting On Dad, His Legacy, Eccentricities And How He Lives On
Growing up with Leonard Bernstein wasn’t always easy. The conductor and composer was brilliant and loving, but also controlling, inappropriate and so much larger than life that his presence could be suffocating.
Jamie Bernstein, 66, his eldest daughter, gave powerful voice to the experience of having such a remarkable, temperamental father in her memoir “Famous Father Girl,” released this past June. “Sometimes it was purely great to have Leonard Bernstein for a father,” she wrote in an excerpt of the book published in the Forward, remembering the time that Bernstein introduced her to the Beatles. Other times, he was critical and narcissistic. “The hardest feat in the world to pull off was to have a little one-on-one time with Daddy,” she wrote.
In Leonard Bernstein’s centenary year, his daughter’s take on his legacy — affectionate, but upfront about his flaws — added essential depth to global celebrations. She traveled to some of those celebrations, alongside her siblings Alexander and Nina. It was a time that her father would have enjoyed.
“[Those were] some of the best times of our lives,” she said, “going on the road with our dad.”
— Talya Zax
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
