Louis Armstrong. He was wearing David’s Star till the end of his life.

120 years ago, on August 4, 1901, the great jazz musician Louis Armstrong was born. In fact, adopted at the age of seven by a family of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, he wore the Star of David for the rest of his life. The details of this story are below.

One of the most famous musicians of the twentieth century, Louis Armstrong was the grandson of slaves brought to America; he was born and spent his childhood in poverty. He wrote in his memoirs, published in Oxford University Press, how his early years were brightened up and changed by a poor Jewish family.

At the beginning of the last century, along the streets of Storyville, an area of ​​dirty slums of New Orleans, a small black boy ran along with other black kids. His father abandoned the family when the boy was still an infant.

His mother, who gave birth to him at sixteen, tried to feed her son and his little sister by washing floors and prostitution. Sometimes she went “hunting” with her son: she picked up spoiled food thrown out in the market, cut off rot and sold it to unpretentious eateries.

Hopeless poverty reigned in the family. And so, when the boy was six years old in 1907, he met a neighbor, a rag and bone man. “Hey, - he called him once with a funny accent, - do you want to earn a couple of cents? Then help me disassemble this stuff." The junkman was white, but he did not boast of that. His name was Alex Karnovsky, he was a Jew. It was said that his family fled to America from somewhere in Russia. A couple of cents for the work were honestly paid, and the next day the boy again spun hopefully by the junkman's cart.

In the end, he became something like the third son in the Karnovsky family, just for a change – a black one. He traveled with Alex, the eldest son of Karnovsky, through the streets, buying up rags, empty bottles and other rubbish. With another son, Maurice, he sold coal to prostitutes in the evenings, looking embarrassedly at their charms.

In the evening, the family sat down to supper and, as a matter of course, called the assistant: "Now sit down with us at the table and eat as well as you worked." After supper, the old man's wife rocked her baby, singing a Russian lullaby. The black boy sang with her.

He actually did not leave their place, he slept, ate, and watched how they lived amicably. He enjoyed the feeling of family, kindness, affection and care. And he was amazed at the contrast with his fellow tribesmen.

The boy was amazed at how quickly the Jews were able to turn the wreck they had inherited into a small but neat house. How delicious was the food prepared by the junkman's wife. How clean they lived. And most importantly, how hard they worked. No complaints, no whining - and without losing goodwill. They taught him to get up at five in the morning and get to work right away.

Sixty years later, he will write: I admire the Jewish people. Their courage, especially against the background of what they had to endure. I was only seven years old, but I perfectly saw how ungodly the whites treated this family. Even blacks were treated better. On the whole, black people had more opportunities. But we are lazy - and still are.

One day the rag and bone man gave him a tin pipe. The boy played it selflessly. The Karnovskys glanced at each other: "Here the Lord has given talent." And the pipe was replaced by a trumpet. The trumpet cost five dollars. Part he saved up, part was given by the junkman. It was old, secondhand, darkened - but real. That boy was Louis Armstrong!

In his memoirs, this world famous trumpet player and singer will write that he learned that Karnovsky was also persecuted by other white people who believed they were better than the Jewish people. "I was seven years old, but I could not help but notice how those other white people mistreated the Jewish family for which I worked," Armstrong wrote. Thanks to this family of Jewish immigrants, he was fluent in Yiddish until the end of his days and wore a chain with the David’ Star around his neck.

The Karnofsky Family was subsequently best known in New Orleans for the Karnofsky Project, a charity that donated musical instruments to children "who otherwise would not have been able to learn the wonderful experience of learning music."

And it may not be accidental that Armstrong began his ascent to all-American, and then to world fame and recognition in the bars of the most Jewish neighborhood of New York in Queens, where the first and only museum in the world dedicated to this outstanding musician of the 20th century was created.