Mad Waltzing - A Biography of Jana Heller

By Lois Roberts

A biography of singer and musician Jana Heller, "Mad Waltzing" charts her life beginning with a childhood of both affluence and adversity in Los Angeles, California. The story follows her professional career, touring with rock bands and as a solo performer throughout the United States and Europe, including 15 years living in London, England. Includes full-colour photographs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312222052

Book preview

Mad Waltzing - A Biography of Jana Heller

MAD WALTZING

A Biography of Jana Heller

Written by Lois Roberts

Copyright © 2014 Jana Heller

All rights reserved

Chunyi Photos Grumbling Ginger TRIO 161 Jana with Dulcimer

INTRODUCTION:

Jana Heller has been a professional performer for over 40 years. What a wonderful life!

She was and is a performer, musician, composer, and actress, and has been totally absorbed in these pursuits for over forty years, the happiest years of her life.

Her performing has taken place all over California, New York State, the East coast, as well as Western Europe, England, Wales, Ireland, and Poland. She has recorded CDs, cassette tapes, and music for TV and radio commercials. Presently she is living and performing on the Monterey Peninsula in California. 

Looking back on a childhood marked by discord, she recalls a responsible, financially generous, and intelligent father, who nonetheless joined her mother in carrying out severe verbal and physical abuse as a means of parental control. Her narcissistic mother apparently found it difficult to enjoy or to express a motherly love for her children, particularly for Jana, the eldest. This biography was prompted by Jana’s wish to record the good years, yet the report must begin here. The pages below trace this parenting, and more importantly her earliest motivation for creativity and entertaining and how the motivation grew as she grew.

THE BEGINNINGS

An attempt to trace Jana’s European ancestors back any further than to those who became immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century bore little fruit. Except for fragments of family history, which Jana could recall (or were supplied by her cousin, Elise Frances Miller), the words below suffice for her parents' roots.  In common with most departing Europe, her forefathers left their native lands for a better life in America. Some, we know, left due to the added impulse of leaving behind the difficulties of being Jewish that existed in Russia and Western Europe.

Her father, Bruce Lawrence Greenberg, was born April 2, 1915 in Kansas City, Missouri.  He was two and a half years younger than his only sister, Tula.  Her mother, Natalie Sandra Frankel, was born April 5, 1924 in Harlem, New York and had one younger brother, Marvin. The search for more about the Greenbergs revealed that her paternal grandfather and grandmother, the émigrés, were Charles Greenberg and Anna Kantor. Her maternal grandfather and grandmother were Mayer Frankel and Yetta Steinberg. The Greenberg ancestors emigrated from the Russian/Polish area of Europe, Charles Greenberg in 1892. However, his father, Hershel, had travelled earlier to America three times, driven by the fact that he had sons and did not want them to serve in the Tsar’s army.  One account tells us that in 1857 he immigrated with son Louis so that Louis would escape the draft, in 1876 with son Jacob for the same reason, and with Charles in 1892. The ultimate exodus was further driven by the fact that he was managing a large farming estate of fifty families. Yet, as a Jew he was not allowed to own land or to be fairly compensated. In the States he bought a 160 acre farm in Atchison, Kansas. Each time Hershel returned to Europe, he found that his wife had died. Each time he returned to the U.S, he had remarried, and he brought a different wife.  At his final exodus, he came with his wife Frieda, the mother of Charles.

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Anna and Charles Greenberg 1958

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Anna and Charles Greenberg 1961

Jana’s maternal great grandparents, the elder Frankels, emigrated from Austria, and Yetta Steinberg, her grandmother, was born in New York City.  Yetta’s family ran a well-known kosher restaurant named Steinberg’s where such luminaries as Albert Einstein were regular customers.  Yetta had relatives associated with the Manischewitz Wine Company and with that wealth at hand, Yetta liked to tell Jana tales of the family eating from solid gold plates. Of more interest here is the claim that Yetta’s grandfather had entertained the King of Austria by playing the clarinet. Jana was named after her great-grandfather, Jonas Steinberg.

Continuing with her heritage in musical performance, it is known that Samuel Kantor, the father of Jana’s paternal grandmother (Anna Kantor) was a well known Jewish cantor and rabbi, after studying music in Vienna, in what today is Belarus. There he wrote music, sang, and led services at the synagogue.  In 1908 Anna Kantor married Charles Greenberg. Before their children were born, Charles and Anna and Anna’s brother Joe toured the Midwest in wagons and trains selling clothing and accessories. To attract customers, Joe played the piano while Anna sang opera and popular songs.  Charles sold his wares. After four years, they began their family. They had two children. Tula, always musical, was born in 1912. She sang and played the piano beautifully. Her parents sent her to college where she majored in music, and she performed with various musical groups throughout her life and well into her eighties.  The Greenbergs sent Bruce to the University of Kansas, where he earned degrees in business and accounting, and then to business graduate school at Harvard University. In order for his parents to pay for his degree, Tula was forced to drop out of college after 2 ½ years. She strongly encouraged Jana in her music, as will be shown ahead.

Upon graduation, Bruce served in the army during World War II as a First Lieutenant. Stationed much of the time in Devonshire, England, he learned to love England, a feeling he passed on to Jana.  After the war he moved to Los Angeles, California where he met

Natalie Sandra Frankel. With his brother-in-law George Friedman, he created The Steward Company, a firm that sold printing presses and graphic arts equipment. Natalie’s father, Mayer Frankel, worked in the Steinberg’s New York City restaurant until he was badly injured in a car accident. Upon recovery, he took his wife Yetta and his children, Natalie (Jana’s mother) and son Marvin, to Coral Gables, Florida. There he entered the real estate business, successfully buying and selling properties.  Eventually he owned the Golf Park Hotel and an entire city block on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. Mayer and Yetta would later spend part of the year in Los Angeles and the rest in Florida, buying properties in both places. In the 1940’s, their daughter Natalie graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in law, enabling her to practice contract law there.

In those days, and perhaps to the present, an organization known as Brandeis served Jewish youth with a gathering camp retreat, one emphasizing Jewish traditions. Natalie, age twenty-three, attended the first retreat or Aliyah held in the hills of Los Angeles County. Friends gave her the names of people to call upon arrival, those who could show her around the city. She contacted Bruce Greenberg. They met for a blind date and married four months later on October 15, 1947. Jana was born nine months later on July 18, 1948.

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Natalie and Bruce 1947

On Jana’s first birthday, the family moved from their Los Angeles apartment at 907 South Kenmore into a house at 325 South Rockingham, Brentwood Park, in West Los Angeles. The house, built in 1947, had a small nursery, maid’s quarters and large front and back yards. 

The house overlooked residential housing and polo fields since developed as Paul Revere Junior High School. Her father referred to this as the Rattery Tract. Jana would spend most of her childhood there. One of Jana’s earliest memories was that of flying on a plane to Florida. She was a year and a half old and visited her mother’s family. When she was older, the family visited New York City for the World’s Fair where she met her Great Grandmother Sadye Steinberg, then in a wheel chair. They all visited Steinberg’s restaurant where she amused her relatives by clearing off her plate after the meal and taking it into the kitchen.

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