Vernon DukeVernon Duke (1903-1969), accomplished composer of modern
classical music and important contributor to the Great American Songbook
("April in Paris," "Autumn in New York," "I Can't Get Started," etc.), was born
in the former Russian Empire asVladimir Dukelsky and fled war-torn Ukraine
with his family in 1919. In Passport to Paris, he chronicles, with
characteristic wit and verve, his childhood, his escape to Istanbul, and his
life in exile until 1955. The memoir is a unique document of 20th-century
musical history and of the émigré experience. The poems he wrote in California in the 1960s, here translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, offer a
glimpse of the last happy decade of his life.