Hollywood Double Agent (Beach Reads)

Boris Morris appears to have been born on New Year's Day in 1891 in the town of Bobruisk in what is now southern Belarus.

Boris comes from a pretty humble Jewish household, and Jews had dim prospects in Bobruisk at this time, to put it mildly, so his family wants out.

And in a way, it's his mother who engineers an escape for them, right? So how does she do it?

Well, at the time, to be Jewish in that part of the world, you didn't have many prospects.

The Tsar at the time had very severely anti-Semitic policies.

So basically, if you wanted to make it, you had to either be in forestry, and that was not really going to work for most Jewish families, or you had to somehow get out and be able to go to a secular high school called a gymnasium, which would lead to

university.

What Boris's mother did was bought him a miniature-sized cello, and he turned out to have been a great musician.

This is something you see actually with a lot of people from his time and place and his ethnic and religious community.

A lot of the great 20th century musicians in classical music ended up being able to stay in what became the Soviet Union.

because there are talents on the violin or the voice or the piano.

So she gave him a cello, and he learned how to play it, and it turned out he was a child prodigy.

He was an expert very soon, and he was able to make tours, local tours with his father.

And eventually he was able to gain admission to the conservatory in St. Petersburg.

At the time, Jews were not allowed to live in St. Petersburg except under special circumstances.

And one of those was if you were going to the music conservatory.

So his mother was able to get back on Boris' talents, was able to get the entire family, that's eight people, to live in St. Petersburg at a time when that would have been really, really difficult.

So from a very early age, people were depending on Boris.

It's lucky they had at least one child prodigy in the household, right? So after completing his education at the conservatory in St.

Petersburg, Boris wins the honor of performing for what I think we can call a VIP in the Russian empire.

Who is he playing for and what is Boris's life like when he's got this gig?

Well, before we get into that, it's important to understand that most of this information that we have, we only know from Boris himself.

It's impossible to confirm any of this information, including did he really go to the St. Petersburg Conservatory? I did the research, looked at the list of students at the time.

He's not on the list of students, but that doesn't mean he didn't study there.

He very well might have studied with a private tutor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.