Jack Presburg

Jacques Presburg (born Isaäc Jacob Presburg; 26 December 1881 – 5 February 1943) was a Dutch composer of theatre music, pianist, violinist, and conductor. After training as a musician in his native Amsterdam, he was active as a chamber musician and accompanist in England. In 1917 he relocated to the United States and settled in New York City, where he worked as a music educator and a musician in the orchestra of the Rialto Theatre. He co-wrote with Charles Jules, and orchestrated, the music to the musical Oh, What A Girl!, which played in 1919 on Broadway. By 1924, Presburg was again working in England as a pianist at the Pleasure Gardens Theatre. He returned to his native country, where he had a success with the American western-themed operetta Hallo, Californië (Hello, California) which opened in 1926 and played well into 1928 in Amsterdam before touring the Netherlands. He relocated to Berlin, Germany, where he worked under the name Jack Presburg as the band leader of a jazz orchestra. He also made recordings in Germany on the Ultraphon record label using both this name and the pseudonym Jack Burg. With the rise of Nazi Germany he was forced to leave in 1938, because of his Jewish ancestry, and returned to the Netherlands. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 during World War II he was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was killed in 1943.