Thank you.

George Jackson
Washington D.C., U.S.A.
August 2024

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2024 by Ilona Landgraf

George Jackson, Washington D.C.’s renowned dance reviewer, died on August 5th at the age of ninety-two. Born in Vienna in 1931, his parents put him on a train abroad when the Nazis invaded Austria in March 1938. The family later reunited and moved to Chicago. A microbiologist specializing in parasitology, George researched and taught at the University of Chicago and New York’s Rockefeller University and for many years worked for the FDA in Washington on food safety. “I enjoyed my work as a biologist in itself and also because it sent me traveling around the world so that I saw a lot of dance that otherwise I never would have,” he once wrote to me, but, as earning a living as a dance critic was not a practical option in the U.S.A. (except during the dance boom from the 1960s to 1980s), writing was his “moonlighting and weekend occupation.” His output was enormous, ranging from dance reviews to historical pieces for U.S. and international outlets, among them The Washington Post, The Washington Star, and The Times of London. Although George officially terminated his career as a dance critic in 2012, he continued to contribute reviews to danceviewtimes.com until 2022. Yet his writing focus shifted to fiction, which he published under his birth name, Hans Georg Jakobowicz.

I never met George in person. We communicated by email and, on a single occasion, by phone. But he effectively prompted my writing about dance and this blog. In 2012, after the death of the Stuttgart-based dance critic, Horst Koegler (1927-2012), George contacted me out of the blue. Like George, Koegler had been a regular contributor to danceviewtimes.com and the then-extant Ballet Review as the only German dance critic writing in English about dance in German-speaking countries. George wanted me to translate one of Koegler’s German texts into English (Koegler’s memories about his beginnings as a ballet critic in Berlin in the 50s) and generously offered to edit my translation, though unaware of my limited abilities and the onerous job he had burdened himself with. We plowed through the pages, and, thanks to George, Koegler’s My Berlin was published in Dance Chronicle in 2013. Things could have ended there were it not for George’s ongoing interest in the German dance scene. He wanted someone to fill the gap. Koegler had left and, with me on the hook, George promised expert editing if I took up the pen. Koegler’s footsteps were by far too large for me, but in the autumn of 2012, Ballet Review’s then-editor-in-chief, Marvin Hoshino, printed my first attempt—a book review. One year and several book reviews later, George initiated my first post on danceviewtimes.com. Not a single text went without his editorial polish. In late 2013, George gradually retreated but made sure that one of his friends straightened out my writing. He gently made me swim toward open waters.
We kept in touch via email, but, over the past years, our contact waned as George’s health declined.

Meanwhile, as fighters of the Azov battalion were welcomed on their recruitment tour through Europe and as Germany’s Federal Defense Ministry declared members of the Wehrmacht paragons of the tradition of the Bundeswehr, Nazis have been rehabilitated in Germany. I’m glad that George didn’t notice this. He died peacefully in his sleep.

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