Dora Zaslavsky

Dora Zaslavsky Koch (July 18, 1904 – September 9, 1987) was an American pianist who was one of the first graduates and later a teacher of the Manhattan School of Music. She died on September 9, 1987.

Zaslavsky was born in Ukraine in 1904, arriving in the port of New York as an infant on February 22, 1905. Her family was Jewish, from the city of Kremenchuk in the oblast of Poltava. Her father Max had immigrated to the United States the previous year. She was traveling with her mother Celia née Fleisher, older siblings Joseph and Fay, and a young cousin. Another brother Israel (also George) was born six years later. Other sources give Zaslavsky’s birth year as 1905, but this is incompatible with the ship manifest information.

Zaslavsky married New Yorker Herbert S. Schwartz (also Herbert Thomas Schwartz) on September 12, 1927. He was a gifted musician whose mother had hoped he would become a concert pianist, as Zaslavsky’s father had hoped for her. Schwartz, however, chose to pursue a college education rather than continue in music. At the time of their marriage he was beginning his third undergraduate year at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, thinking of becoming a physician. He was accepted into medical school but dropped out after one semester, entering Columbia University the following fall to study philosophy. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the Aristotelian theory of music, graduating in 1933. Zaslavsky and Schwartz were amicably divorced on August 10, 1935, each of them interested in someone else at the time.

It’s not clear just when or where Zaslavsky met her second husband, artist John Koch. He grew up in Ann Arbor, joined the art scene in Paris at age nineteen, and lived there for nearly five years. When he settled in Manhattan in 1934, he already knew Zaslavsky, and was “determined to win her.” They perhaps had met when she and her husband were in Paris during the summer of 1932. Koch stayed first with a friend, then moved to a room next door to the one at 56th & Madison in which Zaslavsky was living with her sister Fay. Koch & Zaslavsky were married on December 23, 1935. Their first apartment was at 865 First Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The bedroom served as his studio; the living room with piano was her studio.