Billy Joel: Yeah. My father was a classically trained pianist. He grew up in Nuremberg, Germany, and he also went to school in Switzerland. His father was quite well off. They had a mail-order textile business, Joel Macht Fabrik, so he had to learn to play the piano. It was a very musical family. He could play Chopin. He could play all the great stuff. He should’ve become a musician. He became an engineer. He worked for G.E. and then he was in promotion, but he was never really happy because he didn’t become a musician.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120806054134/http://www.wnyc.org:80/shows/heresthething/2012/jul/30/transcript/
William Martin Joel was born in the Bronx on May 9, 1949,[9] and was raised in a Levitt house in a section of Hicksville, New York, that was located in the town of Oyster Bay.
Joel's father, Howard (born Helmuth) Joel, a classical pianist, was born in Germany, to a Jewish family, the son of a merchant and manufacturer, Karl Amson Joel. Howard emigrated to Switzerland and later to the US (via Cuba, as immigration quotas for German Jews prevented direct immigration at the time) to escape the Nazi regime.[10] Joel's mother, Rosalind, was born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents, Philip and Rebecca Nyman originally from England. Rosalind and Howard Joel divorced in 1957. Howard Joel moved to Vienna, Austria. Billy Joel has a sister, Judith, and a half-brother, Alexander Joel, a classical conductor in Europe, who was the chief musical director of the Staatstheater Braunschweig from 2001 to 2014.[11][12]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Joel
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