One of America’s greatest pop singers and songwriters invited me to his 18-room duplex co-op on Park Avenue on June 25, 1986, to talk about his roots. Everything in the living room was white, even the grand piano. His family name means tsedaka, Hebrew for justice, charity. He was born in Brooklyn to a Lower East Side father, Mack, whose Sephardic parents came from Istanbul, and a Manhattan mother, Eleanor, whose Ashkenazi parents were Polish/Russian. A mixed marriage.