Orchestra of Exiles: The Story of Bronislaw Huberman. The Israel Philharmonic, and the One Thousand Jews He Saved from Nazi Horrors

Orchestra of Exiles: The Story of Bronislaw Huberman. The Israel Philharmonic, and the One Thousand Jews He Saved from Nazi Horrors by Josh Aronson & Denise George  384 pages

I love the cover of this book---very dramatic with its string of barbed wire and Bronislaw Huberman playing his violin. I probably would have picked it up even if one of its authors, Josh Aronson, hadn’t had a book signing at the St. Louis Public Library. His presentation was wonderful.

I had never heard of Huberman until that night in January 2017. Aronson’s description of the great violinist birth reverberated in my soul. It seems that the elder Mr. Huberman had always dreamed of being a violinist. When his dream was thwarted, he decided that one of his sons would play. Immediately after Bronislaw’s death, his father looked at his hands and declared him a violinist.

Beginning when the lad was five or six years old, his childhood ended. His father demanded that he practice four to five hours a day. Luckily from him, Bronislaw was a prodigy. Be the time he was 14, he was playing concert stages around the world to great applause. He was making the money that his father demanded.

Bronislaw was a quirky, sickly little dude, but that didn’t stop his father from pushing him, and pushing him, and pushing him. Abuse takes many forms, and Bronislaw endured the verbal attacks of his father. But this is more than just a tale of child. It’s the story of how being that driven created its own dreams.

I think Bronislaw was a tad psychic. He felt that the Great War would happen and was sure that another one would occur. As he watched Adolph Hitler ascend in Germany, he keenly felt the upcoming horrors Hitler would impose on the Jews. Interestingly, Bronislaw considered himself first a violinists, second a Pole, and third a Jew.

As he watched Hitler deconstruct Germany’s culture. He vowed to create an orchestra in Palestine, a place where Jews were fleeing to at such an alarming rate that the world should have noticed that something evil was occurring in Germany.

Bronislaw worked tirelessly to get money, certificates, a rehearsal hall, and the musicians Hitler had fired get out of Germany. He pushed himself on world tours, speeches; he would do whatever it took to get someone to listen. He pushed himself to the brink of a breakdown several times before December 26, 1936, when the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra played its first concert in Tel Aviv, conducted by Maestro Arturo Toscanini.

One thing I didn't understand was how the number 1,000 wsa chosen. On opening night of the IPO, there were 71 musicians who had abandoned Nazi Germany. Not sure how the authors arrived at that figure, but Orchestra of Exiles: The Story of Bronislaw Huberman. The Israel Philharmonic, and the One Thousand Jews He Saved from Nazi Horrors is fascinating look at a story that had been largely forgotten, but shouldn’t be. This work receives 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France.

 A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France by Miranda Richmond Mouillot 288 pages

The cover and the title of Miranda Richmond Mouillot’s memoir intrigued me the most about reading, A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France. A fifty-year silence sparked my imagination about what kind of silence it could be, was or how was it resolved, and what could have led to it in the first place. Would there be a happy ending?

Come to find out, Mouillot was as intrigued as I about the silence. The back cover explains that in 1948 Anna and Armand bought a house together in the South of France. Five years later, Anna leaves France for the United States, taking only their children and a typewriter. “Aside from one brief encounter, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, never remarried, and never revealed what had divided them forever.” This reader wanted to know what was so horrible that separated two people for the remainder of their lives.

Mouillot is very close to her grandmother, Anna, and semi-close to grandpa Armand. She can’t get their relationship out of her mind, and eventually goes to France to see the house the family still owns. She takes a leave of absence from her job and goes in quest of her grandparents’ marriage. She has a year to complete her task; a year to write a book about her grandparents’ lives. I never really understood what drove her to undertake this, but only that she wanted to write about it.

The house is a dilapidated, uninhabitable ruin. Yet, Mouillot is undeterred. She finds housing nearby and undertakes restoring what little is left. Her grandmother won’t talk on the phone, so the two write letters. Readers are given snippets of what appears to be long letters that sometimes make sense and sometimes don’t.

Mouillot has spent a considerable amount of time with her grandfather, especially when she was sent to a nearby boarding school. It’s unclear if Armand is living in France or Switzerland. But now that she is back, she tries to get him to talk about his life, yet Armand is reluctant.

There are so many unanswered questions. Like were Anna and Armand ever truly married. Or divorced?  In the five years they were together, most of that was spent apart as WWII raged across Europe. Armand was sent to a concentration camp, and survived; survived enough to become a translator during the Nuremberg Trials. The question of his citizenship is discussed, which I found strange. Surely he had to be a legal citizen in the county of birth.

What appealed to me about A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France is two-fold. First, Mouillot tries to understand her grandparent’s relationship; a relationship hampered by survivor guilt. In my mind, she never unravels or gets to the heart of the couple’s revulsion to each other. That makes this work truly realistic. Second, the story is as equally about Mouillot. It’s about her relationship with her grandparents, which becomes quite tender when Armand begins to suffer from dementia. And it’s about her relationship with her past, a legacy of survivor guilt, and her attempts to move forward---a new generation ready, if not totally able, to forget the past and surge ahead.

I give A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France 4 out of 5 stars.

I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review.

Saint Mazie

Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg     336 pages

Mazie Phillips’ story opens in 1907 when she receives a diary for her 10^th birthday. 

Rescued from her abusive parents and poverty in Boston by her sister, Rosie, she is now a New Yorker. Mazie LOVES New York. She loves it streets, the men and women who live there, the air, everything. The diary entries are typical of a developing young lady. As the Jazz Age blossoms, Maize blossoms. The entries are spasmodic until about 1916.

Rosie had married a wealthy man who owns the Venice movie theater. Now Rosie is sick, and Mazie needs to help at the theater. Her brother-in-law, Louis, needs someone who is honest and good with money. Therefore she is put in the ticket cage. She feels like a caged animal.

Mazie knows everyone in the neighborhood---from the bums to the upper lower class. That’s who lives in the Bowery. Then the Great Depression hits. Poverty and homelessness become more widespread. By this time, Mazie owns the Venice and throws it open to those most in need. Oh, she’s still showing the movies, but those who need a warm/cool place to stay for awhile are welcome.

The diary entries continue to be spasmodic and include a chorus of voices that help fill in Mazie’s story. While Attenberg’s story ends in 1939, the “Queen of the Bowery,” as she was known, died in 1961.

I was attracted to this story for two reasons: 1) Supposedly more than 90 years after Mazie began writing in her diary, it’s discovered by a documentarian in search of a good story. However, readers never hear from the movie-maker until the last third of the book.  It didn’t work for me. 2) Maize was a real person living; she was profiled in Joseph Mitchell’s Up in The Old Hotel, a collection of short stories based on real people.

I was never able to get into the plot or the characters. In my opinion, Attenberg wasn’t able to pull off the story. That’s why I’m giving Saint Mazie two out of five stars.