apartment on the top floor of a high-rise overlooking the Mediterranean and told her about his childhood in a concentration camp. His boyhood, which he had described without a trace of sentimentality, reminded her of the grotesque events in a Jerzy Kosinski novel. Then he spoke to her of Jerusalem; he talked about the city the way a man speaks of a woman he loves passionately; he spoke of Hebrew poetry, of arid rocky hills, of deserts and olive groves, of waging wars and song.
She returned to her hotel later that night after he had made love to her and lay awake thinking how he had shattered her world. She thought about the contrast between this country and the comfortable Kansas town where she had grown up, a town defined by order and hygiene, self-righteousness and congeniality; how she had left it behind and set herself adrift among others who, like her, had left behind a great and painful wound. Knowing that home would never be home again. She had toured Europe and played in major cities throughout the United States, and in every city she asked herself, Could I live here? Could I be free here? Could I be happy here? And on she had drifted, until she came to David Zeldin's bed and knew one night of intimacy with an extraordinary man. When she walked onto stage the next day and saw him waiting on the podium, smiling at her, she knew where she belonged.
David was six when he was torn from his mother's arms and herded to the children's barracks in a Polish concentration camp. His mother had fought so fiercely for him that she nearly dislocated his shoulder before the Nazis finally clubbed her unconscious. He never saw her again. Three years later, when his camp was liberated by the Russians, he had no family, no homeland, and no language. The kapos had beaten him whenever he spoke Yiddish or Dutch, and so the only words he comprehended were the hate-drenched German commands he had listened to with fear and humiliation for three years. For weeks after that he lived in the streets, eating rotten garbage and sleeping in rubble, until a priest found him and sent him to an orphanage in France.
It was two years before David learned his father had survived Auschwitz, and in 1948 father and son emigrated to the newly independent Zionist state of Israel, where David's father remarried. Even the Nazis, however, couldn't bash the boy's brilliance out of him—neither his linguistic aptitude (by the time he was at university he spoke seven languages) nor his gift for music. It was his American stepmother who took him out of the kibbutz every Saturday and into Tel Aviv for his violin lessons, an operation that remained clandestine for many years because there was no money to be spent on such luxuries. David kept his violin at the home of a math teacher in the nearby village of Ashdod, and every day after school he walked seven kilometers into the village, where he practiced, then seven kilometers back to the kibbutz to work the rest of the afternoon in the dairy, mucking out the milking stalls. He skipped practice only on holidays and on the day his sister, Simi, was born.
When she was eight months old Simi was massacred along with seventeen other children in a terrorist raid on the kibbutz nursery. Shortly thereafter his family left the kibbutz and moved to Tel Aviv; at that point David's lessons were no longer kept secret from his father. His first composition was an achingly mournful lullaby dedicated to his baby sister.
When Annette met him he was finishing his season in Tel Aviv before taking up the baton as conductor of l'Orchestre de Paris. Although his career was established, personal fulfillment had escaped him. He was forty-three, divorced and childless. The morning he greeted Annette at the airport in Tel Aviv and escorted her to his car, intimations of a future began to trouble him. These thoughts were nurtured during the week as they rehearsed Mendelssohn's and Sibelius' violin concertos, as their music began to meld into
She returned to her hotel later that night after he had made love to her and lay awake thinking how he had shattered her world. She thought about the contrast between this country and the comfortable Kansas town where she had grown up, a town defined by order and hygiene, self-righteousness and congeniality; how she had left it behind and set herself adrift among others who, like her, had left behind a great and painful wound. Knowing that home would never be home again. She had toured Europe and played in major cities throughout the United States, and in every city she asked herself, Could I live here? Could I be free here? Could I be happy here? And on she had drifted, until she came to David Zeldin's bed and knew one night of intimacy with an extraordinary man. When she walked onto stage the next day and saw him waiting on the podium, smiling at her, she knew where she belonged.
David was six when he was torn from his mother's arms and herded to the children's barracks in a Polish concentration camp. His mother had fought so fiercely for him that she nearly dislocated his shoulder before the Nazis finally clubbed her unconscious. He never saw her again. Three years later, when his camp was liberated by the Russians, he had no family, no homeland, and no language. The kapos had beaten him whenever he spoke Yiddish or Dutch, and so the only words he comprehended were the hate-drenched German commands he had listened to with fear and humiliation for three years. For weeks after that he lived in the streets, eating rotten garbage and sleeping in rubble, until a priest found him and sent him to an orphanage in France.
It was two years before David learned his father had survived Auschwitz, and in 1948 father and son emigrated to the newly independent Zionist state of Israel, where David's father remarried. Even the Nazis, however, couldn't bash the boy's brilliance out of him—neither his linguistic aptitude (by the time he was at university he spoke seven languages) nor his gift for music. It was his American stepmother who took him out of the kibbutz every Saturday and into Tel Aviv for his violin lessons, an operation that remained clandestine for many years because there was no money to be spent on such luxuries. David kept his violin at the home of a math teacher in the nearby village of Ashdod, and every day after school he walked seven kilometers into the village, where he practiced, then seven kilometers back to the kibbutz to work the rest of the afternoon in the dairy, mucking out the milking stalls. He skipped practice only on holidays and on the day his sister, Simi, was born.
When she was eight months old Simi was massacred along with seventeen other children in a terrorist raid on the kibbutz nursery. Shortly thereafter his family left the kibbutz and moved to Tel Aviv; at that point David's lessons were no longer kept secret from his father. His first composition was an achingly mournful lullaby dedicated to his baby sister.
When Annette met him he was finishing his season in Tel Aviv before taking up the baton as conductor of l'Orchestre de Paris. Although his career was established, personal fulfillment had escaped him. He was forty-three, divorced and childless. The morning he greeted Annette at the airport in Tel Aviv and escorted her to his car, intimations of a future began to trouble him. These thoughts were nurtured during the week as they rehearsed Mendelssohn's and Sibelius' violin concertos, as their music began to meld into
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