A captivating story of passion and music.
Biography of a Jewish girl who transcended poverty and prejudice to become an illustrious violin virtuoso.
Flautist Wolf (Musical Gifts or How a Maine Fishing Village Became a Center for Great Music, 2011, etc.), co-founder of Bay Chamber Concerts and former executive director of the New England Foundation for the Arts, grew up hearing tales about his famous grandmother, Lea Luboshutz (1885-1965). Those tales—some incomplete, some contradicted by other family members’ versions of events—piqued the author’s curiosity. Urged by his mother to “tell the story,” he mined boxes of letters and clippings, archival documents, diaries, memoirs, and histories to convey, in a sensitive, perceptive biography, the improbable truth about Luboshutz and her emergence from a tumultuous world. She grew up in Odessa, where Jews were forced to live. Her father, certain that she was a musical prodigy, began violin lessons when she was 4; at the age of 5, she was performing for neighbors and at school. At 8, she won a scholarship for private lessons with a prominent teacher; at 14, she entered the Moscow Conservatory, invited by an influential musician who heard her play in Odessa. Luboshutz’s career, Wolf discovered, was punctuated by “amazing good fortune” in the form of generous patrons who provided money and support, not only to her, but also family members. Among them, none was as significant as Onissim Goldovsky, a brilliant pianist, lawyer, and writer, “a true Renaissance man” who, at the time he met 18-year-old Luboshutz, was 38 and married. She admitted being mesmerized by Goldovsky, and by 1906, she was pregnant with his child. Thereafter, the couple lived together for extended periods and had two more children, while Goldovsky continued to maintain “another domestic reality” with his unsuspecting wife. A scandalous personal life, Russia’s roiling political upheavals, and virulent anti-Semitism did not hinder Luboshutz’s career: Celebrated wherever she performed, she came to the attention of impresario Sol Hurok and immigrated to the U.S. in 1927, where her reputation soared.
A captivating story of passion and music.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-067-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
