Los Angeles–based writer Tim Turner was recently overwhelmed with excitement in seeing the response to his historical fiction novel, The Reluctant Conductor, at the 2024 Milford Readers and Writers Festival in Milford, Pennsylvania. After his talk, attendees launched into debates about current issues surrounding Ukraine and Israel. For him, it was an amazing discussion but one he could have never predicted when he started the project nearly 13 years ago. “It’s just uncanny,” Turner says. “The only explanation is bashert, the Yiddish word for meant to be.”
Turner’s book follows the plight of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe between 1922 and the end of World War II. It is filled with devastating scenes of antisemitism, forced migration, and the USSR’s strategy to control the region (notably the breadbasket country of Ukraine). But its sudden relevance to today’s geopolitical climate is not the only surprising thing about The Reluctant Conductor;there is also the fact that Turner stumbled onto this sweeping global epic completely by chance at his local LA gym.
At the time, Turner was preparing for a trip to Moscow by reviewing Berlitz tapes and putting them into practice whenever he ran across Russian speakers in his neighborhood. One of those people ended up being his future writing partner, Moisey Gorbaty. Gorbaty was so impressed with Turner’s simple Russian good morning (“He had never heard an American make any attempt to speak Russian,” Turner says), that he offered to tutor Turner in the language.
“When he learned I was a writer, he just said to me, ‘Oh, you have to write my life story,’” Turner says. After two years of tutoring and learning all about Gorbaty’s fascinating history, the tutor and his student signed a collaborator’s agreement and plunged into the overwhelming world of Gorbaty’s family history in Moldova and the incredible personal stories that culminated with his immigration to the United States.
Once Turner started sifting through taped interviews and Gorbaty’s own rough drafts of writing, he had the impression that he was staring into an abyss of characters, terrifying events, and fascinating perspectives on cultures and borders. “I was just thinking, Wow, this is a story that needs to be told,”Turner says,“but where’s the bottom of this thing?”Turner spent years editing, organizing, and seeking advice from fellow writers before he started excising characters and focusing the first book on one specific figure with a clear narrative arc. That first story revolved around Gorbaty’s maternal grandfather, Elazar Gershovich, who quickly became The Reluctant Conductor.
Kirkus Reviews cites The Reluctant Conductor as “a moving family tale with a strong cast that readers will love,” highlighting the result of the vast material Turner had to work with. The novel opens with Elazar and his family suffering unimaginable horrors during a pogrom that drives Jewish residents in their town to the north of Moldova. There, the young Elazar struggles to find normalcy in music and girls despite a tumultuous world filled with antisemitism. From the very first chapter, Turner blends hope and despair as he builds Elazar’s rich, first-person perspective on the details of daily life, with prose imbued with musicality:
While our family has managed to rebuild our life out here in the heartland of Bessarabia, the big downside for me is there are very few girls my age, and I’ve known all of them since I was a child. I’ve dated several, gone through the usual coming-of-age milestones, but now dating any potential female mate in Kalarash seems incestuous.
In my life there is percussion in day-to-day work, the rise and fall of the sun, the coming [and] going of the seasons. There is rhythm in family, eating meals, and celebrating holidays; but alas, there is no beauty, no high notes, no intimacy…no melody.
Music is a crucial part of both Turner and Gorbaty’s novel and the collaboration that produced it; Gorbaty is a composer who has been working as a piano restorer and tuner since his arrival in Los Angeles. Over the years, Gorbaty began sharing his ideas for music scores for eventual films based on the stories he and Turner were crafting. “I thought, We might be getting a little ahead of ourselves,” Turner says jokingly. But his curiosity about music theory was piqued, and Gorbaty eventually offered to tutor him in piano as well, adding a new dimension to their partnership and the novel. (There are also still several videos of their own musical creations available on YouTube.) “It was really important in enabling me to use music as a metaphor that runs from the first sentence to the very last,” he says.
Turner also cannot wait for readers to discover the role that music will play in future books. Currently, Turner anticipates four complete novels as the story progresses from World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was at that time that Gorbaty fled to Rome and scraped money together for the move to the U.S. by playing the accordion in the subways. “It’s a very cool story and there is so much there…but I don’t want to spoil it,” Turner says of his plans for future installments. “But that movie would really be amazing.”
The Reluctant Conductor is Turner’s first novel, though he is no stranger to writing. Turner got his degree in journalism and mass communications—while also minoring in creative writing, philosophy, and photography—from the University of Northern Colorado, then worked freelance for numerous publications including the publisher American City Business Journals, Money Magazine, Hemispheres, and others. Through another chance encounter that had a big impact, Turner met author and playwright Jerome Laurence while working on a story about the Academy Awards. Hearing about Turner’s artistic ambitions, Laurence encouraged him to pursue playwriting in the graduate program at USC, from which Turner graduated in 1995.
“I was sure I would be on Broadway very soon,” Turner says of his mentality at the time. “But, you know, it’s not so easy.” In the years since, Turner has written six plays—including Out Late (which was produced to acclaim), an original screenplay, and numerous short plays. He also served as the executive director of the Playwrights Group in LA. With TheReluctant Conductor,however, Turner has found something new in the way people are responding to his first foray into fiction as it touches on so many important issues of war and discrimination.
Turner grew up Roman Catholic, with English and German heritage, in Durango, Colorado. Although that childhood seems about as far as one could get from what Gorbaty faced as an ethnically Jewish man in Eastern Europe, Turner saw and felt discrimination in his small conservative community. “If you weren’t a white Christian male, there was a derogatory term for you,” he says, “and God forbid if you happen to be a homosexual.”
As a seasoned traveler who has always been open-minded and fascinated by other cultures, Turner immersed himself in the study of the Jewish religion and the history of violence that plagued the USSR to flesh out Gorbaty’s stories. But while basic facts of violence and border disputes feel like they are happening all over again, Turner points out that the exciting motif within The Reluctant Conductor and its future installmentsis the very personal, unique point of view it offers on these events. “There are no spies.There are no soldiers. It’s not a war story,” Turner says. “We’ve seen that already. This is about family, love, and survival.”
Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.
