By Eileen Wingard in San Diego
It is most unusual to have an inanimate object as the narrator of a novel. Yet, Yale Strom manages to pull this off with great success in The Autobiography of The Offenbacher, where a fictitious violin, crafted in Offenbach, Germany, in 1779, serves as the narrator of this epic tale spanning Jewish history from the 1700s through the 1900s.
The violin’s narrative traverses Germany, France, Russia, Poland and the Ukraine. It traces the tragedies of Jewish communities during World War I, the pogroms, the Holocaust and post WWII antisemitism. And it incorporates the history of klezmer music and the relationship of
klezmer and Roma musicians.
The first owner of the fictitious violin is actually an historical figure, Rabbi Isaac Eberst, whose son, Jacob Offenbach, became the famous French-Jewish musician, Jacques Offenbach, composer of the opera, Tales of Hoffman and the ballet, Gaîté Parisienne, with its famous Can-Can. Later historical figures mentioned include the great Hassidic rabbi, Levi Yitskhok of Barditshev; the Yiddish song writer Mordechai Gebirtig; the Jewish artist Marc Chagall; the virtuoso violinist Mischa Elman; the Russian-Jewish poet Itzhik Feffer; and many political figures.
The second half of the book traces the concentration camp escape of Benish Fein, a Jewish klezmer musician from Lemberg (later called Lvov, now Lviv), who finds help from an elderly non-Jewish Polish couple, falls in love with their violin playing granddaughter, whom he later marries; his survival as a partisan fighter in the forest; her conversion to Judaism; her playing in the Krakow Philharmonic; their parenting a son; and their life together in post-Communist Eastern Europe.
It is an engaging book, a must-read for lovers of Jewish history, klezmer music, and historical novels. Strom brings together his story-telling talents, having written multiple plays, documentaries and non-fiction books; and his Eastern European research to create an impressive
piece of writing, The Autobiography of the Offenbacher.
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Eileen Wingard, a retired violinist of the San Diego Symphony, is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts.