1 The Violin
In the middle of my third year, I found myself one nice summery night on the (to me) vast greensward of Kansas City’s Swope Park. A summer orchestra, which means not the very best, was playing some symphony for the crowd lying on blankets or sitting in beach chairs to enjoy the night air. For some reason I suddenly rose and flopped my little arms up and down, imitating the conductor. “Look, Bob,” my mother said to my father, “he’s a concert violinist.”
And so I was Lebensborn, as if in Himmler’s “Spring of Life” program to make a master race: first by pairing arische late-teens girls with SS of fine breeding; then by kidnapping proto-Aryans from their not-so-Aryan mothers; eventually abducting even Jew-boys and –girls from their natural Endlösunged- Finalsolutioned-to-be mothers (so long as the candidate’s hair were blonde, the eyes blue, the cranial curve proper); the candidate, finally to be rewarded, if a good little boy, with Germanizing, Eindeutschung—or if a bad boy, remembering his old mother, with extermination. Abducted, placed in a Lebensborn nursery, you were told your mother had abandoned you; if you cried for mommy or, on placement with your new SS family, still cried for your past or refused to participate in your future, you were dispatched to the ovens. I spoke Yiddish back then, so also (poorly) read German; and listened in fright as mother spoke softly of things Germanic and Kansas City anti-Semitism. “What a pretty blond you are,” said my mother. I was dirty blond, but blond all the same. My eyes are blue.
No one knew it, the blond was turning brown.
In an eye’s blink Dorothy had witnessed my conducting mimicry and, by some trope that as an adult I still cannot name, had assigned me not to the first, let alone the second violins, but to an invisible place onstage, where a great concert violinist would have stood, but did not stand due to the miniscularity of the orchestra. Assuming the ancient pater role, mother had swooped up my little self, placed it in the highest cultural and thus Aryan category (“You’ll play Beethoven some day”), and thenceforth my little self made a violin out of cardboard, sewing-thread its strings, thread also the horsehair of a cardboard bow; and wrote, for several years, little lyric-and-score books, bound in yellow-green stiff cardboard, for Fiddle-Faddle, Turkey in the Straw, Perpetuo mobile, Waves of the Danube, Eili Eili (oops) and other of my favorites and those of my mother. Like most autodidacts, I imagine, I neither had, nor was criticized for not having, compositional or harmonic skills—it was all au naturel, and stupidly hailed as such. So long as I seduced—my scorebook, Light Violin Pieces the Whole World Plays—the question of composition, nor that of Schönbergian harmony, never came up.
So it was only natural, right? that at seven or eight, in the first grade, when, under the gaze of a mother who didn’t want me to suffer extermination of my talent by the mediocrity concentrated in KC; when I had self-published hundreds of green-yellow violin scores; when I had thereby prepared myself to be a new self, that I be delivered to a mater, one Elsie Vaughn, a violin teacher and lover, in a Kansas City conservatory. Who, not wealthy, soon saw what she wanted to see and, after some
I was even at that young age signing autographs.
months, offered to teach the boy for life for free. I played on a half-size violin and equally little bow.
But soon thereafter the project failed. Recognizing her inadequacy for a boy of such parts and through a kind of clout long forgotten by me, made the referral to one Raymond Cerf, Professor of Music at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, the most noted violin teacher in our area.
Cerf had been the student of the corpulent, black-haired, bravura, turn-of-the-last-century Belgian concert violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, whose unaccompanied Second Sonata, starting with “Obsession,” then followed by “Malinconia” is one of the most revered, difficult, heart-rending of modernist compositions (listen to “Melanconia”: it is trying to sing, but it cannot, it’s like a fingernail on a blackboard, it screeches, it is the voice of being-dead). When I first met Cerf, whose name in French means deer, I marveled at his rendering of the Ysaÿe, crying a little too generously to the rubato as he sang it out; his voice his accompanist. He stopped his performance for one, and clasping me on the shoulder, said, “The first time, it happens to us all,” then resumed the yearning, desperate search for the universal…and the fright,
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You see, the Second Sonata is based on the code of a Gregorian chant, which appears in
every movement: the Dies Irae, The Day of Wrath. The Ysaÿe for me (although I knew it
not at the time): a meditation on the Last Judgment that would come from Mr. G..
piano- and forte-ly borne by the score. And then I tapped the little fiddle to mimic his brio of bowing (leaps from G- to E-string, imitation of bass and treble hands of pianist, a hocketing, a hiccupping, a monophonic way of suggesting polyphony) as the recital abruptly ended. By which time, neither of the emotions made me ashamed in the generosity of his chamber. After class, on the return trip, I would try to tell my father (who, generously, left work at 2:30 to drive me to Lawrence), try to tell him what had transpired, the singing, the martelé, hammer stroke I had just learned, try to sing him this or that phrase I remembered from the lesson. No response. Silence commingled with the air in the car. And I could not understand why.
Maybe the deer knew, maybe he didn’t, but he enabled me, with the aid of my father, to run away, not take classes, from Central High School in KC. For how many years I do not know, but I was hated for not being even the minimalist of athletes (in gym, I couldn’t climb rope, the legs not strong enough, the rope burning the hands as ten, twenty clasped their way upwards—nor indeed, did my mother let me stay in gym long; fear was, I would hurt my hands (already hurt by rope) at sports). I suppose you could have called me—although the word did not yet exist—a nerd.
And I talked too much. From the very beginning.
Fuck you, Ms Riley.
A Jew talking in the Midwest Provinces is scarcely what the goyim want to suffer.
But, truth to tell, I did not always talk too much, or talk period. When I had my violin in my hand. At home, far from the nasty schoolchildren, I scarcely did anything except practice the violin night after night in my little bedroom (homework somehow did itself), modeling my playing on the records I spun: of Menuhin, Oistrakh, Millstein, Heifetz, the greats of the era. It was an escape route sent from God, in whom I believed then. And, one other flight line: every week, on, I think, Friday, before Sabbath, studying Talmud from Rabbi Maurice Solomon, the scholarly leader of the Orthodox congregation into which I was born. My Hebrew was fluent and we would read a passage, I enunciating—I did talk, but not in brat-speak—and he nodding his head at my pronunciation; and then together interpret the Talmudic interpretation. Philosophy, Solomon told me once, and Talmudic philosophy for sure, was the imagination of the relations between and among relations. I didn’t know, really, what it meant at the time, but I think it had something to do with my becoming, much later, a semiotician, studying the sign as a relation of differences. A sheep is not mutton; what is mutton? Mutton is not a sheep. A sign is negative difference; just as Talmud places itself in the difference zone between competing alternative interpretations. How natural: from Solomon to semiotics.
Well, shouldn’t it have been obvious? A boy of the mind and not of the body, a ten-year-old bedroom-cloistered creature listening to Russian Jewish violinists, a 1950’s America, Middle Western America, in which in Jewish homes one whispered “anti-semitism”—of course I became known as The Brain, which, stupidly, I took as a compliment…until one afternoon I was chased by the, we would say today…jocks, all the way home: to them, although not knowing it, I was Kafka’s bug in the bedroom, although they did not know this and would have hated him, if they had: a Jew bug! “Dirty little Jew Big Brains.” In that time, high school was unified, not a shred of diverse population or thought. High school was totalizingly absolutist and Masculine, excluding any femininely artistic boychiks.
The chase of the Jew bug happened so often that my mother had to pick me up at Central High, drive me home. But the dear mother, now the second chauffeur in my life, couldn’t always treat me so royally and, one day, walking, then running, falling, running faster: it was the Big Boys again. My father had, through all this, instructed me to be a man eventually, to stand up for myself, and I do remember, in front of 3233 Park Avenue, a lower middle class home, my home (my father was a bank employee), finding by accident a beam with a nail in it; turning to chase the Leader Boy; pursing him into his home across the street; then like a Levite spirit liberated from the Lost Ark whooshing through room after room until I cornered him: banging once crisply on his forehead with the architectural beam out of whose top came a five-inch nail. His name I cannot remember and so cannot say to him in Yiddish the ironic death salutation, Shayne rayne kapporah, what a beautiful, pure, sacrifice you are…you say of wives or husbands you’ve hated all your life, then bury with the elegant headstone reading Shayne… I think there was some discussion between the parents about things arranged that, only in my vaguest earshot I heard, but thankfully forgot in the pure fire of my first enacted aggression.
Since everyone was smiling, I was smiling, too. And my mother, inspired, took this picture. A
perfect young man, am I not? Adore me. Even if I be a murderer.
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