Rosendorf Quartet - Softcover

Shaham, Nathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802133169 ISBN 13: 9780802133168

Publisher: Grove Press, 1994

Synopsis

Four German Jews , all refugees from Nazi Germany, and all first-rate musicians, arrive in Palestine in the 1930s. There they join a symphony orchestra, which although made up of Europeans serves as a propaganda vehicle for the Zionist state-in-the-making. Unable to express themselves within this melting-pot orchestra, they join together to form The Rosendorf Quartet. In this compelling and provocative novel, awarded Israel’s prestigious Bialik Prize for Literature, Nathan Shaham examines the plight of these refugees, who must adjust to the old-new land a place fraught with political struggle and impending violence.
Kurt Rosendorf, the quartet’s founder and first violin, would like to believe that his true homeland is music. Forced to leave his Christian wife and daughter in Berlin, he cannot adjust to life in Palestine and tries to live outside history and geography.” Konrad Friedman, second violin, is a young Zionist who constantly battles the urge to renounce the European, cultured life of the musician and dedicate himself to the Jewish cause. Bernard Litovsky, the cellist, is tired of wandering and longs for firm ground and a sense of home. The fourth in the quartet is the stunning Eva Staubenfeld, whose beauty and sexual liberation baffle and mesmerize her colleagues. Relieved to be far from the abuses of her past, she is furious that the accident of being born Jewish has disrupted her life.

Uniting the four is Egon Loewenthal, a brilliant and underrated German author who has survived Dachau but cannot forsake the language of his persecutors. He decides that his next novel, written in German, will be about the quartet.

The Rosendorf Quartet is not only a deft portrait of the complexities and contradictions that have gone to make up the state of Israel; it is also a stunning tribute to the curative powers of music, in whose realm dissonance, politics, and personal anguish dissolve into art, transcending human conflict and national boundaries

About this title

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Hebrew

From Kirkus Reviews

Israeli novelist Shaham (The Other Side of the Wall, 1983) unfolds the deceptively quiet story of a string quartet formed by four German ‚migr‚s to Palestine in 1936, set forth in five sections--one by each player and a fifth by the group's spiritual mentor, historian Egon Loewenthal. Aphorism (about the Reich, the Palestinian experiment, the problems of playing Mozart in the desert, the endless dialectics of quartet playing) is the organizing principle of the sections by first- violinist Kurt Rosendorf, a Jewish aristocrat who lives on a shoestring so that he can send money to his Christian wife back in Germany for his daughter's music lessons; by diffident second- violinist Konrad Friedman, who embraces his new home with a fiercely self-critical appetite; and by earthy cellist Bernard Litovsky, whose wife is certain he's carrying on with half-Jewish violist Eva Staubenfeld. Icy, whorish Eva provides most of what passes for the plot, seducing Rosendorf, entrancing the disapproving other narrators (including Loewenthal), and casually betraying cellist Litovsky's involvement with the Israeli underground. But these incidents, like Kristallnacht and the Anschluss, are resolutely, suggestively subordinated to a polyphonic meditation on the string quartet as a microcosm of prewar society. Loewenthal plans to write a novel called The Rosendorf Quartet composed in ``prose without a plot . . . a novel without a dominant character, to live in a world without heroes.'' A difficult prescription for a novel, perhaps--but Shaham's study of refugees trying to live for music during a moment of supreme disaster and hope is chamber music of a high order. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0802133169
• ISBN 13: 9780802133168
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368