Eugene Drucker is a successful violinist who has written his first novel, “The Savior”. It is a powerful story built somewhat tangentially on his father’s history.
The main character, Gottfried Keller, lives during the Hilter regime in Germany. A prominent graduate from the Hochschule in Cologne, Keller begins a promising career and starts a relationship with a young pianist who became his accompanist. As he develops a love relationship with her, his first conflict emerges as he deals with the fact that she was Jew. His naïve perception that the differences between Jewish or Aryan were minor and inconsequential became shattered when he was unable to identify openly with her status.
But this conflict was minor compared with the role he was enlisted to adopt, viz., a violinist serving the German military effort. First, he was assigned to play for Germans wounded in conflict. Going from one hospital to another, he faced the faces that seemed so distant. But, the unbelievable then occurred when he was ordered to come to one of the concentration camps to participate in an “experiment” to determine whether music would stimulate the hopeless to adopt some hope.
The horrors that he witnessed and the conflicts he experienced are exquisitely captured by this author’s ability to penetrate the ugly dismantling of humanity of the Jewish prisoners and the evolving strength of this musician who stands up against the Kommandant of the camp.
No comments:
Post a Comment