Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #815153 in Books
• Published on: 1994-02-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Israeli writer and dramatist Shaham uses a string quartet of German Jewish refugees playing in the Palestine of 1936-1938 as the vehicle for ruminations on Zionism and the creation of a uniquely Israeli culture, the nature of exile and the potentially destructive power of sex. Each of the four musicians "authors" a chapter in which a dark personal secret is revealed. The final chapter takes the form of a journal kept by Egon Lowenthal, a novelist who has befriended them. Too intimately involved with their emotional crises, he is ultimately unable to formulate a novel from this material (a failure which the author does not invest with adequate resonance). When the narrative concerns itself with the internal workings of the nascent musical group, it is moving and funny. The contrast between the two violinists--handsome and accomplished Kurt Rosendorf, for whom music is everything, and Konrad Friedman, a homely man of lesser musical talents, but the only Zionist in the group--makes for compelling reading. Unfortunately, when the focus shifts to violist Eva Staubenfeld, the fulcrum of the group's sexual tensions; or to the rather unpleasant cellist, Bernard Litovsky; or to Lowenthal, the tale descends into melodrama at the same time that it becomes an occasionally hectoring novel of ideas. Shaham, director of Israel's Sifriat Poalim publishing house, received the Bialik Prize for this work.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This delicately nuanced novel, winner of Israel's Bialik Prize, balances the voices of the four German-Jewish refugees who are members of a string quartet formed just before the onset of World War II in Palestine. Exiled from their homes, the musicians attempt to make a life in music outside history. Yet history continually intrudes. Whether it's the cellist's inadvertent involvement with a terrorist organization or the violist's relentless sexual adventures, the tension between art and life creates unsurpassed music far greater than the individual talents of the ensemble. Shaham's skillful blending of the four voices, as well as the ironic commentary of the quartet's friend, an exiled German author, creates a finely tuned meditation on art, exile, and human engagement. Highly recommended.
- Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

Customer Reviews

the rosendorf quartet
This is a superbly well-written book, beautifully translated into English from the original Hebrew. It operates on many levels: nominally, it is about four displaced German-Jewish musicians, refugees from Hitler's Germany who find themselves in Palestine in 1937. Metaphorically it can be read as the power of chamber music as a common denominator among disparate personalities and fractured lives. It also offers insights into traditional European culture in the context of a pioneering social experiment in the Middle East. A riveting read. A civilising experience.

Wonderful Novel
I thought this was an intelligent and beautifully written book. No fireworks, car chases, television drama. Instead, we get intriguing characters and complex relationships. A brilliant look at Israeli society and four people trying to make music together.

A must read
Displaced Jewish musicians from Germany, not suspeced of Zionism, find themselves in the ideologically zealous Palestine of 1937.
With the prospects of going back to Germany becoming slimmer, and the future of Jews in Palestine being shaky, they try to find condolence in music.
The personal differences between the four quartet members are intensified by the division of the novel into different parts, each one the diary of a different quartet member.
While the music making and the social surroundings are always present, the book's main merit is in presenting the personal turmoil that people undergo when uprooted from their homeland, especially one that has betrayed them.