Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  The 350 emigrants had to spend another night in the unheated carriages. The damp and cold affected the children above all and many of them fell ill. Stephan was also suffering from tonsillitis. Alice asked the Polish-born Dr. Ziv, the Israeli charged with accompanying the train, to stay with Stephan and the other sick children while she went to the Jewish Community in Genoa to organize help.

  “Stephan, do you hear me? Your maminka is now going into the center of Genoa to fetch help. Listen, I am going to be gone a few hours, but I shall come back soon.”

  Stephan nodded weakly. When his mother had left him for work in Theresienstadt he was frightened that she had gone forever. Now he was four years older and knew that his mother would never leave him.

  * * *

  ALICE DID not speak a word of Italian and with a combination of English and German and great effort she found her way to the offices of the Jewish Community. There she learned that her fellow passengers would be leaving the train to be put up in neighboring private houses and small hotels. Four days of uncertainty later, the journey started again, and the train proceeded to Brindisi, where a Greek ship had been laid on to take the emigrants to Palestine. When the ship left the harbor it was completely full and they had five days of stormy seas ahead of them. Alice was badly seasick, but Stephan had recovered from his tonsillitis and spent hours exploring the ship with some children of his own age.

  After what seemed to be days and days at sea, Haifa—for many the prettiest town in Israel—could be seen on the horizon with the wooded slopes of Carmel in the background. Alice was astonished at the beauty of the strange landscape and she realized just how little she knew about her new home—the promised land of Israel.

  The ship dropped anchor off the coast and a small vessel took the passengers into the harbor. As the boat came close to the harbor wall Alice heard a familiar voice call out her old nickname: “Gigi!” It was her nephew Chaim whom she had last seen two years before when he had come to Prague. Now he was twenty-one and studying sociology in Jerusalem. For twelve hours he had been waiting in Haifa harbor for Alice’s arrival. Arriving in a new country was not daunting for Alice now that one of her loved ones was there to greet her.

  They spent their first night with Felix Weltsch’s brother Willi, who practiced as an architect in Haifa. The next day in Tel Aviv there was a moving reunion with Alice’s niece Ruth. The girl whom Alice had fed as a baby and later taught the piano had grown into a fine, handsome woman.

  The search for their cases proved unexpectedly difficult. More than a thousand cases had been unloaded from the ship and these were distributed in different places all over Tel Aviv. For three days Alice and Stephan hunted down their bits of baggage, but one little case filled with shoes remained impossible to locate, and so the two of them had to walk about Tel Aviv wearing their Prague winter shoes.

  * * *

  DON’T SPEAK about Leopold’s death, about Theresienstadt or about the extermination of the Jews. Don’t look back, but keep looking forward and with that live as best you can in the present. This was Alice’s philosophy and she had passed it on to Stephan. In the past year neither of them had spoken about the camp. Although Alice was happy to be in Israel, she was dreading the first evening with her family as she did not know how she would react when they asked her about the occupation, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Dachau?

  In Marianne’s small flat in Jerusalem the table had been laid for a party, and lovingly decked out with flowers and candles. There were nine seats around it as they were expecting the whole family: besides Marianne, Emil and Chaim Adler, Alice’s sister Irma was due with her husband Felix, while their daughter Ruth was coming from Tel Aviv with her second husband Benjamin Gorenstein.

  Everyone greeted one another with great warmth, but after a quarter of an hour they were all talking about the political events of the last weeks and months. They spoke German among themselves, like the old days, and Alice was pained to discover that after two years of Theresienstadt and four more in postwar Prague Stephan was scarcely able to speak the language anymore. What did German culture mean to him? It was still as important to her as ever, but how would she be able to teach him to appreciate it? She decided that as soon as he had learned enough Hebrew she would begin speaking to him in German again.

  On 14 March 1949, a few days before her arrival, Chaim Weizmann had been elected the first president of the new state. In January a truce had been agreed with Egypt and since then the Star of David had been flying in Eilat in the Gulf of Aqaba, providing Israel with access to the Red Sea. In February the Knesset, the freely elected parliament, convened for the first time, and approved its first prime minister and cabinet under David Ben-Gurion. The talk that evening at Marianne’s was all about the new state of Israel, the victory in the war of independence and the threat from the Arabs. Alice was relieved and amazed that no one spoke about the war in Europe or of the crimes committed against the Jews. It was not just true of Alice’s family, but of families throughout Israel: no one spoke of the Final Solution or of the dead. They all concentrated on building up the new state; everyone looked forward, as she did herself.

  It was a new experience for Alice, who had always been apolitical, to find that politics was the main topic of conversation whenever the family sat down to dinner together. Current affairs were hotly debated and each person felt themselves jointly responsible for the new state, so it was inevitable that everyone would have an opinion about the government’s decisions. Even Marianne who, when she was in Prague, showed more interest in literature than in anything else, was now well versed in the political issues of the day. For Alice, though, rebuilding her life was her priority; politics could wait.

  From the first day that they were reunited the twins were inseparable once more. For the next twenty-five years, until Marianne’s death, barely a day passed that Alice did not call on her sister. Apart from her mother, Marianne said once, she loved only three people in the world with all her heart: her husband Emil, her son Chaim and her twin sister Alice. Despite their different characters, it was never a one-sided relationship; each gave the other strength and support. But close though they were, they were also quite critical of one another. Marianne was quick to defend herself when Alice encouraged her to look at the sunny side of life. Once Marianne cried out: “But Alice, life has just as many dark sides! Don’t delude yourself by denying it.”

  * * *

  ALICE WAS particularly struck by two things in her new homeland. One of them was her almost childish astonishment that Jews did all the jobs in the country. Never had she seen Jewish bus drivers, dustmen or postmen in Prague. The other was how modest and cramped everyone’s lives were. Even people in important positions, with high incomes, lived in what were generally small flats. The spartan lifestyle was obvious to her at every turn, and she was surprised at how difficult it was to get used to the lack of space in Marianne and Emil’s flat.

  The flat was in the Rechavia district, a particularly leafy part of Jerusalem, inhabited by many European immigrants: intellectuals, artists and civil servants. The houses were usually two stories and constructed from a local, shiny white stone and, with their occasional front gardens, they looked European. The inhabitants were careful to preserve a European way of life and in some streets the German language predominated, while in others it was mostly Czech or Russian. Many of the older inhabitants seemed to have stopped making an effort to speak Modern Hebrew. It was here that Alice would spend the next thirty-seven years of her life.

  Emil had rented the flat in 1939. It consisted of a tiny kitchen together with three little rooms. Every afternoon the biggest of the three served as a surgery. There was a massive writing desk, a bookcase and a glass cabinet filled with medical instruments. The second room was a waiting room. It was sparingly furnished with some simple chairs and a sofa, which could be folded out in the evening and became Emil and Marianne’s bed. The third room contained a huge wardrobe and a table and chairs. It was there that the
y ate—and where Chaim slept. During the three weeks that Alice and Stephan lived with Marianne and Emil, Chaim stayed with friends.

  Life with the relatives was not always easy. It had been clear for a long time that Marianne needed an operation. Even when Emil assured his wife that the operation was routine Marianne was skeptical. While she was in hospital in Jerusalem Alice was supposed to run the household. Marianne explained the housekeeping and the afternoon surgeries, and the concert pianist was temporarily transformed into a charming assistant to the consultant.

  Alice visited her sister at the hospital every day, even sitting beside Marianne when she came round from the anesthetic. Alice saw that her sister wanted to say something and leaned over. In a whisper Marianne confided: “Life is terrible!”

  * * *

  IN THE months following the foundation of the state, 145,000 people arrived in Israel and were assigned to twenty-nine camps dotted about the country. More than half of them lived in tents, the rest in huts,2 but they were all dreaming of a home of their own.

  Three weeks after her arrival, Alice went flat-hunting. First she had to become a citizen, but after the humiliating treatment she had received at the hands of the Czechs she was made to feel welcome in Israel. A lovely official suggested that Stephan might want to adopt a more typically Hebrew name in the future and proposed David, Ben or Raphael. Stephan was very pleased with Raphael. Then it was time to find a flat and again Alice was lucky. They needed to live somewhere convenient for the Conservatory, her future place of work, and if possible close to Marianne and Emil. Because she had arrived in Jerusalem without any means of her own, the Conservatory paid her an advance and Marianne and Emil also provided her with money to get started up. She planned to work as hard as she could to provide Raphael with a decent education, and did not want to pay more rent than she had to.

  With her sister’s help Alice found accommodation in a four-bedroom flat which she had to share with another family. It was about ten minutes on foot from Marianne and fifteen from Irma. Each family had two of the rooms and shared the kitchen and the lavatory.

  An Arab family of six lived in the other two rooms. Two diametrically opposed lifestyles came together in that small space: Alice the pianist, an example of the central European Jewish bourgeoisie, and the Arab family, illiterate, uneducated workers who had grown up in the Muslim tradition, but Alice was immediately impressed by their kindness. At the beginning they communicated only by friendly gestures, but Raphael learned Modern Hebrew remarkably quickly and, after a few weeks, he was able to interpret.

  When a couple of weeks later a lorry drove up delivering beds for the two of them and the Steinway grand, Alice found that the piano took up two-thirds of the room and left her with even less space than she had had in Prague. She tenderly stroked the instrument and sat straight down at the stool to play a soft melody. It had been more than ten weeks since she had played the piano and nearly all the keys were sticking. When she opened the lid she immediately shut her eyes to banish the horror of what she saw: whole strings had rusted, the interior workings of the piano were ruined. It was clear that the piano had been kept outside for weeks on end during the rainy months of February and March. The Steinway, every pianist’s dream, was unusable. There was nothing for it but to use her first earnings to purchase a secondhand piano.

  Shortly after their arrival someone knocked on the door and when she opened it she saw to her great surprise an old friend from Prague, Richard Gibian. He had emigrated to the United States with his wife and four young little sons in 1939 and had come to Israel to visit his sister. When Raphael came out to say hello, Richard remembered how, even as an unborn child, he had demonstrated his musical talent at the Kolisch Quartet’s concert. Mutual friends had told Richard about Leopold’s death in Dachau and to spare Alice’s feelings he did not raise the topic. When he asked her to play something for him Alice explained what had happened to the Steinway grand.

  “We’ll get it fixed,” said Richard. In Prague he had been a successful businessman making typewriters. He noted the number and date of the grand piano and wrote to the firm’s Hamburg depot to order a whole set of new strings, together with all the hammers. A few months later the spare parts arrived in Jerusalem and a piano maker, paid by Richard, came round to install them. At the end of 1949, even though it never achieved the quality of tone it had had before, Alice could play her Steinway once again.

  * * *

  THE DIRECTORSHIP of the Jerusalem Conservatory had waived the usual auditions and handed Alice’s contract to Irma even before she had landed in Israel. The reviews of her many concerts and the reference supplied by a fellow Czech piano teacher guaranteed her future reputation. This would have been more than enough, but Max Brod also praised Alice’s talent as a pianist. His reputation as a music critic was so good that the director of the Conservatory was left in no doubt that Alice’s appointment would be an honor.

  It was a tradition that new members of the staff should give a concert. There was a small auditorium in the building that held about 150 people. Alice applied her usual serious approach to the first concert in her new homeland, playing Beethoven’s Appassionata and Smetana’s Czech Dances, which met with great success. Not only were all her colleagues sitting in the audience, but most of the students and, of course, her sisters and their husbands. Alice had not realized that there was stiff competition between the teachers for the approval of their pupils, their monthly stipends depending on the number of pupils they had on their books, so she had not prepared her concert with this in mind. Nonetheless, over the next few days many students came to her, wanting to be taught by her.

  Over the next few weeks, Alice quickly established a new routine. She was particularly pleased that she had had no problems finding Raphael a place in a good local school. When he entered the class for the first time neither master nor pupil quite knew what he was doing there.3 As he spoke no Hebrew he introduced himself in Czech, but fortunately the teacher was of Russian origin and could follow what he said. Suddenly the teacher remembered that he had been told that he was going to have a new pupil who had survived the concentration camp at Theresienstadt. There were no other boys in the class with a similar background, but he quickly told the boys what the European Jews had suffered under the Nazis and asked them to be particularly attentive to their new classmate. At first Raphael had to put up with the fact that everybody laughed at his funny accent, but after a few weeks he could easily make himself understood in Hebrew and with his good-humored observations, and the many pranks he played, he was soon accepted by his peers.

  After a few weeks the music teacher asked Raphael to give a concert for the children in his year. He began with some preludes and fugues, which Johann Sebastian Bach wrote for his son and which were later published as The Little Clavier Book for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, but it was his performance of Beethoven’s Pathétique that completely won over his audience. Here was an eleven-year-old boy playing like a concert pianist—and playing by heart. From that day onward he was admired by every boy at the school and he went on to give a number of piano and cello concerts in his time there.

  Alice still taught her son every morning, then as soon as he had left for school she began her three or four hours of practice. She didn’t like to spend time cooking and so she met Raphael at noon every day at Maria Polack’s house, some five minutes away, where they joined a group of six or eight other guests. Maria was originally from Vienna and, as kind as she was cultivated, she regularly cooked for professional people. It was there that Alice met her first pupil, Esther Erle, and her mother.

  Maria soon took account of Alice’s eating habits: little in the way of salt or spice, lots of fruit and a bit of fish or chicken from time to time. In the first few months, before Alice could make herself understood in Hebrew, she would speak in German, English or French, according to her fellow diners’ origins.

  At 2 o’clock Alice started work at the Conservatory, while Raphael went home and did
his homework, practiced the cello and had private lessons in Hebrew, English or music theory. Alice usually taught for three or four hours every afternoon, sometimes for longer. Her route home led her past Marianne’s house and she would often drop in for a quarter of an hour before heading home, where she knew Raphael would already be waiting for her. Their dinner together was an important ritual, during which they recounted everything that had happened that day.

  One of the advantages of Alice’s modest living arrangements was that the Arab family were happy to keep an eye on Raphael when she went out in the evening; she went mostly to visit Marianne and Emil, but only for about an hour. The disadvantages of the small flat became apparent equally quickly, however. In every free moment Alice gave private lessons, while Raphael was often practicing cello in the next room. The resulting tonal confusion was disturbing, but Raphael found a solution. When piano students came he would practice his cello in the lavatory.

  “And what will you do when one of our neighbors needs to use it?” Raphael beamed: “Then I shall go into the hall and play a little louder … until the smell has gone away.” And that is what he actually did and over the next few years it proved the best solution.

  * * *

  TOWARD THE end of July 1949, a few weeks after his twelfth birthday, there was a ring at the doorbell. Raphael answered and was ecstatically happy to see David Herschl, with whom he had spent such unexpectedly happy days in Prague. In fact a picture of one of the aircraft David had shown him then was on the wall above his bed. Raphael’s cousin Ruth had told them what happened to David since he had left Prague: