Alice paused for a moment, looked Golda straight in the eyes, and said, “I never talk about that time. I do not want anyone to pity me. I do not want my son to remember. I want his childhood to be happy.” Golda seemed sympathetic to her response but pressed on. “But how do you feel about the Germans and all that happened to our people?” At first Alice remained silent. Then she said, “I am not here to discuss the past. I love this young country, where maybe I can contribute. I was not spared to spend my days looking back, to make myself and others miserable. And soon we will make beautiful music.” And then Alice remembers hearing Golda say, “Peeling potatoes gives me naches (joy).”
That day in Alice’s kitchen a friendship was cemented.
Alice’s and Golda’s lives had many similarities. Both were single mothers of gifted sons who studied the cello. Menahem Meir and Rafi Sommer, though thirteen years apart in age, both had the great fortune to study with the world’s greatest cellist, Pablo Casals. Both became highly respected performers, concertizing widely. Later on Menahem would become director of the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv, while Rafi took a position as professor of cello at Guildhall School of Music in London. Alice once explained to Golda that her father had not been educated and had never read great books either; still, the women agreed that they had absorbed more about life from their fathers than from their mothers. And each had chosen to live without a husband. Golda’s marriage had fallen apart because of the time and effort she devoted to her work, and although Alice did not lack for suitors, she never remarried; once she was in Israel, no man could distract her from her life in music.
As the years passed and Golda rose to more powerful government positions, the two women saw far less of each other. When Golda was foreign minister, she traveled continually. Alice, meanwhile, was consumed with raising Rafi and teaching, practicing four or more hours each day and traveling around Israel for her concerts.
Alice was not surprised when Golda became the first female prime minister. She felt that Golda was the best choice for the job and that she had earned “her promotion.” Today Alice fondly says, “You could trust her as a world leader—she had common sense, she loved people, she worked for peace, but was tough when she needed to be.”
Word was spreading about Alice’s frequent concerts in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and more and more of Israel’s elite could be spotted in her audiences. She soon attracted the greats of the country to her home as well as to her performances. Max Brod served as her chronicler and showed Alice the lists he made of her well-known admirers: Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, Abba Eban, Arthur Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Zubin Mehta, the young Daniel Barenboim, and, along with Golda, Teddy Kollek, the future beloved mayor of Jerusalem. Alice says, “Kollek was always gracious and charming, but Golda was very musical. She had not had the opportunity to study, but by going to concerts frequently she taught herself to listen. Golda understood the music’s message. But Kollek, not so much.” Alice mentioned that sometimes she thought Kollek had fallen asleep during a concert.
According to Alice and others, Golda had high musical standards. Isaac Stern, Rudolf Serkin, and Arthur Rubinstein were frequent guests in her home. Proud of her role as honorary president of the famous Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, she said, “Although I don’t know much about music, I love and have a special affinity for three musicians, for Casals, for Rubinstein, and for my son!” Alice protests Golda’s understated self-assessment. “But Golda was very knowledgeable,” she insists. “She knew a lot about music.”
When the Israel Philharmonic came into being as the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra, in 1936, Golda was in the audience at its first concert. Conducted by Arturo Toscanini, a refugee himself from fascist Italy, the concert was held in a large pavilion at the Tel Aviv fairground. Maestro Toscanini, recognized at the time as the world’s greatest conductor, said, “It is the duty of everyone to fight and help in this sort of cause according to one’s means.” He declined payment from the Palestine Symphony, even for travel expenses, with the explanation that he was “doing this for humanity,” in solidarity with the musicians who had been victimized by the Nazis.
Golda had met the orchestra’s founder, the violinist Bronisław Huberman, when he sat next to her on a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco in the mid-1930s, while she was in the United States on a mission for Histadrut (the Jewish Labor Federation). He had told her of his plans to establish a symphony orchestra in Palestine where the Jewish musicians who were fleeing Germany would be able to play, and she had vowed to help him. Golda later admitted to her son that she had felt flattered that such an enormously famous violinist had recognized her.
Huberman had performed Brahms’s Concerto for Violin in Vienna with the composer seated in the hall. In 1896, the year of his Carnegie Hall debut, the great composers of the world—Antonín Dvořák, Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner, and Johann Strauss, as well as Brahms—could be seen in his audiences. And now, with the help of Albert Einstein as head of American Friends of the Palestine Philharmonic, Huberman funded the orchestra as his contribution to the building of the future State of Israel. The first seventy-three members were all recent immigrants who had fled from Nazi Germany and Austria, many of whom had known Huberman before the war. Although Alice had never met him personally, she had heard him play several times in prewar Prague and Vienna.
Menahem Meir remembers that what was so meaningful about that first concert was that artists and audience alike had gathered against the background of the Arab riots that were being launched to protest Jewish immigration and the British Mandate. Precious trees and crops were destroyed, homes were burned to the ground, and nearly one hundred Jews—some who had been refugees from Hitler—had been killed. In his biography of his mother, Menahem wrote, “The fact that Toscanini and other gifted artists had knowingly and willingly entered this atmosphere to be with us, filled our hearts to overflowing.”
Because of Golda’s accidental meeting with Huberman during their flight, she was also able to talk him into sponsoring an annual series of concerts for factory workers and farmers. Golda and her family attended those programs, according to Menahem, with “nearly religious devotion.”
Even after she became prime minister, Golda attended concerts whenever she could. Once she confessed to Alice that she had always longed to study piano. When she was a child in Milwaukee there was no money for lessons. And later, given her responsibilities as worker, wife, and mother, she had no spare time. She asked if Alice thought that she could still learn even though she was past her seventieth birthday. Alice told her, “It is never too late to try.” “Alice,” Golda said with unusual hesitance, “would you accept me as your student, teach me to play piano, when I retire?”
Alice pressed Golda’s hand and said, “It will be my great joy to give lessons to you because you are so musical. How soon can we start?”
Sadly the piano lessons were never to be. Golda developed lymphatic cancer and died in 1978.
Today, nearly thirty years after Alice immigrated to England, she says that her happiest days were lived in Israel. “It was in Jerusalem that I watched my son grow strong and healthy without scars from the war years. I loved the many gifted students that I taught—Sabras, Palestinians, Russians, Americans. Israel represented both the past and the present. It was a time of great hope. Everything seemed possible.”
Politically Golda held socialist values, whereas Alice, who knew little about politics, was simply detached from material possessions. Alice remembers the private moment when Golda, who had been raised Orthodox, asked her about religion. Golda smiled when Alice answered, “I am Jewish, but Beethoven is my religion.”
Music, potato peeling, and love of Israel provided the bond that made the friendship possible between these two immigrant women—the pianist from Prague and the future prime minister of Israel.
INTERLUDE
Dreaming
Irma, Alice’s older sister, who was a gifted pia
nist, gave Alice her first lessons at the age of seven. Whereas her twin, Mitzi, showed no particular affinity for the instrument, from the beginning Alice practiced endlessly, memorizing every piece she learned.
In late November before her ninth birthday she was able to give a credible performance of Robert Schumann’s popular and gently evocative “Träumerei” (Dreaming). Alice played the piece over and over, trying to achieve her own interpretation. She practiced it very slowly and softly, and then decided it sounded more effective a bit faster and with a stronger melody line.
Her brother Paul, who was four years older and making serious progress as a violinist, wanted to play the beautiful “Träumerei” with Alice. He was haunted by its infectious melody and borrowed his sister’s music for his next lesson. His teacher told him that the piece was written for piano not violin, and although Paul had turned it into a violin arrangement, the teacher did not believe that one so young could understand such romantic music. “Do you know what love feels like?” the teacher asked. “I do not mean love for your parents or your country, but romantic love for a woman?” Twelve-year-old Paul confessed that he thought of the sister of his best friend every morning and every evening and sometimes even during his math classes. “Yes, I know love, my heart beats fast every time I think of her. Sometimes I can barely breathe.” The teacher then agreed that he could try “Träumerei.”
That evening at home, Paul asked Alice to play it with him. Excessively exaggerating his feelings, Paul could not keep the rhythm. Alice corrected him. “But you do not know love. You are too young. I am expressing the feeling behind the music,” he replied. She quickly retorted, “I may be younger than you, but I know how to count, and to play what the composer wrote.”
FOUR
Piano Lessons
“Music was always all around me. I mean live music, people playing or singing, not recordings. That came years later.” Alice is referring to some of her fondest childhood memories. “My mother was a marvelous pianist.” Nodding her head, she adds, “Ja, ja, how she loved to play. It was one of her diversions from melancholy.”
In Prague, nearly everyone Alice knew owned a piano, but the one in her house seemed to reign over her family’s living room. It was a large grand—or at least it appeared to be enormous to young Alice—that had belonged to her grandmother. The keyboard was always covered when not in use, and no one was allowed to open it or to touch its keys without first washing their hands. Alice and Paul would often give informal performances before bedtime. Alice would play waltzes by Chopin and Strauss, pieces from Schumann’s Kinderscenen, and early sonatas by Beethoven. Together she and Paul would offer movements of Mozart’s or Schubert’s sonatas for violin and piano. They had great fun performing Dvorak’s Sonatina for violin and piano, based on Native American melodies the composer heard in America. Sofie found the music rather exotic. Often their concerts ended with Dvořák’s familiar “Humoresque.” Alice can still hear the neighbors calling, “Hurry, the Herzes are about to begin.”
In 1910, when Alice began her piano lessons, music was in the Prague air. “In those beautiful years,” Alice reminisces, “Prague was music.” The green and gold jewel box theater where Mozart had conducted the premiere of Don Giovanni stood majestically in the center of the city, just off Old Town Square. Alice’s older sister, Irma, had shown it to the twins many times on their walks, reminding them that Prague was Mozart’s favorite city. She took them on picnics to the farmhouse Bertramka, where Mozart had lived with his wife when he was writing the overture to Don Giovanni. Inside the house Alice was allowed to touch the tiny piano with soft, bell-like tones that Mozart had played little more than a century earlier.
Musicians, past and present, were revered. Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák had put the Czechs on the world map with their music inspired by national folk tunes. The greatest artists of the day performed in Prague. Concerts and operas often made front-page news in the morning papers and were not to be missed. Even the poor and uneducated could be found in the standing-room sections when the tickets were sold out. “Sometimes we saved for months in order to afford the ticket for an important concert,” Alice says.
Civil servants, bankers, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, housewives—many of them were highly skilled amateur musicians, and those who were not competent instrumentalists sang in choruses. Their weekly rehearsal time was sacrosanct. The word amateur is derived from the Latin word amator, lover, and music was, for many, their grandest love affair. House concerts, called Hauskonzerte, whether performed by professionals or amateurs, were a popular form of entertainment; in fact, friends would frequently gather in someone’s home to hear the first performance of a new work with the composer in attendance.
Beyond her musical gifts, Alice was an ideal pupil. Irma instilled in her a love of practicing. Alice made corrections easily and gratefully, repeating a phrase or section until she mastered the task at hand. Perhaps because Alice was more than eleven years younger, Irma never seemed jealous of her sister’s abilities. Instead she found reward in the praise she garnered for being such a fine teacher. After two years, Irma introduced Alice to her former teacher, Václav Štěpán, who was considered Prague’s finest pedagogue. Alice played a movement of a Beethoven sonata for Štěpán, who commended both the child and the teacher. Although he did not normally teach young children, Štěpán was so moved by Alice’s passion for playing that he agreed to see her once each month, while Irma would continue the weekly lessons and supervise Alice’s practicing. A couple of years later Štěpán began to teach Alice in earnest; he would become her mentor and constant friend.
It was a time when Alice could learn from those who were only one generation removed from the immortals. She could literally touch the hands of those who had been close to Brahms, Liszt, and Chopin. Her future teacher at the academy, Conrad Ansorge, had studied piano with the technical wizard Franz Liszt. Johannes Brahms had given his own grand piano to his student Alexander Zemlinsky, the inspired founder of Alice’s conservatory, who became her friend. In concerts she learned from the pianists Wilhelm Backhaus and Moriz Rosenthal, who had been taught by Chopin’s most promising pupil, Karol Mikuli.
Even though Alice graduated from the Prague German Conservatory of Music as a student of Ansorge, it was Štěpán who continued to guide her career. He arranged for her debut as a soloist with the Czech Philharmonic, coached her performance of Chopin’s E-minor Concerto, accompanied Alice to the rehearsals, and invited Max Brod to attend the concert. Spellbound by the young pianist’s otherworldly tone and impeccable technique, Brod wrote a glowing review of her performance. It would be the first of many. Recalling those days, Alice says that, when she played in Prague, she always cast a quick sidelong glance to see if Max was in his usual seat. Only when she knew that he was in the hall could she begin. When questioned about stage fright, Alice simply has nothing to say because she never experienced it. “Stage fright comes mainly from caring more about what others think than about the music itself,” she says. “The only possible fear that I might have had was of my own inner critic. But once I began to play, even that anxiety disappeared.”
After her early successes, she registered for seminars with the well-known pianist Eduard Steuermann, who announced that he would travel from Vienna to Prague to teach the most gifted students there. Steuermann’s fees were required in advance for his twelve master classes, but Alice was bitterly disappointed by the cold and uncaring attitude he demonstrated toward the students. She felt that she learned nothing musical from him and had wasted her money and her time. She later walked away equally disappointed from an hour lesson with the famous Artur Schnabel that had cost her an entire month’s salary. Ultimately Alice learned to trust her own judgment, and in the process, she learned to teach others. For Alice, a performance career and all that it entailed was secondary to a life as a dedicated artist in search of excellence.
Nearly one year after the Nazi invasion of Prague, on Sunday, March 3, 1940, A
lice participated in a secret concert of new works by the Jewish composer Viktor Ullmann in the home of Konrad Wallerstein. She fondly recalls, “Their home was so gemütlich [homey and warm]. And they had a beautiful Steinway.” The living room was furnished with Biedermeier originals inherited from Mrs. Wallerstein’s parents. Multicolored Persian carpets covered the floors. But the silver coffee service sat empty on the dining room sideboard, and the usual Czech tea cakes topped with bits of fruit were missing too. The small fire in the fireplace provided the only heat in the room. Everyone except the performers wore their coats and gloves all afternoon.
Alice played Ullmann’s extremely modern and difficult Second Sonata for Piano that afternoon. After the performance the composer hugged Alice, and Wallerstein gave her one red rose in appreciation. No one knew how he had secured such a treasure. Three years later, in Theresienstadt, the composer would dedicate his newly written Fourth Sonata to Alice, but the Second would remain her favorite and the only one that she would ever play publicly.
All of the highly educated Czech citizens who had gathered for that concert spoke German as their language of choice. They bore German family names and had attended German schools. They had all defied the Nazi ban on Jews assembling together. Still hopeful that things would not get worse, they were unaware that everyone in that room would soon be torn from their homes and end up in Theresienstadt on their way to Auschwitz and other camps in the East.
Alice would be the only guest that day to survive.
A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor Page 4
