Detailed item info | Synopsis | In this memoir Holocaust survivor Martin Goldsmith celebrates his music and his love, both of which survived Nazi Germany. His romance began in 1936, when he, a flutist, met Rosalie, a violist. As German Jews, they secured positions in the Kulturbund's orchestra in Frankfurt and performed for Jewish audiences until 1941, when the married and fled to the United States.
| | Size | | Length: | 346 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in. | | Width: | 6.5 in. | | Thickness: | 1.2 in. | | Weight: | 23.2 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | Advance Praise for the Inextinguishable Symphony "A Fascinating Insight into a Virtually Unknown Chapter of Nazi Rule in Germany, Made all the More Engaging through a Son's Discovery of His Own Remarkable Parents." -Ted Koppel, ABC News "An Immensely Moving and Powerful Description of those Evil Times. I couldn't Put the Book Down." -James Galway "Martin Goldsmith has Written a Moving and Personal Account of a Search for Identity. His is a Story that will Touch All Readers with Its Integrity. This is not about Exorcising Ghosts, but Rather Awakening Passions that no One Ever Knew Existed. This is a Journey Everyone should Take." -Leonard Slatkin, Music Director National Symphony Orchestra "For Years I've been Familiar with Martin Goldsmith's Musical Expertise. This Book Explains the Source of His Knowledge and His Passion for the Subject. In Tracking the Extraordinary Story of His Parents and the Jewish Kulturbund, Martin Unfolds a Little-Known Piece of Holocaust History, and Finds Depths in His Own Heart that Warm the Hearts of Readers." -Susan Stamberg, Special Correspondent National Public Radio "[A] Strong and Painful Book, Well-Written, Well-Researched, Moving, and Very Instructive." -Ned Rorem, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer
| | Industry reviews | "[A]t its heart, Goldsmith's tale is about people and their stories. He gives us a full, rich account of his parents' own love story, including his father's decision to return from Sweden, risking death, to play music, and yet never strays into self-indulgence or sentimentality. The deep love and understanding of music that come through on every page are a true delight, and, if nothing else, this labor of love ensures that no one who has read it can ever listen to Mahler again with quite the same ear."
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - Steve Kettmann (04/08/2001)
"...Goldsmith's account offers an excellent contribution to Holocaust studies."
Publishers Weekly (08/14/2000)
The Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer once remarked that when you write about the Holocaust, you should remember that you are writing in front of burning children. What he meant was that the murder of six million Jews is a subject that requires a unique sort of humility-a warning that seems especially resonant today, now that redemptive Holocaust tales are suddenly in fashion. I'm referring to films such as "Schindler's List," the story of a transformed Nazi who just wants to save Jews, and "Life Is Beautiful," where the message appeared to be that you shouldn't let a genocide prevent you from having a good time. <BR> Of course, the urge to find even a flicker of light in this darkest of human tragedies is an understandable one. Perhaps more to the point. Holocaust stories that are, in some utterly improbable way, a little bit uplifting or empowering are part of the larger saga-albeit a very, very small part of it <BR> Such is the case with Rich Cohen's <I>The Avengers</I> and Martin Goldsmith's <I>The Inextinguishable Symphony</I>, the latest literary contributions to this genre. <I>Th</I>e Avengers is the tale of the Vilna partisans, Zionists who tunneled out of the Jewish ghetto before the Nazis could round them up and kill them. . . <BR> <I>The Inextinguishable Symphony</I> is, on its pace, less dramatic. The author, Martin Goldsmith, reconstructs the lives of his parents, two young German Jewish musicians who fell in love and married during the war. His mother, a violist, and his father, a flutist, were both members of the Kulturbund, a Jewish cultural organization that allowed the Nazis to purge their various arts entities of Jews without sounding international alarm bells. It was a crude form of segregation, and the Nazis closely monitored all performances to ensure that they were in no way political and that, above all, they didn't sully any cherished German ideals, but the Kulturbund nevertheless became a cultural and spiritual refuge for a people with nowhere else to go. <BR> War and revenge versus music and love: <BR> The two books are opposite sides of a single coin. Cohen's is self-consciously muscular, macho, the story of a courageous group of people who refused to accept the fate handed to them. Goldsmith's is more sensitive, more humanizing: Here are two young people who did the best they could to simulate a normal life within unthinkable circumstances. . . <BR> Goldsmith, by contrast, is conscientious about alerting the reader to his flights of <BR> imagination, and his motives are clear. He is not writing compensatory history; he wants to know what happened to his parents before they escaped to America. But more than that, he wants to understand how they became who they were: it's a literary journey reminiscent of Art Spiegelman's in <I>Maus</I>. <BR> In the book's most moving passage. Goldsmith describes his father fleeing Berlin during <I>Kristallnacht</I>, the murderous rampage during which the Nazis torched synagogues <BR> and razed Jewish-owned stores. Goldsmith's father boards an overnight train to the small town where his future wife lived with her mother and father, a music teacher. He shows up at their home early in the morning and unannounced; he is out of breath and desperate to alert her family to the imminent danger, but her father only dismisses the going's on as the work of some drunken hooligans. <BR> Goldsmith's prose is spare and simple, as if this were just a little sliver of the huge, terrifying story of the Holocaust-and that is precisely the point. This is the humility about which Yehuda Bauer was speaking. <P> Renewed b/JONATHAN MAHLER <BR> --Jonathan Mahler is a senior writer and editor at <I>Talk Magazine <P> </I><B>When the Music Stopped</B> <BR> The story of a symphony orchestra may seem an odd way to approach a retelling of the Nazi era, but a new book by Martin Goldsmith serves to illuminate the everyday human tragedy of the Jews in Germany in the 1930s and '40s. In ...
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