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SANDEE B RAWARS KY
Special to the Jewish News
I
f Norman Lebrecht's The Song of
Names (Anchor; $14) had a
soundtrack, it would be the music
of Mendelssohn and Bach, mixed
with the sounds of Chasidic- niggunim,
wordless tunes with a
mystical edge, played
with passion on a pre-
cious 18th-century vio-
lin.
The novel, recently
released in the United
States, won last year's
Whitbread First Novel
Award, one of the major
British book prizes.
Although Lebrecht pub-
lished his first novel at
age 54, he was already
well known as a journal-
ist whose cultural com-
mentary and music criti-
cism appears regularly in
the British press and is
heard on the BBC.
"Swimming in a double breasted suit
against the Monday morning incoming
tide, I feel a double misfit," the novel's
narrator reflects, passing through a
London train station. Reading this first
sentence, I was hooked.
The Song of Names is a suspense story,
a love story, a novel of ideas, traversing
the world of music. The main characters
are two boys,-one a musical prodigy born
in Poland whose parents send him to
London in the years before World War
II, and the other — who narrates the
novel as a grown man — the son of the
musical manager who takes him in.
Together, they endure the London
blitz, turning it to adventure. Dovidl, as
the talented young violinist is known, is
handsome and self-assured, while Martin
is awkward and friendless before the
other arrives. They grow to be true
friends, closer than brothers, partners in
Dovidl's genius.
Martin explains, "I was, thanks to
him, no longer trapped in mute misery
but able to convey my feelings to the
world about me, whether it cared to lis-
ten or not. I become a vocal Mottl to his
effulgent Dovidl, a vital part of a greater
organism. And he lived within me like
an artificial lung, filling me with confi-
dence and contentment when natural
organs failed. That's how I thought of
him: as part of me."
On the evening of Dovidl's high-pro-
file debut at Royal Albert Hall, arranged
by Martin's father, the young musician
disappears. For 40 years, Martin lives
with this unsolved mystery, until he
hears music played by a
young boy that provides
a significant clue. To say
more of the plot would
diminish some of the
pleasure of reading this
lyrical novel.
The book's tide refers
to an invention of the
Medzhiner rebbe: a list of
names of Jews killed by
the Nazis, chanted in
song, with several
melodies, as a lasting
memorial to the victims.
"Music, these rabbis must
have known, clings to the
brain like a barnacle. In
the aged and confused, it
is the faculty that fades last, the final
memory," the narrator explains.
Time shifts in the novel, from the past
to the 1990s, and most chapter names
are about time, whether "Time After
Time," "Time's Up," "The Time of Our
Lives." The sense that time passes, never
to be regained, is palpable. Martin
recalls, "That's what I lost when the
genius left — the mastery of time. Like
death, it is a loss that cannot be repaired,
a hole in the heart of things."
The novel is invested with the author's
knowledge of music and of Judaism; it is
about the tangled loops between memo-
ry, identity, loss, faith, friendship, love,
envy and hope. With verbal dazzle and
some humor, too, Lebrecht fits together
the emotional puzzle pieces. In a
Hitchcock-like moment, a journalist
named Norman Lebrecht makes a
cameo and key appearance in the book.
In conversation with this reporter
while visiting New York, the author
explained that he intended to write a
novel for 30 years. When he felt the time
was right and finally sat down to write,
he had three ideas in mind; this one was
the story "that pushed itself to the head
of the queue."
The assistant editor of the Evening
Standard who writes a weekly column