Music From A Broken Violin: A Memoir

By Tikvah Feinstein

A diplomat and writer from the United Nations in the throes of repercussions of his quest to find God in the Holy Land that may have found the devil. A woman?s deadly secret. Their child, conceived in adultery, unaware of the intrigue and lies, embraces the gifts she?d inherited, and embarks on an extraordinary life. Music From a Broken Violin: A Memoir chronicles generations of a family, as destiny would have three people brought together over oceans and time to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania of the turbulent 1940s. The characters come to life, as author Tikvah Feinstein channels her descendants and portrays a childhood of wonderment and catastrophe in a gripping story of survival and betrayal. A clash between two separate religious faiths and dangerous innocence is captured. The essence of pre-Holocaust Europe, the Great Depression in the United States to post World War II, the characters reveal their innermost thoughts, motives and desires. We travel with them in the course of their eventful lives. Through the author?s portrayals we get to know and understand their darkest secrets and the profound heroic sacrifices they made for each other, for love and family. David Horowitz, A charismatic Jewish news correspondent from New York obsessively devoted to Moses Guibbory, a mysterious Jerusalem cave-dweller many at the time called a ?prophet,? whom he had met in 1927 as a newlywed in Palestine. More than a decade later, David?s wife had died and their son, killed in the Holocaust. He was crushed in the backlash of the publication of ?The Bible in the Hands Of Its Creators,? Guibbory?s controversial translation of the sacred text of the Bible from original Hebrew, which David had edited. David is disgraced and publically removed from his mentor?s organization. David is blamed for ?mistranslations? from the original Hebrew that reveals the creation of humans by multiple gods and claims that Guibbory is the last Jehovah, along with shocking predictions. Rudolph Dobsch, who was sent alone at age 14 from pre-war Europe to New York City?s Ellis Island survives the Great Depression, escapes the Holocaust, but not destiny. When his compassion compels him to rescue her from the flood of 1936 in Pittsburgh?s North Side, his life entwines with Ruth Gregg, and her secret becomes theirs. Ruth Gregg, an intellectually gifted young woman whose marriage and growing family defies her lifelong affliction. She, in her own quest for answers about religion, orders and reads Guibbory?s controversial book. Satisfied that it offers the answers and determined to live fully in spite of the inherited disease that she kept secret, she reaches out to David?s organization and their spontaneous relationship produces a child, another secret. The Dobsch family grows from five to eight children and thrives as the Pittsburgh branch within the religious organization United Israel World Union, founded by Horowitz. In a desperate move to escape the moral and physical threats to the family by a gang of hoodlums in the Esplen neighborhood in 1952, the parents accept an offer to join a branch of UIWU in Michigan. The experience of living in newly constructed UIWU headquarters among followers of fundamental Judaic Law is spiritually empowering but proves to be financially untenable. The father?s work is in Pennsylvania, while David remains in New York, marries and essentially abandons the movement. Returning to Pittsburgh?s North Side with just the clothes on their backs, finally the large family is forced to seek shelter in an unfinished shanty on a huge hill in Washington County, Pennsylvania. Without electricity and running water, the hills and river and sky become a canvas where Tikvah at nine begins to write this story in her imagination. And a broken violin that she vows will again make music becomes her mantra and her connection to the emerging part of herself that unexpectedly resembles a family she will never know. In the aftermath of his whirlwind seduction the Dobsch family ultimately is left to deal with the ambiguity of the gift of experiencing and then losing this extraordinary man?s love and influence.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1890269131
• ISBN13: 9781890269135
• Release Date: September 2011
• Publisher: Taproot Press
• Length: 286 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 5.5" x 0.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up