Martin Goldsmith: The Inextinguishable Symphony - A True Story of Music And Love In Nazi Germany

John Wiley and Sons

$46.40

Review: Tara Werner*

Martin Goldsmith's personal and very moving journey into his family's past starts with a parable.

He writes that in the house where he grew up with his father, mother and brother there was an enormous tree growing through the roof, its great trunk dominating the enclosed space.

"None of us ever acknowledged the tree. [It] wasn't real, of course. But its impact on my family was overwhelming. The effort it required for all of us not to take conscious notice of it was also huge. This enormous presence in our house was the fate of my parents' families - Jews who lived in Germany in the 1930s - and my parents' escape from that fate.

"Their story, so similar to and yet so different from the six million other stories of that time and place, affected everything these two people did. It was at the root of their lives and grew ever upward as they grew older. And, as in so many other families like ours, it was something we never spoke of."

Goldsmith's courage in confronting and exposing the very real demons of his family's history make reading this book both a compelling and a nerve-racking experience.

It is a painful and gripping story that sheds light on a less-known chapter of Nazi rule, the Judische Kulturbund - the Jewish Culture Association established in 1933.

His parents, musicians Gunther Goldschmidt and Rosemarie Gumpert meet through the association, and fell in love. In 1936 they were banned from all German orchestras except those organised by the Jewish Kulturbund. Goldsmith reveals much about this controversial organisation which, although the only source of culture for German Jews, knowingly served the Nazis' propaganda purposes.

Created under the auspices of Goebbels' "Ministry of Information and Propaganda" to show the outside world how well Jews were treated under the Third Reich, the Kulturbund backfired on the Nazis, becoming a haven for Jewish artists.

The Kulturbund spread from Berlin to other cities, offered employment to thousands of Jewish musicians and survived as the only cultural oasis for its Jewish audiences. In 1941, the Nazis' "Final Solution" made it superfluous, and it was disbanded, with most of the artists involved sent to the death camps.

The Kulturbund has been accused of encouraging the Jews to ignore the desperate circumstances surrounding them, performing in concerts with the naive assumption that they would allowed to survive. Goldsmith denies this, saying that few could foretell the seriousness of the horror to come.

Above all, although the book is sometimes written in a gushy style, he writes about the survivors' guilt and its dreadful effect upon his own generation.

He says with aching honesty, "Music literally saved my parents' lives. Had they not been members of an all-Jewish orchestra, maintained at the pleasure of Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda, they would never have made it out of Germany alive."

This is a troubling but ultimately triumphant account of the power of music and culture to endure, his parents' escape to America, and the subsequent emotional cost of their survival to everyone in his family.

* Tara Werner is a Herald music reviewer.