A captivating story of passion and music.
Biography of a Jewish girl who transcended poverty and prejudice to become an illustrious violin virtuoso.
Flautist Wolf (Musical Gifts or How a Maine Fishing Village Became a Center for Great Music, 2011, etc.), co-founder of Bay Chamber Concerts and former executive director of the New England Foundation for the Arts, grew up hearing tales about his famous grandmother, Lea Luboshutz (1885-1965). Those tales—some incomplete, some contradicted by other family members’ versions of events—piqued the author’s curiosity. Urged by his mother to “tell the story,” he mined boxes of letters and clippings, archival documents, diaries, memoirs, and histories to convey, in a sensitive, perceptive biography, the improbable truth about Luboshutz and her emergence from a tumultuous world. She grew up in Odessa, where Jews were forced to live. Her father, certain that she was a musical prodigy, began violin lessons when she was 4; at the age of 5, she was performing for neighbors and at school. At 8, she won a scholarship for private lessons with a prominent teacher; at 14, she entered the Moscow Conservatory, invited by an influential musician who heard her play in Odessa. Luboshutz’s career, Wolf discovered, was punctuated by “amazing good fortune” in the form of generous patrons who provided money and support, not only to her, but also family members. Among them, none was as significant as Onissim Goldovsky, a brilliant pianist, lawyer, and writer, “a true Renaissance man” who, at the time he met 18-year-old Luboshutz, was 38 and married. She admitted being mesmerized by Goldovsky, and by 1906, she was pregnant with his child. Thereafter, the couple lived together for extended periods and had two more children, while Goldovsky continued to maintain “another domestic reality” with his unsuspecting wife. A scandalous personal life, Russia’s roiling political upheavals, and virulent anti-Semitism did not hinder Luboshutz’s career: Celebrated wherever she performed, she came to the attention of impresario Sol Hurok and immigrated to the U.S. in 1927, where her reputation soared.
A captivating story of passion and music.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-067-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A follow-up to the controversial novel How to Make Love to a Negro (not reviewed), and a hard look at race, sex, class, and fame in America. When ``an influential East Coast magazine'' commissioned a long article from Laferriäre, he took it as an opportunity to crisscross America. This assemblage of field notes from his travels covers such diverse subjects as his return to the bar where he hung out as a struggling writer; the Nigerian taxi driver who criticizes his work as a betrayal of his race (he replies that defending his people ``doesn't make for good writing'' and all he cares about is ``fall, decadence, frustration, bitterness, the bile that keeps us alive''); the beautiful blonde who insists that life with her African lover involves feelings as well as sex; the young black who complains that he gives too much press to white women and cajoles him to write about her next. Laferriäre also takes a moment to fill us in on the diverse reactions to How to Make Love to a Negro (one woman threw a glass of wine in his face; another had the title tattooed on her body) and his impressions of everyone from Miles Davis to Ice Cube, who argues that blacks are still slaves while Laferriäre believes that they have created contemporary America together with whites. If this sounds like a series of snapshots, even the author admits that it is: ``American reality...is more cinema than novel, more jump cut than dissolve, scenes that run over each other and don't follow any logical sequence...This book is no exception.'' (See also the review in this issue of Laferriäre's novel, Dining with the Dictator, p. 1295.) The strange mix of humor, honesty, impertinence, and self-importance may satisfy Laferriäre's dedicated fans, but most readers will find it about as meaningful as a one-night stand.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-88910-482-4
Page Count: 198
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In time for the centenary of Stevenson's death, this weighty biography ballasts the romantic version of his life, from his wild youth in Edinburgh to his exile in Samoa, with an integrated appreciation of Scotland's best writer. Historian and biographer McLynn (Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa, 1993, etc.) is a good match for Stevenson and a doughty partisan for his literary worth, which suffered posthumously from both the hagiography encouraged by his wife, Fanny, and from subsequent Bloomsbury debunking. Now, with later champions like Borges and Nabokov and recently renewed biographical interest, Stevenson can no longer be dismissed as a children's author with adult crossover appeal or a dilettante with a Byronic talent for living more interestingly than he wrote. McLynn balances a historian's thorough research with well-chosen excerpts from Stevenson's letters, essays, and verse, whose grace makes an unflattering contrast with the biography's tone-deaf prose. McLynn intimately depicts Stevenson's sickly childhood in Edinburgh (particularly the Calvinist nurse who had an acknowledged effect on his imagination), bohemian university days, early literary career, and later travels. The writer's life took an unlooked-for turn when he met Fanny Osbourne, a married American with a frontier temperament, misplaced artistic aspirations, and neurotic possessiveness-or at least that was the opinion of his friends, particularly editor and poet W.E. Henley, who famously fell out with Stevenson after he set out for Samoa to improve his health. In the Pacific Stevenson outdid Melville, at least with the Samoans, who accorded him heroic status. The book is marred toward the end by McLynn's undisguised antipathy for Fanny and her clan, whose demands are blamed for Stevenson's stroke and the lower quality of his South Seas writings. (For The Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, see p. 1347.) Nonetheless, Stevenson's charm is visible in every letter and essay quoted in this noteworthy biography. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41284-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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