The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany.(Review)(Brief Article)

The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany

by Martin Goldsmith John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 346 pp. $24.95

It is hard to know what to expect from Martin Goldsmith's deeply felt memoir about his parents' lives and their escape from Hitler's Germany. The book's subtitle itself gives one pause -- hardly in keeping with the images one recalls of shaven-haired string quartets playing amid the horrors of Auschwitz.

Yet Goldsmith reveals a far different world within the Reich, one where Jews could find a haven of music and art. This was the Judische Kulturbund, known as the Kubu, formed in 1933 as a response to the growing list of decrees banning Jews from all aspects of German life. Expelled from "Aryan" orchestras, theaters, museums and ballets, Jewish artists came together under what would become a nationwide organization of performers -- permitted only because it could be controlled, and used as propaganda, by the Nazis. An odd marriage to be sure, but even through the dark days of Kristallnacht and the onset of war, Jews continued to play, act and dance until the first trains started heading east in 1941. It is a part of the Nazi story very little known, but one that suggests how desperate these Jews were to maintain their artistic lives.

It is within that struggle that Goldsmith traces the utterly compelling story of Gunther and Rosemarie Goldschmidt, along with the plight of ...