The real, the theoretical, and the spiritual

Judaism, Wntr-Spring, 2004 by Curt Leviant

But that description reflects the seamless version, all satiny and smooth and stitched and ready for show. The fact is that like any other work of creation, a story or novella or a novel has bumps and false starts and gaps. What you can read in two or three hours from beginning to end may have taken the author a year or more to conceive, dream of, and execute.

In writing Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet, I combined fact and fancy. One of the heroes of the story is Engineer Ferdinand Friedmann, a very real man I met in Budapest, a Holocaust survivor with a brilliant mind and tremendous courage, stamina and determination. Hearing me speak English in the Jewish community's kosher restaurant, he asked me if I could do him a favor: find some of his relatives in the New York City area. I said yes.

But when I got back to the U.S.A., I couldn't find his list of relatives, on which he'd written his name and address. I then wrote a couple of letters to Budapest. And here's where the fortuitous and the miraculous intercede--it just so happened that my father-in-law was about to leave on a business trip to Hungary. I asked him to look for Engineer Friedmann and told him where he could find him every day at lunchtime.

When my father-in-law returned, he told me an incredible story, which crystallized the novella in my mind. He had met Friedmann and was as impressed with him as I was. But Friedmann told him something he had not told me. He said he had in his possession a manuscript of the original music of the Hebrew alphabet. My father-in-law told him that I, as a person who liked letters and words and music, would be very interested in this manuscript. As soon as I heard this aspect of Friedmann, I tied the real request to find his relatives to a reward pertaining to the aleph-bet music. In other words, in the novella, Friedmann promises the narrator--whom I made a musicologist teaching in college--that if he would find his relatives he could have the information about the original music of the Hebrew alphabet.

For the narrator, named Isaac Gantz, discovering such a Jewish treasure and publishing it would assure him fame and immediate tenure. So as not to spoil your enjoyment of this provocative tale, I will tell you no more. But I will add that it often happens that after I publish a novel or story, some event in the news echoes it.

In my novel, The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah, about the great Hasidic leader and storyteller, Nachman of Bratslav, I invent a scene where Reb Nachman goes to Vienna to study music with Beethoven. Nachman, having lost the use of the Hebrew letters because of a moral lapse, loves the shape of the musical notes. He hopes that by mastering this mysterious alphabet he will relearn the other one he has lost.

Nachman and Beethoven are in his study. When Beethoven leaves the room for a few minutes, Nachman picks up a violin score, examines it, and inadvertently places it upside down. A violinist whom Beethoven is expecting enters and begins to play. Beethoven returns and is furious at the violinist's wrong notes. Only then does he discover the upside down score. After The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah was published, I heard an anecdote about Beethoven. Once, to play a trick on a French horn player he didn't particularly like, Beethoven turned his score upside down.