-> American Dreams
 BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE.
WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you.
VA LOAN INFORMATION and VETERANS' MORTGAGES  KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis
New Orleans is the Lost City of America.A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need.
Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now!
|
To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Dutch, Greek, Chinese and Russian, copy and paste the complete URL("http://www.g21.net/amdream95.html") and enter it in the box after you click through.
COMMON VALOR AMERICAN DREAMS DAY ONE G21 AFRICA JOIN OUR MAILING LIST. It contains more jokes than not. GLOBAL*BEAT IRISH EYES NEW YORK STATE RADIOACTIVE RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT ARCHIVES SMOKE & MIRRORS VOX POPULI LAST WEEK's EDITION MEET THE G-CREW! These are the people behind this jam-band every week. HOME TABLE OF CONTENTS & BACK ISSUES BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE.
WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you. We know you're lazy. Here's a button for a quick translation of this page. Just click on the flag for your country. You're welcome! OR TRY THIS GOOGLE TRANSLATION SERVICE. |
Los Angeles, CA, USA - BREAKUP
My parents' divorce was fast and not friendly. It came a couple of years after an article and photo of the family -- Yaltah and Ben Rolfe and sons Lionel and Robert -- appeared in the Long Beach Press-Telegram in 1956. The article was about how a woman successfully balanced her career and her family.
Even as late as 1957, on the occasion of their fifteenth anniversary, my mother said, "Bud and I are very happy. We are beginning to relax more and enjoy our fifteenth wedding anniversary."
Ultimately my mother felt that my father was holding her music back because he was jealous of her male musical colleagues.
She also resented the intensity of his hatred for the Menuhin clan, but given his history with it, there was no reason to expect anything else.
Benjamin Lionel Rolfe was born in 1914 in Minnesota, and he was proud of being a Midwesterner whose family had come to the United States in the1820s. His lineage was also different from that of the Menuhins. He was of Portuguese and German Jewish descent while she was of Russian Jewish émigré stock.
He looked down on Russian Jews. He regarded himself as a Jewish aristocrat because he was Sephardic. His mother spoke Ladino, not Yiddish, when she grew up in a small Sephardic community around Seattle. As a kid, when I ran around without shoes, which I liked to do, he would remonstrate with me for "acting like your peasant background." When my mother got mad at him, she would tell him to take her to Canter's delicatessen in the Fairfax District, "so I can be am ong my people (Russian Jews)."
He was never happy when she went on a world tour, which she did several times -- a couple of times with Michael Mann, the violist son of author Thomas Mann. She also toured and played chamber music regularly with violinists Israel Baker and Eudice Shapiro, violists Paul Doktor and cellists George Neikrug, Willie Van den Berg, Howard Colf, Victor Gottlieb and Gabor Rejto, who was part of the original Alma Trio.
The duo of Menuhin-Mann ended rather abruptly early one afternoon as we were on our way to Exposition Park where the Sunday Afternoon Concerts emanated from the Natural History Museum and were heard on radio station KFAC. Mann threw a knife and a viola case at my mom and me in the back seat. Then he jumped out of the car. My unnerved father was driving. Mann went on to become a literature professor at UC Berkeley and later tried to reform their duo. Yaltah rejected the offer, just as she rejected the Mann family.
My mother was very dismissive of Thomas Mann's books which she rejected as strongly as she supported Willa's. Her experience with Michael, then with his parents, Thomas and Katia, was a negative one.
I remember her attitude was that for a man who was supposed to represent democracy and freedom, she thought that Mann's household was like a totalitarian state -- and his children were being sacrificed to his needs as a writer.
Lionel Rolfe She thought he was not so different from the Nazism which he crusaded against.
Interesting[ly] enough, some critics noted that although Mann was the great antennas writer who kept the conscience of Germany alive in exile, there was a certain totalitarian streak in him and his writing. My mother felt as if she had personal knowledge of that totalitarian streak.
After the Menuhin-Mann duo was dissolved, Katia and Thomas were concerned my mother might sue them because of the cancellation of a world tour. So Katia accused my mother of having "done something to upset Michael" and added a warning that one must never "upset a Mann."
My mother responded that "a Mann had tried to kill a Menuhin." She had no desire to sue. She just wanted nothing more to do with them.
Far earlier in the game, Willa was proud that Alfred and Blanche Knopf were publishing such great European writers as Thomas Mann, and they convinced her to write an introduction for his Joseph and His Brothers.
Willa met Thomas Mann only once, and not much is known about that meeting. Willa developed an intense appreciation of his work, but she excluded the work that came out of his fight against Nazism.
She loved Joseph and His Brothers in part because he was writing a kind of history, just as she did. In the case of the Mann book, it was biblical history.
She pointed out that everyone knows the story -- the writer is not going to be able to use "bizarre invention" to hold the reader. The power, she said, is in having "the old story brought home to us closer than ever before ... Shakespeare knew this act very well, and the Greek dramatists long before him."
Willa said that the "story of Joseph and his brothers is not only forever repeated in literature, it forever repeats itself in life." In an essay she wrote in 1936, she talked about Mann's technique of storytelling which involved use of a peculiar kind of time machine.
"With a sense of escape we approach something already known to us; not glacier ages or a submerged Atlantis, but the very human Mediterranean shore, on a moonlight night in the season of Spring," she wrote.
She said the story was driven by a search for "a God who was not a form, but a force, an essence, felt but not imprisoned in matter."
In her essay on Mann's Joseph, Cather makes a remark that is more revealing than one might think about the book she has just finished -- Lucy Gayheart. A disturbing part of the novel, as we will discuss later, was whether Lucy's death was by design or circumstance.
Referring to Mann's Joseph in Joseph and His Brothers, she says that "he knows that even external accidents often have their roots, their true beginnings, in personal feeling."
She proves her point by saying that "he accepts the evidence of the bloody coat and believes that Joseph was devoured by a boar or a lion, yet his glance at the brothers is always accusing. But for their hatred, the wild beast might not have come down upon Joseph."
I remember telling my mother whose dislike of Mann was quite complete that whatever she thought of him he was, in fact, a great writer, and Doctor Faustus was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, works of the 20th century.
Significantly, she listened without comment.
I think another person who ranked high on my mother's list was Josef Szigeti, the great violinist who, like Yehudi, had premiered the works of? Bela Bartok, the man some think was the greatest composer of the 20th century. I think Yaltah admired Szigeti, who like Bartok was Hungarian, in the same way she loved Cather, although she had known Cather better as a child and she was an adult when she performed with Szigeti, who by that point was an elderly man. She was tremendously excited to be playing Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata with Szigeti.
We always looked forward to going to Szigeti's house. I was almost always along, sometimes turning pages for my mom under Szigeti's watchful eye.
By that time, Szigeti had lost much of his technique, but like Pablo Casals in his later years, the quality of his interpretation shone through his defects. My mother was always quite angry that Jascha? Heifetz had once invited Szigeti to play a benefit for his students at USC -- and one of the reasons he was invited was so that Heifetz and his friends and students could laugh at how the old man's playing had deteriorated.
She thought it was cruel and unfair, and showed the pettiness that Heifetz often displayed in private, which some partisans argue showed through in his otherwise magnificent playing.
Although my mother saw the clay feet of people like Heifetz and Mann, it did not keep her from working with them musically. One of my mom's closest collaborators in chamber music, with whom she toured, was Israel Baker, who was one of Heifetz's greatest students.
I was often at my mother's side when she went to rehearse, to perform or simply to play chamber music with other musicians. I? turned pages for her. She seemed to value my opinions, if they weren't offered too vociferously.
I remember that one year on my birthday, we went into a recording studio and she recorded all the Chopin Preludes.
For my mother, that was a perfect birthday present -- and it also seemed that way to me.
However, at the studio, the engineer tried to tell her how to play. Her reaction was quite direct. She told him that she was the musician and he was the engineer and never the two will mix. His job was? faithfully to record whatever she played, no more, no less. I can't help wondering how she would regard the current trend toward "hands-on" producers in the world of classical recordings.
I wish I still had that recording of the twenty-one Preludes. Somehow it got lost during those many years I knocked around after my parents' split.
What did not get lost so quickly were memories of my mom's emotional rhythms. The day of a concert I learned to stay out of her way. She was always taut and nervous. Some performers become inured to nerves before a concert, but this was rarely the case with her.
I think my dad became upset over two things. It was hard for a man to run a family and work while the other was away on a world tour. He was also jealous. My sense is that he needn't have been, but children often are the last to have an accurate sense of their parents' sex life.
I paid heavily? in later years for supporting my mother. My father and I had a rocky rela tionship that became closer only at the end, because he blamed me for encouraging her to leave. He never recovered from her leaving. I believe he loved her a lot.
By the time I was 16, I spent very little time at my father's place. My mom had moved into a nearby old apartment building on Bronson and Franklin in Hollywood.
One time I, my dad and Robby came to sleep overnight on the floor of her small apartment. I was particularly proud of the new car -- a Mini-Minor -- that my father had bought me.
"They shoved me into their new car ... glad to have such a toy, when to make ends meet I had to sell my beautiful piano. But I know that to a man ... to a boy ... a car is a symbol of some power," my mom later recalled.
I began my student life, living around coffeehouses and radical politics. At that point, my mother moved to New York and then to London.
My father definitely distanced himself from me during this period. I lived in squalid student housing and when I couldn't pay the rent, I fled to sleep on someone's couch. I was reading all the time -- Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in particular.
My own history with music was a mixed blessing. I think that I felt terribly inadequate as a musician, even though I had started, in the tradition, playing at a young age.
My mother was my first teacher on the piano, but it quickly became apparent to both of us that this was not going to be successful, so she put me in other hands, but it evidently wasn't meant to be. After the piano I took a few violin lessons, first in a public school and then with a violinist who was the first chair in the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
I studied the classical guitar for several years, although I felt like a bit of a fraud because I never really learned how to read music well. I had to suffer through each piece, even the simplest of the Bach preludes transcribed for guitar by Segovia, almost learning them by memory.
Nonetheless, Raul Gripenwaldt, the music critic for the Santa Monica Outlook and an impresario around town, set up some sort of performance after my mother played at a high school. I had already played for regular meetings of the lute and guitar club my father and I went to.
On this occasion I nervously plunked through the piece, without any great fault, and thought I had acquitted myself adequately but not tremendously. However, I judged the applause to be only grudging.
Despite high praise from my mom and Gripenwaldt, I gave up then and there, and have not played the guitar since.
I knew the truth. I did not play with enough facility or technique to offer anything in the way of interpretation. It just didn't come together for me as it did for the Menuhin children. I'm surprised my mother could not see that -- and I think it was good that I moved away from performing music.
I next toyed with the idea of making films. I was going to be the next Eisenstein or Fellini, until I realized the art of transforming your vision into a film has more to do with your fundraising abilities than anything else.
When I finally got around to writing my first book, The Menuhins, I felt as if I were also composing music. I didn't succeed with that book so brilliantly as Cather had in My Antonia, where you can hear a symphony in her words. Still, I'm still convinced? if I had been able to write down the music I felt inside of me, I might have been a fair composer. But my decision to get away from music was probably inevitable.
Despite my mother's hopes for me as a musician, I did not want to be a second-rate Menuhin. Besides, I deeply suspected that I would be a better writer than a musician. At the same time I knew that my mother looked down on writers. She didn't like raconteurs. She equated the two. "Oh, he's nothing but a talker," she might say about someone she didn't trust.
So I was determined to become a writer. I got very politically involved -- and finally ended up writing for the People's World (the communist newspaper), and the Los Angeles Free Press (the first underground newspaper) which made its national appearance in Los Angeles in the '60s. My father was horrified, being an old mainstream Roosevelt Democrat. Soon many of the lawyers who appeared before him told him what good articles I was writing. He was impressed with this.
My mother had imbued me, in many ways, with the attitudes if not the actual education of a 16th century gentleman. I believed in the ethos of the artist above all else. The businessman -- commerce and finance in general -- was on the lowest rung in my mother's scheme of things, and hence in my scheme of things as well.So she left my father, left me, left my brother, and married Joel Ryce, another pianist, in much the same way her sister Hephzibah also left her children, left Australia, and went back to London to live and marry a penniless social activist and concentration camp survivor. This was after having been part of Australia's wealthiest families.
Maybe Willa Cather was not entirely blind to Marutha's faults, because she once counseled Yaltah not to leave my father and to stand up to her parents -- which, in particular, meant standing up to Marutha, who could be a very formidable woman.One of the reasons Yaltah was attracted to Willa was because her words made sense. They were meaningful, as opposed to the crazy fantasy world represented by her mother.
Yaltah read and reread Willa's books all her life, getting more out of them each time. She devoured Willa's books the way she devoured a musical score, minutely yet with passion.
But if my mother's parents held her back, and then her husband, my father, also held her back, her third husband ended up being the biggest impediment of all her musical career.
It was only after her third husband died that she began to emerge on the concert stage again. It may even be that she was miserably lonely and depressed by his death, seeking solace in music -- yet in the last three years left to her after he died, she underwent something of a musical rebirth.
Willa Cather's female protagonists were survivors, from Antonia to Thea to Lucy. Yaltah survived and triumphed perhaps because Cather's protagonists were so ingrained in her.
This was an excerpt from Lionel Rolfe's The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin & Willa Cather. The book is available from amazon.com, barnes and noble and american legends.com.
© 2005 - GENERATOR 21.
E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your kudos, brickbats and suggestions to rod@g21.net.