The Rosendorf Quartet

Name: The Rosendorf Quartet
ISBN: 9780802133168

A Novel

Nathan Shaham and Dalya Bilu, Translator

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

Four German Jews, all refugees from Nazi Germany, and all first-rate musicians, arrive in Palestine in the 1930s. There they join a symphony orchestra, which although made up of Europeans serves as a propaganda vehicle for the Zionist state-in-the-making. Unable to express themselves within this melting-pot orchestra, they join together to form The Rosendorf Quartet.

In this compelling and provocative novel, awarded Israel's prestigious Bialik Prize for Literature, Nathan Shaham examines the plight of these refugees, who must adjust to the old-new land—a place fraught with political struggle and impending violence.

Kurt Rosendorf, the quartet's founder and first violin, would like to believe that his true homeland is music. Forced to leave his Christian wife and daughter in Berlin, he cannot adjust to life in Palestine and tries to live "outside history and geography."

Konrad Friedman, second violin, is a young Zionist who constantly battles the urge to renounce the European, cultured life of the musician and dedicate himself to the Jewish cause.

Bernard Litovsky, the cellist, is tired of wandering and longs for firm ground and a sense of home.

The fourth in the quartet is the stunning Eva Staubenfeld, whose beauty and sexual liberation baffle and mesmerize her colleagues. Relieved to be far from the abuses of her past, she is furious that the accident of being born Jewish has disrupted her life.

Uniting the four is Egon Loewenthal, a brilliant and underrated German author who has survived Dachau but cannot forsake the language of his persecutors. He decides that his next novel, written in German, will be about the quartet.

The Rosendorf Quartet is both a deft portrait of the complexities and contradictions that have gone to make up the state of Israel and a stunning tribute to the curative powers of music, in whose realm dissonance, politics, and personal anguish dissolve into art, transcending human conflict and national boundaries.

About the Authors

Nathan Shaham (1925-2018) was one of Israel’s most respected novelists and dramatists. Born in Tel Aviv, the son of the writer Eliezer Steinman, he served in the Palmach during the War of Independence. He was a member of Kibbutz Beit Alfa from 1945, later served as cultural attaché in New York, and was editor-in-chief of Sifriat Poalim Publishing House.

His fiction is rooted in the central questions of modern Jewish and Israeli life: war, kibbutz life, immigration, and disillusionment. His best-known work, The Rosendorf Quartet (1987), follows a string quartet of German-Jewish refugees in Mandate Palestine in the late 1930s. Through these characters he explores Zionism, exile, and the making of a new Israeli culture. Shaham, himself a violist, treats music as a universal language that transcends nationalism. The novel’s narrator, a German-language writer, struggles to write in a new tongue, which gives the book the character of a “diary of exile.” Shaham revisited the world of the quartet in the sequel Rosendorf’s Shadow (2001).

His honors include the Bialik Prize (1988), the National Jewish Book Award (1992), the Prime Minister’s Prize (2007), and the Israel Prize for Literature (2012).