In Norman Lebrecht’s novel “The Song of Names,” Dovidl Eli Rapoport is expected to be the next Fritz Kreisler. On the afternoon of his debut, however, the violin prodigy and Jewish refugee in England falls asleep on a London bus and ends up in the Chassidic quarter. There he learns with absolute finality the fate of his mother, father and sisters — including the time and manner of their deaths in the concentration camps that he, by luck of fate, escaped.
When the young violinist hears the Rebbe’s niggun to the names of Hitler’s victims, he replaces his classical repertoire with the “Song of Names” and ends his ambitions as a concert violinist.
Ignoring his concert, he changes his name and identity and becomes a part of the Chassidic world.
As he disappears into the world of the fervently religious, Dovidl leaves in his wake the couple who took him in during the terrible years of World War II. He similarly abandons his closest friend, Martin, the narrator of the novel.
Martin’s father is a musical impresario and music publisher, a Jewish veteran of World War I who rose from the poverty of the East End to make it into the world of the British upper class. He gives shelter to David not only out of humanitarian motives, but also in the belief that David will become the next world-class violinist.
“The Song of Names” excellently describes the London of the Blitz. Also, Martin is no small achievement as a fictional character. For a lonely only child, emotionally deserted by a mother who lavishes more affection on refugee children than her own son, Dovidl’s arrival is a godsend. The two become best friends.
But after the young man disappears, Martin’s mother and father are heartbroken, feel betrayed, and in quick succession, they die. Martin takes on the family musical publishing business. He marries, has children and grandchildren, yet has felt “dead” inside since the loss of his best friend.
Forty years after the disappearance, in 1991, Martin is drawn outside of London to judge a young musicians competition and hears an aspiring violinist whose technique could only have been learned from his boyhood “brother.” This leads Martin to a final meeting with Dovidl, who has become a Chassidic rabbi.
“The Song of Names” is reminiscent of some of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s later stories, in which the hero — soiled by the loose sexuality and shallowness of the secular world — becomes fervently religious to atone for past sins.
And Dovidl was, before his disappearance, more than just a promising artist. He had descended into the London underworld of gambling, hard drugs and prostitution.
Yet, unlike Singer, author Lebrecht is not a foe of modernity. He traces the effect of Dovidl’s disappearance on Martin and Martin’s parents as a tragedy.
Dovidl’s disappearance, Lebrecht’s narration argues, was not only a brave move of renunciation. It was also, perhaps, the act of a coward, the act of a man, who, if he had only dared, might have elevated humanity through his art.
Lebrecht, a renowned music critic for the BBC, has a sure feel for the role of great music and the world’s yearning for the musical genius who, like Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn, can restore the human race to the deepest feelings of the heart.
But the novel also asks: Doesn’t the great artist also have an obligation to his own soul and memory?
Dovidl is a realized character whose inner conflict — between loyalty to the Jewish people and religion and obligation to the entire world — is only partially resolved. His dilemma, so well described, makes “The Song of Names” a complex and deeply insightful novel.
“The Song of Names” by Norman Lebrecht (320 pages, Anchor Books, $14).