‘A SENSE OF COMPLETION’
Violinist finishes father’s work
In 1933, the promising young Jewish-German violinist Ernest Drucker left the stage midway through a Brahms concerto in Cologne at the behest of Nazi officials, in one of the first anti-Semitic acts of the new regime.
Now, more than 80 years later, his son, Grammy Award-winning American violinist Eugene Drucker, has completed his father’s interrupted work. With tears in his eyes, Drucker performed an emotional rendition of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77, over the weekend with the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra.
“I think he would feel a sense of completion. I think in some ways many aspects of my career served that purpose for him,” the 63-yearold Drucker said of his father, who passed away in 1993.
Thursday’s concert commemorated the Judischer Kulturbund — a federation of Jewish musicians in Nazi Germany who were segregated so as not to “sully” Aryan culture.
After the humiliation in Cologne, the elder Drucker became a central player in the Kulturbund, a unique historical phenomenon with a mixed legacy.
On one hand, it gave Jews the opportunity to carry on with their cultural lives and maintain a sense — some would say the illusion — of normalcy in the midst of growing discrimination against them. On the other, it served a Nazi propaganda machine eager to portray a moderate face to the world. It was a prototype for the “Judenrat” system in which relatively privileged Jews naively operated under Nazi auspices all the way down the road to destruction.
“They wanted to show the Germans why it was important to preserve us and why we were better than they thought we were. There was this delusional sense that this may alter their fate,” said Orit Fogel-Shafran, general manager of the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra. “This was their mistake. They thought this gave them some sort of immunity.”
The Kulturbund was reduced significantly after the pogroms of Kristallnacht in 1938 — when Nazi-incited riots marked the start of the campaign to destroy European Jewry. Musicians went underground or fled, like Drucker’s father, who fled Germany in 1938 and moved to the U.S., where his son was born.
Drucker said he didn’t know if it was “my place to correct a history wrong.” But backstage, after the performance, he was clearly moved.
“As a musician I feel like the circle is never completely closed,” he said. “But I was standing there at one point ... and I really did start to think about my father.”
I was standing there at one point ... and I really did start to think about my father.