Review by Booklist Review
When Roxanne de Bastion inherits a baby grand Blüthner piano, she embarks on a journey through her family's past. The piano belonged to her paternal grandfather, Stephen de Bastion, who was born Istvan Bastyai von Holzer in Budapest in 1907. A talented musician and composer, he also left a collection of cassette tapes on which he recorded his life story. And what a story it is. After a stint at the family's textile business, he left to pursue a musical career. Then the world changed. During WWII he was taken to a Russian forced labor camp, then to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. He survived those horrors, and upon his return to Budapest, he found that his piano had also survived, and when he left Hungary for England, the piano went along, too. De Bastion, a singer-songwriter, skillfully blends family stories and memories into a virtuoso narrative of courage, resilience, loss, and survival. This powerful and moving story is rooted in heartbreaking history, family pride, and a belief in the power of music.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
British singer de Bastion's poignant first book nimbly reconstructs the life of her Jewish paternal grandfather, Stephen de Bastion, who was born Istvan Bastyai vol Holzer in 1907 Hungary and survived the Holocaust. Drawing on tapes that her grandfather recorded about his life, de Bastion pieces together a narrative that gathers steam in 1940, when Stephen was a professional pianist in Switzerland. Despite his mother's protestations, he returned home to Hungary, only to be separated from his parents and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944. There, Stephen witnessed cruelties that haunted him for decades, such as walking "past corpses of men who had pulled down their trousers to 'do their business' and had instantly frozen to death." Though he survived, got married, and immigrated to England in 1948, Stephen never returned to playing piano professionally. Still, his love of music serves as a powerful undercurrent throughout the narrative. In an atmospheric touch, de Bastion utilizes the family's piano, which miraculously survived the Holocaust, as a vector for Stephen's emotional experience (as he suffers through "the hours of the work, the humiliation," at the camp, "dust settles" on the unplayed piano; when "the layer grows thick enough," it produces a "muted sound"). This strikes a moving and melancholy note. (July)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A somber narrative derived from archival work left by a Holocaust survivor portrays an era in Budapest just before and during early World War II. Singer-songwriter de Bastion is the granddaughter of the protagonist of this book, Istvan Bastyai von Holtzer (later known as Stephen), a Jewish musician and composer who had a fabulous career as a working pianist across Europe before he was sent to German camps after the Nazis invaded in March 1944. Until that year, Hungary was a German ally, which meant that Jews were mostly protected by the pro-Nazi regime, despite their fate elsewhere in Europe. Through cassette tapes the author discovered in the possession of her recently deceased father, she learned that Stephen had narrated his "war story" rather selectively, but the author was able to fill in many other details while researching the history of the era. Stephen was the eldest of four born to a family of nonreligious Hungarian Jews. His father was a wealthy textile entrepreneur, and the family lived in a penthouse apartment in central Budapest, and one of the home's main focal points was a Blüthner piano. Stephen disdained business, but he became an accomplished pianist for hire--in films, nightclubs, etc.--in Budapest and across Europe. As the author relates, he pursued his passion while "blissfully blinkered" regarding political events until October 1942, when he was summoned to provide forced labor for the Russian war front. Although he managed to survive the horrific conditions, when the Russians broke through, he escaped to Budapest to see his family, only to face deportation to Nazi death camps along with 440,000 Hungarian Jews. De Bastion ably pieces together this poignant tale despite Stephen's silences, offering a memorable account of family and resilience. A painfully moving story of how a family piano served as a cherished reminder of long-lost but not forgotten relationships. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
