Jewish violinist finishes father's piece Nazis halted
RAANANA, Israel — 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-year-old Drucker said of his father, who passed away in 1993. “There is all this emotional energy and intensity loaded into my associations to this piece.”
Thursday’s concert, and a second performance Sunday night, 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.
Long before the Nazis placed Jews in ghettos and gassed them to death in concentration camps, they were mostly preoccupied with “purifying” German institutions with racist laws and street justice. Jews were fired from their government jobsand harassed into emigrating.
For the largely assimilated German Jews, who had a deep connection to the country’s culture and history, the Kulturbund offered a much-needed creative outlet as their world was crumbling.
Drucker fled Germany in 1938 and moved to the U.S., where his son was born. The younger Drucker said the incident in Cologne was a “dramatic experience” for his father that stayed with him for years.
