A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor

by Caroline Stoessinger

  As Alice raised her students on the music of Bach, she also made them aware of the artist’s calling. No pupil escaped Alice’s tutelage without knowing Bach’s personal dictum: I compose for the glory of God and the entertainment of the soul. “Bach is the philosopher of music,” Alice emphasizes as she puts her hands on her heart. “His music is like a puzzle. It takes many twists and turns, sometimes obvious but often elusive as it always goes forward just like our lives. For me he is the God of all of the Gods of Music.”

  To this day, at the age of 108, Alice begins her daily practice with a work by Bach from memory. She finds beauty and meaning in trying to solve the challenges her favorite composer offers up on the page. Relearning Bach’s two-and three-part inventions from memory with uncooperative arthritic index fingers, she manages the difficult music with only four fingers on each hand. As Bach was the first pianist to play with his thumbs, using all five fingers, Alice laughs and says that she has progressed backward.

  Throughout her many years, she has gleaned personal inspiration from the lives of these immortal composers, which she then poured into her performances. And she passed on her deep reverence to her students. If a student failed to know the first name of a composer whose work she was performing, Alice would admonish, “What? You don’t know the name of your friend?” At the same time Alice was unaware of the love she stirred in the hearts of those budding pianists. Nor did she know that her influence would last a lifetime and beyond. Meira Shaham, the mother of the celebrated American Israeli violinist Gil Shaham, was one of those students.

  MEIRA DISKIN SHAHAM

  “Of course I would recognize her. She was my teacher.” With tears welling in her eyes, Meira points to a recent photograph of Alice. “There she is. That’s her. That’s her smile.” Meira, now a grandmother, had not seen or heard about Alice since she immigrated to the United States nearly forty years earlier. Meira wept too when she learned that Alice is a Holocaust survivor. “All these years I did not know. We students had no idea. She was so happy, always smiling, even when she was disappointed with our playing.”

  Meira studied piano with Alice throughout her high school years. As a budding scientist she went on to Hebrew University, where she earned advanced degrees in genetics. “She made me want to practice,” Meira recalls. “Although I had taken my earliest lessons twice weekly with another teacher, I could get by without working between lessons. And anyway I had no piano at home. Practice was a foreign concept. But after I began to study with Alice, she got me to love to practice. At first I did it for her, in a neighbor’s house after school. Then my friends and I started spending all of our weekends at the conservatory practicing for hours, just for the love of it.

  “I did not become a professional, but I did give birth to the next generation and helped them to find their way along music’s path. Yes, I was able to give something of what Alice had given to me to my children—her great, great love of music and musicians. So all her hard work was not lost.” All of Meira’s three children are musicians. Orli, her daughter, is a well-known concert pianist. Her oldest child, Shai, is a distinguished scientist specializing in developmental molecular genetics, although music is his lifetime avocation and he is a remarkable pianist. And Gil, Meira’s middle child, is an internationally famous violinist.

  And while Meira does her high-tech work in genetics, she is deeply involved in music through her children and friends. In whatever spare time she finds, she avidly attends concerts. “I represent the other half of the story—that is, the audience for music,” she says. On New Year’s Eve, 2010, Meira attended a joyous family concert in St. Louis. Orli’s husband, David Robertson, the music director of the St. Louis Symphony, conducted the concert; Orli and Shai both played piano pieces; and Gil played Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with the orchestra. St. Louis music lovers were fortunate to witness the tradition inherited and treasured from generation to generation.

  EDNA ZAITSCHEK MOR

  “I was in the middle of a session with a patient, an older woman,” the Israeli psychoanalyst Edna Mor says, “when she mentioned, ‘I listened to my mother play duets with Alice Herz-Sommer.’ ” Ignoring for a moment the rigid tenets of her profession, Edna says she told the woman that she also knew Alice. When she was young, she had taken piano lessons from her. Edna goes on to explain that, within that moment of mutual recognition, the patient’s trust greatly increased. “And I believe that I was able to help her.”

  Edna talks about the first time she reconnected with Alice in London. “After nearly fifty years, Alice actually recalled a piece she said I had played very well. It was Chopin’s Scherzo no. 2 in B Minor. And she reminded me that my boyfriend, Gideon [who later became Edna’s husband], had learned Beethoven’s Sonata, opus 2, no. 1, with her.” Gideon worked with their teacher for only a year or two when he was a university student, and although he went on to become a biochemist, according to Edna, he has never stopped playing.

  Edna studied with Alice for more than ten years. She was a talented pianist—but she is quick to confess that she was not one of Alice’s star pupils. She was a shy girl who never wanted to be the center of attention. She felt that she could not face the competitive atmosphere of the conservatory and the requirements of public performances. “I never wanted to play in public, and still today I practice and play only for myself,” she says.

  Nevertheless Alice taught her as if she were pursuing a professional career. Edna became a private student and took her lessons in Alice’s apartment so that she did not need to face the dreaded jury examinations by the academy’s piano faculty. She remembers how the tiny front room in the apartment was completely dominated by the piano: “There was barely room to move about.” Later Alice, with the help of her brother-in-law Dr. Emil Adler, was able to buy a larger place with a living room that could comfortably accommodate both of her pianos and guests for concerts.

  Like Alice, Edna’s parents were from Czechoslovakia, only they had escaped the Nazis to build new lives in Palestine in 1934. Both were amateur musicians and part of the genteel, music-loving world that was prewar Czechoslovakia. Edna’s mother, a pianist, and her violinst father met Alice in Jerusalem. They too had lost many close relatives, including Edna’s grandfather, in the Holocaust. The Nazis had arrested him in early 1940 for selling cigarettes on the black market in the streets of Brno as he struggled to support his family. After the war Edna learned that her grandfather had been murdered in Auschwitz.

  Edna was Alice’s only student to have even a vague idea of Alice’s past, from overhearing her parents’ conversations. But she never spoke about it with Alice as Edna understood that the subject was off-limits.

  After Alice and Rafi moved into their larger apartment, Alice began to revive her prewar tradition of giving Hauskonzerte, and Edna’s parents attended regularly. Most times Alice would serve tea and one of her luscious Czech cakes. The discussions were always lively, and then the topic would invariably turn to local politics. After an hour or so Alice would go to the piano, where she would play a formal program for another hour or two. In this way Alice and a few of her émigré friends re-created warm moments of their familiar life in Czechoslovakia, the way it was before.

  ESTER MARON KRIEGER

  Before she left for London to visit Alice in the fall of 2010, Ester practiced Chopin’s Ballade in G Minor countless hours daily for nearly two months. Although Ester had not seen Alice in more than forty years and had performed the Ballade in concert countless times, she was nervous as she prepared to play it for her former teacher. Alice was thrilled with Ester’s performance. “Magnificent. Your playing never stops growing,” she told her. Ester felt the same surge of hope that she’d felt half a century earlier when Alice approved of her playing.

  Like Alice, regardless of the impediments life has thrown her way, Ester has enthusiastically made the best of her situations through music. When in 1962 the time came for her to do her obligatory two years of military service, she was worrie
d about time for practicing and being away from music. Never at a loss for ideas, she asked if she might be permitted to teach music during her army years. Without the usual teacher training courses, she was sent to teach in two schools in Israel’s most northern city, Kiryat Shmona, very close to the Syrian and Lebanese borders. It was an area that, at the time, was considered too dangerous for civilian teachers. Ester paid a visit to Zadik Nahamu Yona, the principal of Tel Hai, one of the schools, on a sultry day before the opening day of school to get his instructions and advice.

  The principal explained that Ester would be teaching the youngest children: third through eighth grade. Most of her students would be French-speaking children of immigrants from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. The principal, the soldiers, and the teachers were mostly Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Middle East. Admitting that she had not been trained in music education, Ester asked to see the textbooks and an outline of the curriculum. “I am sorry that we do not have many books. We do own a few recorders, drums, and cymbals. You are free to use them,” the principal told her. He paused before saying, “I love music. These poor children need this in their lives. Please—do your best, but know that you are on your own.” Later Ester would learn that this compassionate, intelligent, down-to-earth man, an immigrant from Iraq, had no college degrees. Yet he ran a superb school, evoking the best from his soldier-teachers and a deep love of learning in the children.

  Ester thought of Alice and how she made music sing wherever she was. “Teaching is love and a teacher must love to teach”—Alice’s words rang strongly in Ester’s memory. During her two years in Kiryat Shmona, Ester produced concerts and even fully staged and costumed musicals with her students. “This was the best training I could have had—far better than a graduate school laboratory,” she claims. “I think that teaching is always a matter of improvising, adjusting to get the most of each individual.” And that, according to Ester, describes the way Alice was with her students. “She was very modest and patient as she encouraged me to try ever more difficult pieces.”

  Ester began lessons at the Academy with Alice when she was sixteen. Four years later and only two months before her graduation examination, the doctors put Ester’s right wrist in a cast to correct a previous injury. She was panicked because she was unable to practice, but Alice comforted her, saying, “Don’t worry, you will be fine. We will have at least a month after your cast is off to prepare. I will give you a lesson every day.”

  “And she kept her word, every day we worked, until I was finally ready for my graduation program. May I say that I received the top marks?”

  Ester was admitted on full scholarship to the New England Convervatory of Music, only to learn that she could not major in accompanying because it was not offered in the degree program. With Alice-like perseverance, she persuaded the president of the school to design the program she wanted. He did, and Ester received their first degree in vocal accompanying. Thanks to her, the program continues to flourish.

  Ester’s only child, a daughter, Michal, was raised in the distant shadow of Alice’s influence and is now a cellist in the Haifa Symphony. Describing their visit to Alice in September 2010, Michal said that Alice asked her why she had chosen the cello. “I always knew that I wanted to be a musician just like my mother. I heard my mother accompanying a cellist and loved the sound,” Michal answered. “Alice asked me if I played the Dvořák concerto, and she started singing the theme.” Michal told Alice that of course she had learned it in school, but she had not had a chance to play it with an orchestra. “Well, what are you waiting for?” Alice quipped before adding, “You must work and work again on the slow movement. With this piece you will learn to master the performance with an orchestra weaving your part in and out—as if you were in a conversation about love, never saying goodbye, always returning. It is all warmth and love, never angry or aggressive. Your tone must be a laser beam to the heart.” Then suddenly dropping that conversation, Alice asked if Michal played concerts with Ester.

  “Of course,” Michal answered. “I love playing with my mother.”

  Alice continued, “It was my great joy to play concerts with my son. Nothing, nothing made me happier. I think he liked it too. I know the cello repertoire by heart. Your mother, Ester, is an excellent pianist. Ex-cel-lent,” Alice repeated, emphasizing each syllable. In parting Alice added, “We are so lucky. We are the richest people in the world. Much richer than millionaires. People who don’t know music are very, very poor!”

  Ester’s most recent hurdle is facing mandatory retirement from her work at the Levinsky Teachers College. Actually she has already retired twice, and each time was called back because she is so specialized that she cannot easily be replaced. In May 2011, Ester presented what was supposed to be her farewell concert with her current students. But, as for Alice, retirement for Ester is highly unlikely. She has already increased her practice hours in preparation for other options.

  Asked what is the most important lesson piano teachers can share with their students, Alice says, “Love to work.” She mentions that, when Bach was asked how he managed to write so much great music, he answered, “Hard work … anyone who works as hard as I do will be successful.” Alice continues, “And this is true for all teachers of all subjects.… Instill a love of work, a love of practicing or of cleaning the kitchen until it shines. Love to make things better. Love the process of learning. We must learn to enjoy work because it is good in and of itself and not because of the triumph we hope to achieve.”

  “Love to work” has been Alice’s lifelong guiding principle, which she also imparted to her students, teaching them to try to perfect even one short phrase by practicing the passage hundreds or thousands of times until it is fluent.

  “When I start a new piece,” Alice explains, “it takes time, and little by little, sometimes after months, when I know it like my nose, I can call it my own.” Alice insists that she practiced all kinds of exercises to free her technique. “This is, I believe, the secret to my sight reading. My eyes see groups of notes that my fingers obey because of the scales and practicing all sorts of patterns.

  “When you truly love your work, you are much happier. And I can say that your chance of success is greater.” Not only did Alice teach her piano students to love to practice but her code extended beyond music. “Enjoy even menial tasks,” she says. “They help to overcome life’s greater challenges.”

  Alice throws her head back in hearty laughter when she finds a new solution to a difficult passage that she has practiced for at least one hundred years.

  INTERLUDE

  The Lady in Number Six

  The tree-lined street in London’s Belsize section is quiet. Robin Tomlinson, the affable directing manager of the apartment house, is taking in the morning air with his short-haired dog when a passerby asks him where the music is coming from.

  “Aw yes. She lives on the first floor. She plays the piano all day,” Robin says in his warm Irish accent.

  The other tenants recognize their effervescent oldest neighbor as Alice the pianist. They set their clocks by her practice schedule. And they look forward to a jovial exchange whenever they run into her in the hallway. Although they know that she plays from memory, they are always surprised and flattered to find that her memory is just as sharp when it comes to the names of their children, grandchildren, and pets. Alice discusses the latest international political news, and whenever something happens in the world, “What does Alice think?” becomes a common question among the tenants. They know that she always has an opinion. Even frequent guests to the building know that a lady called Alice lives there.

  Robin enjoys promoting the best interests of his tenants. “Running a building full of amazing people is about much more than making money. I look at my tenants as my family. I am responsible for them and for their homes. It is my job to keep them happy. If they are happy, I can enjoy my sleep,” he says.

  Robin and his wife occupy the top floor of the five-story b
uilding, where they tend the flowers in their sprawling roof garden and welcome visits from the residents. Until recently Alice was a frequent guest, always eager to enjoy the ever-changing landscape of the garden and sit, if the day was sunny, in the warm and healing light. Sometimes she would arrive to watch the hummingbirds at work. Teasing Alice, Robin would tell her, “Those tiny birds are putting on a special show to thank you for your music.” Alice would take the time at sunset, when the scents of flowers on windless nights are strongest, to remember similar moments, standing on her Jerusalem balcony and surveying the ancient landscape. On the London rooftop the aroma of the jasmine, lilies, and roses was tangible. Alice particularly loved the red roses climbing on the fence. Robin sometimes plucked a few for her to take home for the top of her piano. Alice no longer visits the garden. Climbing the stairs is too taxing.

  Most of the tenants marvel at Alice’s playing. They are astonished by her continued dedication to her art. Once, when Alice was hospitalized after a small accident, Robin visited her and threatened to send her piano to the hospital if she did not come home soon. “Send it today,” she quipped. “I need to practice.” According to Alice’s friend and neighbor Valerie Reuben, the only time the music stopped was when Alice’s son died. “We feared for her life because the music had gone silent.” After several weeks the tenants rejoiced when they once again heard Alice’s piano. She began slowly, playing for only a few minutes before she would close the cover on the piano. But when she regained enough strength to begin the day playing Bach preludes and fugues, one by one the neighbors thanked her for the music. They did not speak of the death, but Alice understood the meaning of their words.