Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

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  Jerry Kupchynsky with his four-year-old daughter, Melanie.

  To Tom, Rebecca, Andrew, and Mom, and in memory of my dad, Burton E. Lipman

  —J.L.

  To Ed, who will always remember, and to Nick, Greg, and Laura, so you will never forget

  —M.K.

  Some people come into our lives, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never the same.

  —FRANZ PETER SCHUBERT

  FOREWORD

  Everybody has that one teacher who changes his or her life forever. And it seemed like we heard from all of them after Joanne wrote about Jerry Kupchynsky, the toughest teacher in the world, in the New York Times.

  Even before the print newspaper landed on people’s doorsteps, e-mail messages began pouring in from readers reminiscing about the English professor, the soccer coach, the bandleader who pushed them beyond their limits. They spoke of that one person in their childhood who forced them to achieve more than seemed possible, whom they cussed and whined about back then—and whom they wished, more than anything, they could thank now. They lovingly described the tyrant who once put them through living hell.

  “My wife and I choked up over breakfast this morning. It got me thinking about every teacher, coach, even parents of friends, who connected with me when I was growing up,” wrote a Boston lawyer. “It’s funny how the ones who were the biggest pains at the time are the ones I recall most vividly all these decades later.”

  For an elderly retiree, Mr. K’s story evoked “a journalism professor I had at Iowa and Kansas.” For a prominent attorney, it was “my tough-as-nails soccer coach at Stanford.” For a New York woman it was her son’s ninety-seven-year-old cello teacher, who “often brings Eli to tears, but no one inspires him more.” As a New Jersey woman who sent the piece to all three of her college-age children wrote, “They may not have realized it yet, but we are all influenced and touched by some teacher in our lives.”

  The outpouring following the Times piece surprised us both. And then it hit us: Everybody needs a Mr. K. Especially today—when it isn’t just kids but grown-ups who have been raised on a steady diet of praise and trophies—a little toughness goes an awfully long way. Those who have endured a Mr. K of their own can handle just about anything. They’re tougher, more resilient; they laugh just a little bit more. If ever there was a living, breathing, yelling embodiment of the old adage, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” that would be Mr. K.

  And this was the impetus behind our journey to write Strings Attached. We feel uniquely privileged to be able to tell Mr. K’s story. We grew up together. Melanie, Mr. K’s daughter, was a child violinist who began performing at the age of four; Joanne was a violist whom Mr. K plucked out of the beginner class and groomed to be a worthy enough musician to play with his own daughters. We spent much of our childhood performing together in a quartet that also included Melanie’s younger sister, Stephanie.

  As musicians who rehearsed together constantly, we learned to play in sync, to read each other’s nuances and body language, and to trade melodies seamlessly from one to the other and back again. We went our separate ways after high school. Melanie became a violinist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, while Joanne became a journalist and magazine editor in chief. But we were reunited more than two decades later at Mr. K’s memorial concert, and found ourselves right back in sync, right back in that familiar rhythm—not just on the concert stage, but long afterward, in our very distinct reminiscences about Melanie’s father. This book is, in effect, a duet.

  If Mr. K wasn’t a real-life character, somebody would have had to invent him. A Ukrainian-born taskmaster, he yelled and stomped and screamed. But he also pushed us to dream bigger and to achieve more than we ever imagined. What’s remarkable is that he did all this while enduring a life of almost unimaginable tragedy.

  His is an unforgettable story about the power of a great teacher, but also about resilience, excellence, and tough love. Mr. K’s subject, of course, was music. But the lessons he taught his students are universal.

  It’s hard to imagine a Mr. K in today’s world. Parents would be outraged; administrators would be pressured to fire him. Yet he was remarkably effective. His methods raise the big issues we grapple with now ourselves, as parents. Are we too soft on our kids? How do we best balance discipline with praise? How hard do we really want our kids’ teachers to push them? And if our kids do complain, how do we know when—or if—to interfere?

  The latest research on kids and motivation, it turns out, comes down in Mr. K’s corner. Recent studies have turned conventional wisdom on its head, concluding that overpraising kids makes them less confident and less motivated. Psychologist Carol Dweck, for instance, found that fifth graders praised for being “smart” became less confident, while those told they were “hard workers” became more confident and performed better.

  Similar findings have transformed our understanding of business success. In his 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion that true expertise requires 10,000 hours of practice. He cited examples—Microsoft founder Bill Gates, for one—and credited the work of the Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Ericsson’s initial work was based on a study he did not of executives—but of violinists.

  Ericsson expanded his research to the business world with a 2007 Harvard Business Review article, “The Making of an Expert.” He and his coauthors identified three key steps that all experts take, including those 10,000 hours as well as deliberate practice with a teacher. Perhaps most significant was the third step:

  The development of expertise requires coaches who are capable of giving constructive, even painful, feedback. Real experts… deliberately picked unsentimental coaches who would challenge them and drive them to higher levels of performance.

  In other words, real experts don’t want soft teachers: They want tough ones. Unsentimental ones. Ones who give them “painful” feedback.

  We couldn’t imagine a more accurate description of Mr. K.

  That research helped us to answer a key question: What was it that made Mr. K so effective? But, as we were writing, a business executive asked us what turned out to be an even more important question: What did Mr. K do that made his students effective?

  “Any kid can be pushed to excel,” said the executive, the CEO of a big U.S. company. “What I want to know is, what happens when the teacher isn’t there any longer to push them?”

  Too often, he said, he hired applicants with sterling résumés who turned out to be poor performers. They were incapable of taking initiative on their own. How, he wanted to know, do you raise kids to be self-starters?

  The CEO got it right, we realized. That was the key to Mr. K’s success. It wasn’t about what happened in his classroom. It’s what happened once his students left the classroom. Whether his students became musicians or doctors or lawyers, they shared one trait in common: They pushed themselves. They didn’t need anybody else to do it for them. It dawned on us that perhaps it was no mistake that one of Mr. K’s most frequent admonitions was “Dis
cipline yourself!” His students, whether consciously or not, took him at his word.

  “Discipline. Self-confidence. Resilience. These are lifelong lessons,” as one of his old students told us. “Whether we stuck with the music or not, it stuck with us.”

  Mr. K was without a doubt the toughest teacher we ever met. But his legacy is proof that one person can make all the difference. And that legacy endures. Its power was clear when, after his death, forty years’ worth of former students flew in from every corner of the country, old instruments in tow. They were inspired to take leave of their busy lives because they never forgot the lessons he taught them. And they were determined to thank him in the best way they knew how: by playing one last concert together, this time for Mr. K.

  The outpouring of emotion—from students, colleagues, and those who read about his story afterward—made us understand how universal is the appeal of that tough teacher who can set us straight on what matters in life. Mr. K may be gone, but with Strings Attached, we hope his lessons will live on.

  —JOANNE LIPMAN

  New York City

  —MELANIE KUPCHYNSKY

  Chicago

  Prologue

  MELANIE

  JUNE 1991

  We are walking hand in hand through a beautiful, sun-drenched meadow. In the distance, a line of shady trees marks the edge of a forest. As we approach a small hill, she lets go of my hand and climbs ahead. Seconds later, I reach the top, but she has disappeared. At first I think she has slipped into the forest, but she is nowhere to be seen. I look and look, and call her name, but she is simply gone.

  When I wake up I am trembling, drowning in the deepest sadness I have ever known. In the early summer dawn, I can see the shadows of boxes littering the bedroom floor, awaiting the movers who will take them to our new house just outside of Chicago. I grab my sleeping husband and shake him awake.

  “Ed! Ed!” I half-sob, half-whisper. “I dreamed I lost my sister.”

  JOANNE

  AUGUST 1991

  The phone rang while I was on deadline. I grabbed it without looking up from my keyboard. I didn’t have time for interruptions. My daily column was going to be late—again. But at least I had a scoop to show for it, if I could only finish the damn thing without distractions. Around me were the familiar sounds of the newsroom—Kevin in the cubicle next to mine, on the phone with a source: “You better not be fucking with me. It’s going in the paper tomorrow.” Our boss, Laura, tapping a stiletto heel and yelling for copy, where the hell is everybody’s copy? Dennis, complaining loudly about the editor recently promoted from our bullpen of reporters: “Didn’t take him long to become an asshole!”

  The phone cord knocked a pile of magazines onto the floor. My desk was a disaster, a firetrap of newspapers, discarded drafts of articles, photos of my infant daughter, dead flowers still in the vase, scrawled reminders for the babysitter. It was barely controlled, comfortable chaos, just the way I liked it. Unless this caller had something I could use for tomorrow’s paper, this would be a very short conversation.

  “It’s Jerr…,” the caller began, tentatively.

  “Yes?” I was ready to slam the phone down.

  Pause. “It’s your Mr. K.”

  I froze.

  I turned away from the keyboard. Mr. K? I hadn’t seen my childhood music teacher, Jerry Kupchynsky, in a decade, maybe longer. Once, he had been the most towering figure in my life, other than my parents. His voice, a booming, yelling voice with a thick Ukrainian accent that never mellowed, was embedded in my brain. I could still hear him from all those years ago: “Playing sounds like cheeken plocking! Wrist back! Elbow out! Again!”

  But that was a long time ago. Now I was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and lived with my husband and my new baby and a live-in nanny in a Manhattan apartment. I was on a first-name basis with chief executives and politicians and billionaires. I hadn’t thought about my old music teacher back in New Jersey, much less picked up my viola, in years. Yet here I was, suddenly feeling like I was twelve years old again. “Your Mr. K” realized it even before I did: he would always be Mr. K, never plain “Jerry,” to me.

  This wasn’t a social call. “Stephanie is missing,” he said, his words spilling out quickly. Stephanie, the younger of his two daughters, was, like him, a violin teacher. She had just moved to a new job in upstate New York, he was telling me. When she didn’t show up for lessons a few weeks back, the police searched her apartment. Her groceries were still on the floor, waiting to be put away. But she was nowhere to be found. No note, no sign of struggle… and no trace of where she went. It was as if she just disappeared.

  She is simply gone, Mr. K told me. I lost her.

  I had grown up with Mr. K’s daughters. The older one, Melanie, was my age. Named for the saintly sidekick to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, she was just about as perfect: a violin prodigy, brilliant student, conservatory graduate, violinist with the Chicago Symphony. Stephanie, just a few years behind us, was the fun one: a gifted violinist with a mischievous streak, the kind of girl who laughed good-naturedly when she hit a wrong note and who listened to Pink Floyd when her father thought she was practicing Mozart.

  And now she was missing.

  Could I possibly help get media coverage of her case? Mr. K was asking. Perhaps if others heard about her disappearance, some stranger out there might provide some clues. Maybe she had fallen and hit her head and gotten amnesia, he said. If her story made the news, surely someone would recognize her. Maybe she needed a break and wanted to clear her head alone, away from the phone, for a few days, he said. His voice was pleading.

  I forgot about the deadline. And the column. I pulled Kevin in from the next cubicle—he covered the television business and had almost every TV news producer in town on speed dial.

  It was unfathomable that fun-loving Stephanie would simply disappear. Mr. K knew that better than anyone. With a new daughter at home myself, I couldn’t even begin to ponder the horror of simply… losing a child. It was too awful to contemplate. Nor could I reconcile this vulnerable, frightened old man on the phone with the invincible, intimidating figure from my childhood.

  But I knew what I could do. For the first time in my life, I was the one giving instructions to my old teacher. “Tell me everything, from the start,” I commanded him, flipping open a fresh reporter’s notebook. “Tell me your story.”

  PART I

  To play without passion is inexcusable!

  —LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

  1

  The Debut

  JOANNE

  The meanest man I ever met came into my life when I was five years old. I first saw him from behind. Shoulders hunched, he was flailing his arms wildly, straining the seams of his black suit jacket so ferociously that I feared it might rip right apart. He looked like the villains I had seen in my big sisters’ comic books: any moment now he would burst out of his civilized shell, shredding the clothes that restrained him, and terrorize the high school auditorium.

  I shrank into my seat, squirming in my hand-me-down party dress and the ugly Mary Janes that pinched my toes. My feet didn’t quite touch the concrete floor beneath the fold-down seats. Next to me, my mother shot me a look that silently commanded: “Be still!”

  Onstage, the terrifying man still had his back turned to us. He was gesticulating even more maniacally now, looking as if he might careen right off the raised wooden platform where he loomed, impossibly large and menacing. One hand had a death grip on a pointy stick that he waved frantically to and fro. I could swear I could hear him grunting. In front of him sat several dozen kids—big kids, these were, at least nine or ten years old—each fumbling with a musical instrument and each looking up at him in abject horror. One of them was my big sister.

  He was conducting the East Brunswick Beginner String Orchestra.

  They were playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

  The man’s arms waved faster and more wildly, as if he were straining
to extract each note by brute force. Then he made one last furious swing with his pointy stick and the orchestra—almost in unison, save a few stragglers—struck the last chord. As they did, he stretched out his arms and held them wide. The music stopped. The kids froze. Their instruments remained motionless in the air, their bows still poised on the strings, their eyes unblinking as they looked fearfully toward the man.

  The auditorium erupted into applause. The scary man slowly lowered his arms and turned around. I winced. His face was fierce, even more frightening than I had imagined. He had narrow black eyes and a thin mustache perched over an unsmiling mouth that seemed cast in plaster into a rigid, straight line. Though my big sister was now standing with the rest of the orchestra, proudly clutching the neck of her rented three-quarter-size violin, I paid no attention to her. I couldn’t look away from that fearsome, mesmerizing presence.

  And then it happened. It was just a flicker, and it disappeared in an instant.

  But years later I remember that moment: as the applause swelled, a glimmer of a smile, with the faintest hint of mischief, passed over Jerry Kupchynsky’s face.

  A man like Jerry Kupchynsky had no business being in a place like East Brunswick, New Jersey. It was one of those featureless suburbs that sprouted out of dairy pastures and chicken farms, a muddy expanse of new developments with streets named “Tall Oaks” and “Evergreen,” after the trees that had been plowed into oblivion to make way for cookie-cutter houses with new-sod lawns. The town’s local highway—home to the International House of Pancakes and the drive-in McDonald’s boasting OVER 1 BILLION SERVED—roared with the sound of teenagers gunning their Mustangs and Camaros. There was no real center of town in East Brunswick, no quaint shop-lined streets. The height of local culture was the drive-in movie theater.