Exile Music

Description

Based on an unexplored slice of World War II history, Exile Music is the captivating story of a young Jewish girl whose family flees refined and urbane Vienna for safe harbor in the mountains of Bolivia

As a young girl growing up in Vienna in the 1930s, Orly has an idyllic childhood filled with music. Her father plays the viola in the Philharmonic, her mother is a well-regarded opera singer, her beloved and charismatic older brother holds the neighborhood in his thrall, and most of her eccentric and wonderful extended family live nearby. Only vaguely aware of Hitler’s rise or how her Jewish heritage will define her family’s identity, Orly spends her days immersed in play with her best friend and upstairs neighbor, Anneliese. Together they dream up vivid and elaborate worlds, where they can escape the growing tensions around them.

But in 1938, Orly’s peaceful life is shattered when the Germans arrive. Her older brother flees Vienna first, and soon Orly, her father, and her mother procure refugee visas for La Paz, a city high up in the Bolivian Andes. Even as the number of Jewish refugees in the small community grows, her family is haunted by the music that can no longer be their livelihood, and by the family and friends they left behind. While Orly and her father find their footing in the mountains, Orly’s mother grows even more distant, harboring a secret that could put their family at risk again. Years pass, the war ends, and Orly must decide: Is the love and adventure she has found in La Paz what defines home, or is the pull of her past in Europe–and the piece of her heart she left with Anneliese–too strong to ignore?”A beautiful coming-of-age tale… Moving, evocative, and well-researched, this is sure to linger in readers’ minds long after the last page has been turned.” —Booklist (starred) 

“Immersive… evocative.” —Publishers Weekly

“Beautifully narrated…From the very first pages I was swept up.”
—Georgia Hunter, New York Times bestselling author of We Were the Lucky Ones

“Gorgeous and lyrical, Exile Music captures the delicate rhythm of one girl’s coming of age while driven by war and exile. Heart-wrenching, tender and powerful.” —Jean Kwok, New York Times bestselling author of Searching for Sylvie Lee
 
“Out of this this little-known corner of history, Steil offers a beautiful meditation on the things we all hold dear – family, friendship, home. My Beautiful Friend meets The Pianist in this elegant symphony of a novel.”
—Ruth Gilligan, author of Nine Folds Makes a Paper Swan 
 
“This riveting, elegantly rendered coming-of-age story sheds light on the community of Jewish refugees who found sanctuary in La Paz, Bolivia. With vivid historical details and unforgettable characters, Exile Music captures the heartbreak of exile, the painful scars of survival, and the redemptive power of art.”
—Amy Gottlieb, author of The Beautiful Possible
 
“A celebration of the redemptive power of love, art and music in the face of the cataclysms of history, this novel weaves a powerful spell. I fell in love with Orly, a keeper of secrets and stories, who holds her family together by force of will when it seems certain they will fray apart. In prose of vivid beauty and lyrical toughness, Steil illuminates the life of the émigré with moments of unexpected kindness, tension, tragedy and triumph.”
—Ariel Kahn, author of Raising Sparks
 
“Jennifer Steil has created a world that is as fierce and stunning as her exquisite language. She dares ask the question where do we belong – and forces the reader to question our own conceptions of what makes a home. Ultimately, this is a story of a woman searching for herself following unimaginable trauma.”
—Elizabeth L. Silver, author of The Execution of Noa P. Singleton
 
“Vienna, Austria and La Paz, Bolivia; war and peace; immediate love and mingled yearning; tangled desires sprung from single seeds—Exile Music is a magnificent exercise in connections among objects, ideas, and places that seem to have nothing in common, but do.”
—Beth Kephart, author of Strike the Empty and This is the Story of You
 
“Here is a coming-of-age book for anyone who has ever felt their world shift on its axis, from light to dark, from comfort to abject terror, from sonorous to sheer noise–for anyone who has ever had to run. A lyric and heartrending adventure.”
—Elizabeth Cohen, author of The Family on Beartown Road

“Jennifer Steil is a conjurer of spells and a resurrector of lives past. In Exile Music she brings to life a little-known chapter of a war that came to define us, & which were still grappling w today. This beautiful book is at once timeless and topical. A great novel.”
—Daniel Torday, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for The Last Flight of Poxl West Jennifer Steil is the author of two previous books, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, a memoir of her experience as a journalist in Yemen, and The Ambassador’s Wife, a novel about a hostage crisis that was also inspired by Steil’s own experience. She currently lives in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, with her husband and daughter.1. As children, Anneliese and Orly imagine a complex and ever-evolving fantasy world that they inhabit together, along with their bunny family. How does the intensity of their games distract them from the changes happening in their world? How does their play help them digest or adapt to the growing menace around them? Do you remember the games you played as a child? Why do you think our imaginary friends or childhood games shine so brightly in our memories?

2. Before reading Exile Music, did you know that Jewish refugees fled to Bolivia during World War II ? Many Jewish citizens sought refuge in South American countries, yet those experiences aren’t as prominent in our history books as the experiences of refugees who escaped to North America, Scandinavia, or survived hidden in European countries. Why do you think these experiences aren’t as commonly discussed?

3. Many chapters begin with an epigraph that acts that as sort of news flash. Why do you think Steil decided to include these historical headlines? What purpose do they serve in the narrative?

4. Music is, from the beginning of the novel, a means by which Orly understands her world. Her parents’ work as musicians defines how she understands Vienna, and the music of Bolivia—the way her father engages with his students there, her mother continues to keep music out of her life, and Miguel shows her the sounds of his country—shapes the way that Bolivia becomes home. What other elements of Orly’s life give her the sensation of home? What activity or ritual has for you acted as a lens through which you understand your life?

5. In moments of stress or frustration, Orly often takes two seemingly unconnected things—places, people, or experiences—and figures out a path that connects them. How does that act of defining connection help Orly? How does the book itself act as a path connecting two seemingly unconnected places?

6. Jennifer Steil is the wife of an ambassador, and has lived in many different places around the world, including Bolivia. As a mother, in each new place her family moved it was imperative that Steil find a way to establish a steady day-to-day rhythm, and that often meant learning a new language, making new friends, adapting to new foods and ways of shopping, and learning the cadences of daily life in a new place. How does her experience as an outsider making home in a new place influence the way she wrote this book? How do you think the skills she’s learned in her travels helped her in her research for this book?

7. Over the years, Orly’s understanding of her connection to Anneliese transforms. But the transformation of her feelings isn’t the first time that sexuality is explored in Exile Music. How does this story broaden or change our understanding of sexuality in the 1930s? Steil says that she “purposely avoided labelling Orly’s sexuality.” Why do you think she made this choice? What role does Orly’s sexuality—her attractions and her passions—play in Exile Music, and how does it shape her experiences and the way the plot unfolds?

8. Orly’s mother starts a bakery in Bolivia, and returning to the recipes that they loved in Vienna is at first a sign to Orly that her mother has found hope and purpose at last. But her mother’s baking disguises a dark secret. Even before this secret threatens those closest to her, Orly disapproves of her mother’s choices. What do you think? Has her mother earned her revenge? Does revenge ever solve a problem or resolve pain?

9. The Bolivian Andes are the most prominent geographic feature in Orly’s new home, and their presence on the horizon comforts her, amazes her, and gives Steil ample opportunity to describe the beauty of this country. Steil says, “Many of the things that struck me about La Paz are also the things that struck Orly. First, the mountains. Which are spectacularly present every moment of the day and at the end of every street. I couldn’t get over the joy I felt every time I looked at them.” How do the geographical features of where we live shape our emotions? Have you ever felt a deep connection to a geographical feature—the seaside, a lakeshore, a valley, forest, or even a city block? How did that feeling of connection shape your memory or attachment to a place? What do you think the steadiness or omnipresence of the mountains in Bolivia represent to Orly?

10. How did you feel about the end of the book? How would the story have been different if Orly had decided to return to France with Anneliese? Why do you think she didn’t feel that was an option?One

In May 1928, the Nazi Party gains twelve seats in Germany’s elections.

My parents fell in love when they were still students at the UniversitŠt fŸr Musik und darstellende Kunst. While women were unwelcome in the Vienna Philharmonic and in the music world at large, opera required them. For this reason, my mother trained her voice rather than her fingers, even though her fingers had always been rather good at piano.

On a rare warm spring day my father had stopped on the shores of the canal to play to the lilacs, the passing boats, and the birds. My mother, who recognized him as well as the song he played, had paused to add her voice. “I couldn’t help it,” she told me. “I love that song.”

But they can never agree on what he had been playing. She says it was Handel’s “Flammende Rose,” while he says it was definitely Brahms’s “Zwei GesŠnge.”

“It can’t have been,” she argued. “I didn’t even know ‘Zwei GesŠnge’ then.”

“But ‘Flammende Rose’ wasn’t written for viola,” he pointed out.

Ultimately, the song didn’t matter.

They were so young. They had Willi when my mother was still a girl of seventeen. After that, they figured out how to avoid having another child for a decade.

I was born on Friday, January 13, 1928, the same year Wolpe’s satirical opera, Zeus and Elida, premiered, the same year the curtain rose on Weill and Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper, and the same year Schoenberg composed Von heute auf morgen. Jewish musicians of Europe were busy creating.

It was a happy year for my parents. While their salaries were modest, they had the good fortune of relatives who had chosen more practical careers. My mother’s parents were flourishing bakers in a village near Graz. My father’s father, an ophthalmologist, owned our three-story apartment building on Seegasse. My grandparents spent the early years of their own marriage in what would become our apartment, but once their children were grown they moved a block away to a smaller apartment on Pramergasse, over my grandfather’s practice. Anneliese’s family lived directly above us on Seegasse, the rooms of their apartment mirroring ours. On the top floor were the Windens, an elderly couple with no children who often invited Anneliese and me in for cake or a strudel. It was a quiet building, except for us.

Anneliese and I were the laces that tied our two families together, though our parents had never been close. Her banker father’s mind was occupied with figures and balance sheets while my father’s preoccupations rarely ventured beyond the body of his viola, of the orchestra. My mother, whose concerns were with cavatina, recitative, and cabaletta, had no shared vocabulary with Ana’s mother. Once in a while they happened upon a shared enthusiasm for a pastry recipe, but beyond that they regarded each other warily across the borders of our doorsills.

As children, neither of us thought much about money, the privilege of having enough not to have to think about it. A privilege, like so many others, that I failed to appreciate until it was lost.

My very first memory is a sound: the long shimmer of my fatherÕs bow across the strings, the upward flight of my motherÕs voice, filling the air of our apartment in 4 Seegasse as I lay on the living room floor, drawing.

My second memory is tactile. When I was old enough to stay silent and still, my father took me to the Musikverein before one of his rehearsals with the Vienna Philharmonic. My mother must have been there, too, or my nanny, Stefi, to whisk me away when the musicians finished tuning their instruments, but I don’t remember anyone except my father, who hoisted me into the air, his hand over mine as he pressed my fingers against the belly of one of the golden women whose heads propped up the first balcony. The long sides of the rectangular room were lined with these figures growing out of pillars, their arms folded across their ribs, their cone-shaped breasts pointed toward the ceiling. A pianist and a cellist were warming up onstage, and under my fingers I could feel the women tremble along with the notes, the oscillations of the music. “Wood vibrates with sound,” my father explained. “Almost everything here is wood, even the parts painted to look like stone.”

“Or gold,” I whispered, stroking the shuddering belly.

“Or gold,” he agreed, lowering me to the ground.

I looked around me at all of the gold that was not gold, the stone that was not stone, the seemingly stable floor that hid a trap door. Even the organ was fake, my father had told me, created to disguise a series of changing organs installed behind its faade.

“Isn’t there anything here that is real?”

My father laughed, but low, so only I could hear him. “Only one thing in this building is real, Liebling: the music. All else is deception.”

That room was the Golden Hall, the jewel box where my father became part of a larger instrument, a larger organism: the Philharmonic itself.

My third memory was my brother Willi’s fault. He was the one who taught me to whistle, neglecting to mention to me the prohibition of the practice within the hallowed Musikverein. I had thought I was making music, that my lips were an instrument I was learning to play, so I was shocked at the pressure of my father’s fingers on my arm, the force with which he marched me to the closest exit and literally tossed me through the doors onto the street. “Nie! Never in here.”

Willi claimed he hadn’t known. “I thought it was just for theaters,” he said of the superstition. Because backstage workers often used coded whistles to send messages to each other during scene changes, a whistling actor could cause the premature lowering of a set. “But concerts don’t have sets.”

When I was older, I learned that for many years there had been gaslights in the Musikverein and other concert halls. If a flame flickered out, leaving behind a lethal stream of gas, it made a whistling sound, signaling danger.

“Whistling causes evil things to happen,” my father explained flatly. “It curses us.”

There were times, even years later, I would wonder if it had been my whistling that caused it all.

Two

In 1933, Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany. The Dachau concentration camp is established near Munich.

December 21, 1933

When I was nearly six, my parents decided I was finally old enough to attend the opera. I wasn’t yet old enough to begin school, but for my parents, music was more essential than words or numbers. Ever since I had learned how to speak, ever since I had first understood what it was my parents did for a living, I had wanted to see them onstage. Opera stories-tragic though most of them are-had been my bedtime reading, alongside stories from Greek mythology and the Brothers Grimm.

Why she chose Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots I will never know. It’s not a very festive opera. Something light and funny-The Bartered Bride or The Abduction from the Seraglio, for example-might have better suited a child’s sensibilities. Perhaps it was simply to hear Rose Merker singing Valentine or Marie Gerhart singing Marguerite, though neither was her favorite. Perhaps that is just what happened to be on the day she decided to take me.

Or perhaps it was intended as an early warning: the god you choose to worship could get you killed.

My opera dress, pale blue with white lace along the hem and at the edges of the sleeves, made me feel grown-up. My mother brushed my hair until its pale, coppery strands shone like a one-schilling coin and gathered it up on top of my head. Her hair was curlier and darker than mine, glossy like the horse chestnuts we found on the ground in early September. She twisted my hair like hers, and even dabbed a bit of her lilac perfume on my wrists. ÒThere,Ó she said, stepping back to admire her work. ÒPretty as a china doll.Ó

I twirled, watching my skirt catch the air. “As pretty as you?” My mother looked glamorous in her floor-length, cream-colored silk gown. Embroidered leaves and flowers in the same color spilled down the bodice and over the curve of her hips.

“Prettier!”

This was not possible. No one was as beautiful as my mother.

The opera house was even grander than the Musikverein. I was so busy staring around me that I tripped going up the stairs and my mother had to catch my arm. Above us, tucked into the corners near the ceiling, were statues of children clutching instruments or theater masks, gazing down on us as we ascended. Dozens of chandeliers dangled from the ceilings like upside-down fountains.

“There’s Meyerbeer,” my mother said, pointing to one of the busts carved into the top of one of the walls. “Who wrote this opera. And there’s Mahler.” She nudged me toward a black marble head perched on a pedestal in front of a mirror.

“Shouldn’t he have combed his hair before he let someone carve him into a statue?” My question was sincere: Mahler’s hair looked lumpy and long.

My mother laughed. “We don’t love him for his hair,” she chided.

“Do we love him because he’s Jewish?”

“We love him for the same reason we love everyone in this building. We love him for his music.”

Just as in the Musikverein, everything in the opera house was gilded. Music for me was always associated with elegance, gold, and crystal.

My mother had gotten us seats on the left side of the second balcony so that we could look down at our fellow operagoers filing into their seats. I leaned over the railing staring at the ladies’ dresses and furs until my mother told me to look up. From the middle of the ceiling was suspended the largest chandelier I had ever seen. I wasn’t struck so much by its beauty-it looked like a gigantic shiny pastry-as by its mass.

“It weighs eleven tons,” my mother said. “Fifteen cows. Or twenty grand pianos.”

Gazing at it, I was glad we were not sitting underneath. “How come it doesn’t pull down the roof?”

“Well, the roof is even heavier.”

All of this was making my chest tight.

“Orly,” said my mother, sensing my discomfort, “this building has been standing for a very long time. And it will be standing for a long time more. I promise you, Schatz.

“Now, do you remember the story of Die Zauberflšte?” While we waited for the curtain to rise, my mother entertained me with opera stories and bits of gossip about the composer and singers. When she got to Lohengrin, I made her tell me the story three times. I loved to hear how the knight turned into a swan, how the lady married a man whose name she didn’t know. It all seemed very romantic and mysterious, except for the end. Insatiably curious, I found it maddening that the women of opera, of legend, of myth, were so often forbidden to ask questions of their men, and punished when they did. Psyche, not allowed to see the face of her beloved. Elsa, not allowed to know even the name of her husband, Lohengrin. How terrifying it must have been to marry someone you didn’t know. “I’m going to marry Anneliese,” I announced to my mother. “She lets me ask her questions. And I already know who she is.”

My mother laughed and squeezed my hand. “What a silly duckling you are.” The lights dimmed, and I pulled my spine up as straight as I could and firmly crossed my ankles, locking my feet together to keep them from mischief.

There was no chance of me squirming during Les Huguenots. Stunned by the heady mixture of music and violence, I sat like a stone. I didn’t cough, I didn’t swallow, I didn’t change the crossing of my ankles. (Later, when I undressed for bed, I would notice an indentation remained on the top of my right foot, so hard had I pressed it into the buckle of my left shoe.) I imprisoned my mother’s hand in mine.

I had thought, somehow, that music was meant to tell only beautiful stories, love stories. But here was a story in which every single character was murdered, in which a father murdered his own daughter. I felt sorry for both the Catholics and Protestants-even though it was mostly the Protestants who got killed-because they were not allowed to fall in love with each other.

During the interval, I shook out my stiff legs as we walked to the lobby bar. My mother ordered me an apfelspritz and herself a glass of champagne, which she explained was a grown-up version of the same drink. I looked longingly at the cakes, but my mother said we could go to a cafŽ afterward. As she was paying, a woman with long, glittering earrings and a spiraling tower of fair hair touched her elbow. “Julia? I thought it was you!”

My mother turned to greet the woman, introducing her as a singer she knew from work, but I failed to catch her name. I was distracted by another woman-was it a woman?-just behind her. Dressed in what looked like a man’s tuxedo, she had combed her short, dark hair straight back. Instead of tipping her weight into one hip or wobbling on heels, she stood with her legs a foot apart, comfortable like a man. When she saw me staring, she smiled.

“I’m Odiane,” she said, her voice warm and low as she offered me her hand.

I took her dry fingers in my damp ones. “Are you a girl?”

Odiane laughed, but my mother reached for my elbow and pinched it. “Orly! That’s not polite. Odiane, please forgive my daughter.” She turned back to me. “Odiane is a pianist. And a composer.”

“Pleased to meet you.” I curtsied, hoping it might make up for my rudeness. I didn’t know that girls could dress like that. I didn’t know that women could stand that way.

The bell chimed while we were still drinking, and we had to finish quickly before the lights went down. I wanted to follow Odiane back to her seat, but she and the blond woman quickly disappeared in the throng.

“Mutti, how do you know her?”

“I told you. From work. She’s a mezzo.”

“No, Odiane.”

“Ah.” My mother glanced down at the program in her lap. “She lives with Ilse.”

“They’re sisters?”

“More like roommates, I think.”

I thought about this. I wondered if Anneliese and I could be roommates. “Why does she dress like that? Odiane, I mean?”

“Some women like to wear trousers. Even the First Lady in the United States sometimes wears trousers. And Marlene Dietrich, the film star. Though I don’t recommend that you start. Frau Fessler would not approve.”US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.9100 × 5.5000 × 8.2300 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780525561835
ISBN-10	0525561838
Author	Jennifer Steil
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC044000, FIC046000
Subjects	women gifts, alternate history, nazi, gifts for her, religious books, FIC046000, jewish books, WWII books, world war 2 books, fiction books, book club recommendations, historical novels, historical fiction books, holocaust books, books historical fiction, war books, ww2 books, best book club books, world war 2 book, the ambassador's wife, WW2, history, women, historical, fiction, book club books, lgbt, FIC044000, novels, WWII, world war 2, world war ii, women's fiction, holocaust, jewish, gifts for women, historical fiction, history books, bolivia