Three characters abroad in Budapest

By Andrew Ervin

Coffee House Press. 192 pp. $14.95

Reviewed by Paula Marantz Cohen

The first story is that of an elderly composer, Lajos Harkályi, a native of Budapest who lost his parents during the Holocaust and was himself interned in the "model" concentration camp of Terezin. Created to provide the illusion that the Jews were being well cared for, Terezin featured artists and musicians who mounted exhibitions and concerts for foreign visitors. The young Harkályi, a budding violinist, was one of this group, and, despite the oppression of the camp, owed his musical career to the experience there.

In a wonderfully imagined riff, Ervin describes the genesis of Harkályi's aesthetic and its ironic result:

His inner ear grew accustomed to awkward variations in pitch, which he learned to incorporate into the music he composed based upon the Volkslieder the weeping officers sang drunkenly to him. The rapid turnover of musicians made it difficult to orchestrate precise melodies, so Harkályi taught himself a unique compositional style, a style that eventually gained him a vast, international following and brought him back here to Budapest after all these years.

After the war, Harkályi emigrates to Philadelphia, where he studies at the Curtis Institute and builds a career as one of the world's foremost composers. As the story begins, he has returned to Hungary to debut his new opera and to see his American niece, who works as a translator for a consulting firm outside Budapest.