Eugene Drucker performs 100 times a year with the Grammy Award-winning Emerson String Quartet, of which he's a founding member. He's an active violin soloist, too. Yet away from the tuxedos and glittery ambience of high culture, Drucker reflected for long years on his father's experiences in 1930s Germany. The result was his first novel, The Savior. In our interview Drucker compared the two forms of self-expression.
Q: Early on in your novel The Savior, in writing about your protagonist's practice sessions, you mention that "the jagged edges of Hindemith, Bartok and Berg soothed him, allowing him to bypass his usual frustrations on the instrument" when he was having a hard time with Bach and Paganini. "He felt like he was really getting something done, because there were new, clear-cut challenges to deal with -- passages to learn, fingerings and bowings to work out."
That describes some of the aspects of flow. A state of flow, when one is engaged fully and time often feels altered, requires just the right amount of challenge, often provided by doing something novel. Not so difficult as to be frustrating, not so easy as to be boring. I wonder, regarding music, how autobiographical this passage is? And beyond the realm of music, did you find that writing fiction provided this same sort of useful novelty, diversion, and challenge, a change from the music you've been practicing and performing for so many years?
A: To some extent the passage is autobiographical. Sometimes practicing can be frustrating, when I feel that all the repetition involved in the process is not leading to the desired result. At other times, I do achieve the state of flow that you mention, when everything seems to be working smoothly, and problems take less time to work out. That is very gratifying. The flow can vary according to different repertoire, for which one has varying degrees of affinity.
Writing fiction has provided a different self-expressive outlet for me. Interpreting great works of art, sometimes feeling very close to their creators, is a privilege and a responsibility. Trying to create a work of art on my own is another sort of challenge, in which the parameters and criteria don't seem to be as firmly set as when I play Bach, Beethoven or Bartok. However, to make a fictional world convincing to the reader, within whatever terms you set, takes as broad a view and as much command of detail as it does to play great music. The difference is that I created these characters, their interactions, and specific situations for them -- based on cultural or psychological types drawn from reality, it's true -- where previously no such story existed. There is a special satisfaction in gradually bringing those ideas to fruition. As a musician, when I perform, there is always the text to re-create, since I don't improvise.
Q: In The Savior, an important character is based on your violinist father. How long had you been thinking of writing his story?
A: I began the first draft of this novel, containing only the foreground -- i.e., the events in the concentration camp -- many years ago. It was only after my father died in 1993 that I thought of adding some events from his life, and a character based on him, to form a sub-plot narrated through flashbacks. His stories from the 1930s were part of my family lore and formed a personal background for much of my longstanding interest in the history of that period.
Q: You constructed the main protagonist as a non-Jewish German facing impossible choices. Why did you choose that point of view, and how hard was it for you to get inside his head?
A: From the earliest version of this story, I wanted to present the point of view of an unwilling witness to the persecution of the Jews. I thought there was a lot of dramatic potential in exploring the consciousness of someone trapped in the middle, between perpetrators and victims. Because of my general literary interests (Dostoyevsky was a big influence on me), I wanted to focus on a man who was neither hero nor villain. I am fascinated by the anti-heroes in many great novellas and novels.
Also, my father had some close friends who were German Gentile musicians, who stood beside him until he had to emigrate in September 1938. After the war he re-established contact with them. One of them, the composer Rudolf Petzold, had dedicated several works to my father, and eventually wrote a sonata for me, which I played as a student in Tanglewood and at my New York debut recital. When I met him in 1976, he told me of how he was drafted into the Wehrmacht on the eve of the Russian campaign, in which he lost several toes to frostbite because Hitler, in his grandiosity, decided that winter clothing and gear would be unnecessary for the quick victory he envisioned. I'm not sure that Petzold witnessed any atrocities -- the Wehrmacht was involved in far fewer than the SS, of course -- but he seemed deeply depressed by the times he had lived through.
In an attempt to understand some small part of the national psychology that could have led to the depravities of the Third Reich, I wanted to create a character who was passive, cowed by authority, naive and unable to form or at least to sustain healthy connections to people around him. Also, I hoped that most readers would identify with Keller enough that they would question how they themselves might have acted in his position. It's easy to assume that we would all exhibit sterling moral fiber in extreme situations, but there's no way to be sure from a safe distance.
Q: Are you already working on another book in your rare spare hours between family time and musical performances? If so, is it easier or harder than writing The Savior, a story that seems it may have lived in your blood most of your adult life? In other words, it might seem you were "starting from scratch" this time.
A: Yes, I think I'll have to start from scratch. I have a few ideas, but nothing has fired my imagination yet the way The Savior did over the years. Somehow I had the perseverance and belief in the viability of that project to keep at it, in spite of discouragements and setbacks. Having learned how to write fiction, or at least having found the best way to tell that particular story, I do want to create something else. It's possible that the next book will be easier, because The Savior presented many challenges -- to find the right tone, to evoke a certain atmosphere for the mid-1930s and another for 1945, to balance between what the protagonist knows and what he doesn't want to know.
- Hear Drucker performing the Bach, Partita No. 2, in D Minor, Ciacconna (this is the profoundly moving Chaconne that plays a central role in The Savior, about which the violinist (the invented character and, doubtless, the book's author) says, "What I experience alone when I play the Chaconne by Bach means more to me than sermons and ritual.").
- To watch and hear Drucker perform with the Emerson String Quartet, you can click on these YouTube clips:
