My family has a piano. Its keys are weathered from touch. It has tiny marks on the top right corner where my dad used to gnaw at the wood with his baby teeth.
I always knew this instrument to be special. It felt out of place in our otherwise modest family home (none of my friends had a battle-scarred baby grand in their living rooms, that’s for sure). My dad told me it had been in our family since 1905, and it was a miracle it was still in our possession and sounding beautiful.
Its most prodigious player was his father, Stephen de Bastion, or Istvan Bastyai Holtzer, as his name had been in another lifetime. I never knew my grandfather, who died shortly after I was born. The things I was told about him painted an enigmatic picture: he found success as a pianist in his native Hungary before the war.
I knew that he survived a concentration camp. There was a story about him enduring a lonesome walk through Russia. And I knew – the evidence was right in front of me – that his piano had somehow survived the war as well.
My dad, who taught me to play on our piano and instilled me with an insatiable love of music , died in 2019. The loss left me with a longing for connection. I wanted to know more about the stories our piano had to tell.
The opportunity presented itself to write a book about my grandfather and his instrument. It felt, as my ancestors would have called it, beshert (inevitable). That book, The Piano Player of Budapest , is being published this week, alongside an .