Broken Song

S
omeone was shifting the plank above his head. A crack of light began to dance over his knees. Shriprinka’s face was white and her eyes, as wide and dark as river stones, looked down.

“You can come out now, for a little while we think. We thinkthey have gone for a while.”

He lifted himself from the hole. The heel of his hand skidded on something warm and wet. He knew instantly it was blood, and then he looked at his father, who sat collapsed on a chair, holding a blanket to one side of his head.

“They cut off his ear,” Bathshepa said in a trembling voice. “I got part of it here. Maybe we send for the doctor. Maybe he can sew it back on.”

“No! No!” Aaron Bloom waved her off. “Let themhave my ear.”

Reuven wanted to cry,
Let them have your ear, Papa? Your ear? Your ear into which I poured those measures of music less than an hour ago. With no ear, how do you hear music? They tear your ear, they break our song
. But Reuven was too stunned to say anything. He merely stood with his hand covering his mouth. He did not even notice the wreck the Cossack soldiers had left. Tables upturned. Latkes on the floor. Chicken feathers still drifting through the air. The oddest thing of all was that the menorah still stood in the window with its candles burning. Reuven turned around slowly, looking for the silver Shabbat candlesticks.

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First published in the United States of America by Viking,

a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2005

Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2007

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Kathryn Lasky, 2005

All rights reserved

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Lasky, Kathryn.

Broken song / by Kathryn Lasky.

p. cm.

Summary: In 1897, fifteen-year-old Reuven Bloom, a Russian Jew,

must set aside his dreams of playing the violin in order to save himself

and his baby sister after the rest of their family is murdered.

ISBN: 0-670-05931-5 (hc)

1. Jews—Russia—History—19th century—Juvenile fiction. [1. Jews—Russia—History—19th century—Fiction. 2. Violin—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.

4. Persecution—Fiction. 5. Russia—History—Nicholas II, 1894-1917—Fiction.]

I. Title.

PZ7.L3274Br 2005 [Fic]—dc22 2004017741

Puffin Books ISBN 978-0-14-240741-7

Set in Bembo

Book design by Sam Kim

Printed in the United States of America

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

For my grandparents,

who endured these times
.

—
K.L.

Part I : Russia 1897

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Part II : Russia 1900

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Epilogue

Historical Note

ONE

“TOO MUCH! Too much vibrato!” Herschel the violin teacher muttered. “You don’t like too much flour in the sauce. It disguises the taste. Vibrato works the same way. Too much disguises the real music. Why would you do such a thing to Bach?”

Because
, thought Reuven to himself,
I am not thinking of Bach. I am thinking of your father’s beard
. Reb Itchel sat at a table by a small window, bent over his prayer books. The sun streamed through the window and turned the old man’s beard even whiter. It curled off his chin like wisps of smoke. Reuven became hypnotized by it as he played his violin. The music seemed to flow through him directly to the little beard. And the funny part was that the rebbe was deaf—stone deaf. He bent and rocked to his own music, lost in the ancient Hebrew prayers. He existed in some misty place filled with the voices of the old rabbis.

The little beard jerked up. Reb Itchel suddenly emerged from the mists. He muttered in Yiddish to his son Herschel.

“Yes, yes, Papa, I know. It’s the first day of Passover. I must dismiss Reuven early today.”

As Reuven put down his bow and the music stopped, he blinked. The beard was just a beard again.

“So,” Herschel said. “I shall see you tomorrow right after school, Reuven. No practice time tonight because of seder. We shall continue with the Bach and take a little time, if you can, to look at the Brahms Concerto in D major.”

Reuven tucked his violin case under his arm, made his way out of the muddy front yard of his violin teacher’s cottage, and turned down the road. He had to pick his way carefully. The world had turned to mud. Spring had finally come. Reuven did not mind the mud. He felt it was a fair trade for the stain of green that was finally coming back to the trees, the little white and blue flowers that popped from the earth with blossoms no bigger than his baby sisters fingernails. While he thought of all this, the notes from the Bach concerto swirled through his head and the callused fingers of his right hand, his bow hand, unconsciously plucked at invisible strings.

It seemed, however, that woven between the sucking noises of the mud under his boots, the fragrance of new green hovering in the air, and the music in his head, there was something else that he must think about, something else pressing on his brain, something he did not want to acknowledge. A bleakness at the edge of his mind. Prakova! The single word exploded in his head. It was another shtetl, a small village in the Pale, the only region in Russia where Jews were allowed to settle. Last year on Passover, the entire village of Prakova had been burned, every living thing killed. There was not even a dog left. And the Cossacks had been so clever. They had first ridden through some weeks before and kidnapped
every able-bodied young man and boy, and then they had left the rest of the job to the peasants who had been incited to hate Jews. It was the worst pogrom in recent memory.

It was impossible to anticipate any holiday with joy, only fear, since Prakova. And it seemed that the tsar and the Cossacks and the peasants took specialdelight now in disrupting the holiest of days for the Jews in the Pale. How could he, Reuven Bloom, have forgotten this and instead been almost skipping through the mud to the allegro of the Bach concerto? What a fool he was!

And then as if to remind him of his foolishness, a fierce squawk came from a dreary little cottage set on spindly pilings.

“Reuven Bloom, you no-good dreamer!” It was Reb Mendel, the teacher in the religious school for very young boys. How happy Reuven was to be fifteen now and no longer under Reb Mendel’s rule. Reb Mendel and his family lived in a house that reminded Reuven of a scrawny chicken, and the teacher himself, with his puckered yellow flesh, seemed more chicken than human. How often Reuven had dreamed of throwing him in a pot. And, being no fool, Reuven imagined that Reb Mendel had dreamed similar dreams for him. Reuven had been his least favorite student.