Overview

Feeling stifled as a Jew living in a Moldovan shtetl, violinist Elazar just wants to find love and eventually succeed his father as conductor of the family band and hardware business. But that could take years, and in 1922 Kalarash, he's known all the girls his age since he was a child. He would love to move to Kishinev, Odesa, or Kyiv and become a musician, but it would kill his mama, and he'd feel guilty for the rest of his life. At his cousin's wedding, Elazar falls for Ita Kaplan, an heiress from Bolgrad, but she plans to move to Paris and become a painter. He's then taken by Mariam Gabashvili, the daughter of a local vintner, but is forbidden to marry her because she's not Jewish. History-the rise of Stalin, his brutal takeover of Ukraine, and later Hitler's invasion of the USSR-grants Elazar's wishes in ways he never dreams, sending he and his family on an epic flight to Uzbekistan, where they endure the war, and then back to Moldova, where they pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. With cunning, class and determination, one violinist brings to life a turbulent era in the Soviet Union, where, while life was punishing and brutally unfair, he finds music in devastation and conducts his family-his orchestra-in such a way as to not let the horrors defeat them or hate to overcome them.

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Reviews

"A Page TurnerThe Reluctant Conductor is most definitely a page turner. It is also timely and beautifully written. The cost of love and war and... the power of music. While the book is set during and after the war, WWll, it could've been written yesterday with all that is going on in the world - Ukraine and Russia. The authors, Turner and Gorbaty, have written a powerful historical novel. The hero, Elazar, a violinist, is both tender and audacious; his journey is filled with all of life - love, pain, devastation and hope.- Amy Ferris is a screenwriter, influencer, badass and author of Mighty Gorgeous: A Little Book About Messy Love. Old Fashioned Storytelling. Deliciously EscapistThis is storytelling from the Old World, a panoramic sweep through the tortured times and people of Eastern Europe. It is the story of Elazar, a young Jewish violinist in search of redemptive love and transportive music, in a world full of ugly bigotry and hate. Drifting back and forth between Uzbekistan and the Ukraine between 1922 and 1944, our hero navigates wedding-night steam rooms and birch-branch floggings; rivers of refugees and rivers of blood; lice and typhoid and refugee tent camps; horse-drawn carriage rides through betrayal and death and flattened shtetls; and the small luxuries of the desperate, a simple plate of chicken and cabbage. But always, always, the ebb and flow of music, weaving in and out of a life lost in the terrifying wilderness, searching for family and home. Does our hero find what he is yearning for? Read the book to find out. I picked it up and had to find out what happened to se to Elazar, a narrator I cared about.- Richard C. Morais, author of the New York Times and international best-selling novel The Hundred Foot Journey. Touching Novel of a Jewish Family's Flight Across War-Torn EuropeThe authors touchingly handle themes of loss and belonging as they dramatize, in brisk and poignant scenes, the everyday yet extraordinary experiences of refugee life... Despite the complexity of the political instability of the era, The Reluctant Conductor is at heart an elemental story of one family caught up in the larger context of geopolitics and genocide, a humane examination of the cost in individual lives of ancient hatreds.- BookLife A Moving Family Tale with a Strong Cast That Readers Will Love.""An indomitable man guides his Jewish family through the horrors of World War II in Eastern Europe... Turner and Gorbaty's engaging debut novel is promising and timely, considering what is going on in the protagonist's part of the world. Elazar, the narrator, carries the story and will win readers over right from the start... A scene involving the family member fighting typhus is beautiful and poignant (Dickens would approve)...""- Kirkus Reviews"

Author Information

"A recovering Catholic and fifth-generation native of Durango, Colo., author, screenwriter, playwright and former journalist Tim Turner, who lives in Los Angeles, is the founder and tsar of Bessarabian Publishing.The Reluctant Conductor, which he co-wrote with Moisey Gorbaty, is the first in a tetralogy of historical novels loosely based on the family and life of Moisey, whom he met at the gym in Hollywood in 2010.At the time, there were some 500,000 Russian speaking people in Los Angeles and Tim heard the language regularly at the gym. A language nerd-he's fluent in Spanish and French and has studied German, Italian and Czech-he was listening to Russian Berlitz tapes when Moisey sat down next to him in the locker room and Tim took off his headphones and said, ""Доброе утро,"" which means ""Good morning.""Moisey's jaw dropped because in the 21 years he'd been in Los Angeles, no American had EVER attempted to speak Russian to him. ""I'll teach you to speak Russian,"" said Moisey, who is Jewish and a graduate of the Moldovan Conservatory of Music, then added: ""What do you do?""""I'm a writer,"" Tim said.""You should write my life story,"" Moisey said.Tim rolled his eyes and said: ""Do you know how many times I've heard that?""After two years of studying Russian together, the two agreed that there was at least one book about Moisey living through the era of the USSR and then immigrating to the USA. They signed a collaborators agreement, started videotaping interviews of Moisey telling his family stories, and traveled together with Moisey's wife to Moldova and another trip to Rome to research Part 3.Tim has traveled extensively all over the world, including a trip to Moscow, Saint Petersburg and a cruise on the Baltic Sea. After a decade, multiple drafts, and now able to speak, read, write and touch type in Russian, Tim published The Reluctant Conductor on Nov. 9, 2023. A prolific composer and the proprietor of Moisey's Piano Service, where he tunes and restores pianos, MOISEY GORBATY also teaches piano, guitar, music theory and Russian Language. Born in Kishinev, Moldova, he began playing accordion at the age of four, won his first music competition at age eight, and since the age of fifteen supported his family working as a concertmaster and leader of union bands. He graduated from Stefan Neaga College of Music in 1969, the Moldovan Conservatory of Music in 1973, and served in the Soviet Army from 1973 to 1974. He immigrated to Los Angeles in 1989 via Vienna and Rome, and started his piano service with his wife, a three-year-old daughter, no money, and speaking only Russian."

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