Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

I HAVE THE GOOD fortune of knowing the writer Elie Wiesel and he and I get together every so often to chat. I went to see him shortly after I started to play with LSO and my new quest was very much on my mind. His eyes lit up when I mentioned the cello. “I love the cello,” he said. “I love the sadness of it; the richness of it.”

Wiesel told me that as a boy in Hungary before the Second World War music was a central part of his life. He rhapsodized about the sounds of his youth: the Hebrew melodies of his father’s synagogue, the Yiddish folk songs of his mother’s kitchen, the klezmer music of a local wedding band and his own violin.

“You played the violin?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yes. One of my father’s friends was teaching me to play.” Wiesel had spoken before about the songs of his youth — he was even known to sing in public from time to time — but the violin? What happened to the violin?

“Juliek,” he said. “After Juliek I couldn’t play again.”

It had been years since I read Wiesel’s first book, Night, a heart-wrenching account of his time desperately trying to stay alive as a teenage boy trapped in a series of Nazi death camps. He writes of getting to know Juliek, a young Jew from Warsaw who was afforded special privileges in the camps because he played the violin. Macabre as it sounds, musicians such as Juliek were needed to play the marches that kept the prisoners, like Wiesel and his father, in line. Many marched to their deaths to the sounds of the band at Auschwitz.

In Night, Wiesel recounts that toward the end of the war, in a last desperate attempt to stay alive, he flees, taking refuge in a shed with other prisoners, some alive and some already dead. Exhausted from running all day and his foot inflamed with a painful infection, he falls off to sleep only to be awakened in the middle of the night by the tuneful sound of a violin. “The sound of a violin, in this dark shed, where the dead were heaped on the living,” Wiesel writes with astonishment. “What madman could be playing the violin here, at the brink of his own grave? Or was it really an hallucination?”

When Wiesel wakes the next morning he spots the violinist Juliek, slumped over, dead. “Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.”

In Night, the smashed violin represents the death of hope. Although Wiesel survived the war and was able to rebuild his life, he told me that he could not go back to the violin. “I never played again,” he said.

Wiesel and I spoke for an hour, about family, about writing, about domestic politics, about Israel, about the state of the world. In some ways, our conversation reminded me of a ritual that Mr. J and I had before our weekly lessons where we would share a cup of tea and catch up on each other’s lives and on the consequential events of our time.

Afterward, Wiesel walked me to the closet of his office and took out my coat. He held it for me. I began to slip into my coat and then realized what was happening. Wiesel, a distinguished man in his eighties, was holding my coat for me. It was such a kind and courtly gesture, one that reminded me of Mr. J.

Here is your coat, Ari, Mr. J said after our lesson. When I resisted, he would keep holding it until I relented. When I come to your house, you can do this for me. Now you are my guest.

There was no sense in arguing with Mr. J, but Elie Wiesel? “What are you doing?” I said. “I should be holding your coat!” In some ways, I was addressing both of these great men in my life.

I tried to wrest the coat from his hands but he was insistent.

Wiesel helped me with my coat.

“Thank you,” I said, and then added, “I once had a cello teacher who did the same for me every week after our lesson. He was Berlin-born and half Jewish, a wonderful man and a great cellist. You remind me of him.”

“I take that as a high compliment,” Wiesel said with a smile. “Now, good luck with your music. But remember, Ari, you may play the cello, but you are a writer.”

ANOTHER MAN MIGHT HAVE been flattered. Here was a Nobel Prize laureate and icon of his generation telling me that I was a writer. But I wasn’t flattered; I was insulted. I didn’t say it, but I thought it: Why do you assume that I am only a writer? Maybe I’m also a musician. How do you know I’m not a cellist? Did you ever hear me play?

“I’ve heard you play,” my wife, Shira, told me that night when I repeated what Wiesel had said. “And, sweetheart, you are not a musician.”

Shira is a most supportive wife. But she also won’t allow me to wallow in my illusions. I was studying with Mr. J when Shira and I first started dating in 1983. She saw my love for the instrument — and the man. But she had also watched my cello obsession wax and wane over the decades of our marriage. I clearly hadn’t convinced her that my latest infatuation with LSO was any different from earlier attempts to master the instrument.

After Mr. J died, I tried out other teachers but none of them had the faith in me that he did.

After I committed to performing at my birthday party, I turned to a teacher named Noah Hoffeld, a versatile young cellist whose repertoire ranged well beyond the classical. Noah was more likely to play in rock clubs, churches, and synagogues than concert halls. He was laid-back and easygoing. His music studio was like a Zen retreat center with busts of the Buddha and burning candles and incense. But he could also dish out some tough love.

“Ari, you’ve plateaued,” Noah told me after working with me on and off for almost a year. He spoke about other adult students he had who never missed a day of practice and who kept improving. “I can’t continue to teach you unless you try harder, much harder.” I was shocked at his strident tone. After all, I was paying him handsomely — and he was going to drop me? I assured him that I was practicing, although practicing is one of those things you can never seem to do enough of.

“Ari, I expect more,” he said sternly.

I started playing every night. Some nights it was just fifteen or twenty minutes and some nights longer but not much longer, except on the weekends, when I had more time and could play during the day. My commitment was to at least hold the cello every night. You can’t even begin to call yourself a musician unless you play every day, Mr. J said.

With practice, my cello playing improved but not my relationship with our neighbors. We live in a sturdy one-hundred-year-old apartment building on a busy avenue in New York City just a block from Columbia University, where I teach. The apartment has thick walls and high ceilings, but a cello can sound rather loud especially late at night when the traffic on the street slows down. Our neighbor András complained. I didn’t know much about András. I knew he was from Hungary and that he and his wife had two small children (we saw them in the elevator). We knew he ran marathons (we saw him dashing through the park) but that was about it. They were extremely quiet people. We never heard a peep out of them — no music, no singing, no raised voices — and it seemed that they expected the same from us.

We, however, are a volatile bunch, a lot like Tevye’s clan in Anatevka. Music, singing, and raised voices are just the beginning. Arguing, fighting, and debating — all good-natured, of course — are common in our house. We have no milk cow, but we do have two Pomeranians, Alfie and Nala, who can get pretty yappy at times. András had at times complained about our upright piano, which our son Adam played with abandon in his youth, but he seemed especially sensitive to my cello playing. András would often call the house to ask us to keep it down. He got so annoying that we stopped answering the phone. Then he took to climbing the flight of stairs between us and knocked on our door. “Can you keep it down? Do you know what time it is?” András was standing there in his pajamas. I often wondered if András would complain if I was any good at the cello. After all, it wasn’t that late. Maybe it wasn’t the hour but the music?