The Keeper of Secrets (29 page)

About the book

Reading Group Guide

1. Who is
   The Keeper of Secrets
   ?
   
2. Worried that their son will hurt his hands and, ultimately, his promising career as a violinist, Daniel’s parents forbid him to play baseball. Do you think they are being overprotective? What would you do?
   
3. What draws Daniel to music? What separates his gift from those of other talented musicians? Do you think he understands the gift he has? Why is baseball so important that he would risk his future over it?
   
4. Describe Maestro Rafael Gomez. What does he see in Daniel and the way he plays? Talk about his relationship with Daniel. What lessons does he impart to his young protégé? He tells Daniel, “We must find that violin and we will find your heritage, Dan.
   Then
   you’ll play for the whole world.” Why was he so sure that they could find the missing Guarneri?
   
5. Why did the Horowitzes believe they would be immune from the ravages of the Nazi regime? Why didn’t they leave Germany? When the violin is confiscated, Benjamin tells his son Simon, “One day you will play it again; believe in that, son, because that’s faith and it will keep you sane.” Was he correct? Does faith have the power to hold back insanity? Where does such faith originate? Would you say that Simon had faith or did he stop believing?
   
6. Compare Daniel to his grandfather, Simon. What did music and the violin mean to Simon? Did he do the right thing playing for the German officers in the camp? Were you surprised to learn of the bond between the officer and Simon and his father? Why did Simon give up playing after he was liberated from Dachau? What would finding the Guarneri violin signify for him?
   
7. Think about Simon’s time in the concentration camp and the depravity he witnessed. Do you think you would be strong enough to survive such horrors? Besides playing the violin, what did Simon do to survive? Do you think he suffered survivor’s guilt? How does losing everyone you have ever loved affect your beliefs and the person you are? How did his experience change him even as he was in the camp?
   
8. Can we ever make up for what victims like Simon lost? How much do we owe such victims? Do you think we will ever forget the horrors of the Holocaust? What would it mean for humanity if we did?
   
9. What is Rafael’s relationship with Sergei Valentino? How are the two men alike? What are your impressions of Sergei? Why was the violin so precious to him? How did the violin come to be in his possession?
   
10. Talk about the bond Sergei shared with his aunt Yulena. What would his aunt have wanted him to do?
    
11. How does loss connect the various characters—Simon, Rafael, Valentino? Talk about the hardships they faced in their lives.
    
12. Who is Roberto di Longi and what role does he play in the story?
    
13. If you could hear “the tears of an angel,” what would they sound like to you? Do you enjoy classical music? If so, do you have a favorite composer or piece? Share it with your reading group.
    
14. If you knew little about music, what did you learn from reading
    The Keeper of Secrets
    ?
    

The Lost Violins

T
HE VIOLINISTS
in the Horowitz family—Benjamin, Simon, and Daniel—may have sprung from my imagination, but their experiences are all too real. They are representative of hundreds of thousands of Jewish families who suffered the unimaginable cruelty of the Holocaust and have lived with the injustices ever since.

The 1742 del Gesú violin may sing only on the pages of my book, but it is an example of the thousands of rare musical instruments ripped from their rightful owners by marauding Nazi music specialists. Beethoven’s piano, Stradivari, Amati, Gagliano, and Guarneri del Gesú violins and cellos were shipped back from the occupied countries to Berlin. When the Third Reich fell, these precious examples of creativity were looted a second time, by the conquering armies.

I stumbled upon this fascinating story when researching looted art, a more well-known Nazi war crime. I happened upon a magazine article about a missing 1742 Guarneri del Gesú. Further research explained the reasons why such violins can be almost impossible to trace; in one instance the date had been changed on the maker’s label to hide the true value, in another the modern day owner refused to confirm he owned the instrument.

The more I read, the more enthralled I became. My late sister-in-law’s mother was born Jewish and her family fled to Palestine from Lithuania before the war. She married a New Zealand soldier, became a war bride, and converted to Christianity. This novel is dedicated to my late sister-in-law: she was a music teacher and her five children are very musical. My niece has just finished her Masters of Music in Amsterdam on the harpsichord. My nephew is a talented violinist and also plays piano, guitar, and electric violin. When he was eleven he wanted to play cricket, and his mother said it would damage his fingers, so they compromised and he played soccer instead!

My mother and her identical twin sister sang on the stage throughout their early life in the 1920s and 1930s. I grew up around music and fell in love with opera when I twelve. All these things combined to feed my fascination for this subject. I began to wonder what it would’ve been like to own such a magnificent thing as a Guarneri del Gesú violin and to be able to play it . . . and to have it forcibly removed by people who had no right to it and then, by a miracle of coincidence, to hold it again.

So the story and the characters began to take shape. Rafael Gomez is the game changer—the man of principle and Daniel’s guide—and I based him on the opera singer/conductor I admire the most, Plácido Domingo. Sergei Valentino was based on Robbie Coltrane’s portrayal of Valentin Zukovsky in the James Bond film
GoldenEye
. I needed a Russian who was the antithesis of his upbringing, someone who’d emerged from the gray morass of Soviet Russia to become a shining example of the appetites of the Western world, a man capable of great cruelty and yet with a heart.

As I started to research the Holocaust in detail, the entire Horowitz family began to emerge. I read accounts from survivors who said that their parents were blind to the growing risk and didn’t escape when they had the chance. I read accounts of prewar escapes from Germany and found Levi. The heartbreaking story of the resistance in Berlin, such as it was, gave me Rachel and Elizabeth’s story. The couple Rachel worked for were real and so was their fate when the spy ring was broken. Maria Weiss was a combination of several real, incredibly brave Gentiles. Simon took years and he often made me cry. He is, perhaps, the character of which I am most proud. I really didn’t want to kill off Benjamin and yet the story didn’t work so well if he survived—I cried for a day. The Dachau section is the result of hundreds of heartbreaking stories and I hope I do them justice. Chapter twenty-seven, the liberation chapter, is based on a letter written home by a real first lieutenant in the 45th Infantry Division and archival footage that was almost too hard to watch.

The Valentino family also took shape as I researched Soviet Russia. General Valentino was a fictional sidekick to the very real Marshal Zhukov. The character of Koyla solidified when I read an astonishing letter written by a
zampolit,
a political officer, to Comrade Stalin in which he bitterly condemned his own family as traitors. Yulena was Koyla’s foil and vital in Sergei’s story because he must have his own valid reason for his actions.

They all became very real to me and I will love them forever.

Read on

From Julie Thomas’s Bookshelf

B
ECAUSE
I
WAS BORN
with a serious congenital heart defect, I spent the first four years of my life in bed and my mother read to me for several hours a day. I was a precocious reader from an early age—the Paddington Bear books, the Biggles series,
Swallows and Amazons.
By the time I was seven I was reading newspapers, magazines, and books. When I was ten my dad gave me a leather-bound set of Jane Austen books and I fell in love with
Pride and Prejudice.
There is no greater gift you can give a child than a love of reading; they will never be trapped in their physical surroundings and will face the world with an educated, open mind and a compassionate heart.

(1)
The Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett

(2)
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen

(3)
Schindler’s Ark
by Thomas Keneally

(4)
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
by Patrick Süskind

(5)
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
by Simon Winchester

(6) The Cazalet Chronicle:
The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off
by Elizabeth Jane Howard

D
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