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Hiding in the Spotlight: A Musical Prodigy's Story of Survival, 1941-1946
Greg Dawson
#UD4502
Hardcover, 278 pages; 2009
$25.00
 Members' Price: $21.25
In 1941, when the German Army invaded Ukraine, Jews were rounded up and sent on a forced march, supposedly to labor camps, but most were never heard from again. Young Zhanna Arshanskaya, a fourteen-year-old piano prodigy, was among those on the trek. Her father found an opportunity to bribe a guard and sent her off into the woods with the parting words, "I don't care what you do. Just live." Hiding in the Spotlight tells the incredible true story of Zhanna's survival, under the assumed identity of a gentile Russian orphan. The cruel irony of her life occurred when a piano tuner heard her play and sent her off to join a troupe of musicians who entertained Nazi officers. Throughout the war years, she never heard or spoke her real name, and she survived by playing the music she loved for the enjoyment of those who would have had her killed if they had discovered her true identity. After the war, an American soldier heard her play on a dilapidated old piano in a displaced persons camp and went to remarkable efforts to ensure that she emigrated to the United States to study and perform. Greg Dawson, Zhanna's son, writes his mother's story--which he only learned well into his adulthood--with a gentle grace and a poignant awe of her spirit, stamina, and talent.
(EE)
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