Talk spotlights poignant story of inherited violin
An illustrated talk with music which tells the extraordinary story of a violin which links revolutionary Russia to the Holocaust and to modern-day Britain is being given in Shrewsbury on Tuesday, October 19.
Speaker at St Alkmund's Church at 1pm is Natalie Cumming who sat down and wrote, before it was too late and the memories faded, the history of her family, their precious violin and their remarkable journey. The result was a book called The Fiddle, published in 2018.
She will be accompanied by the young violinist Alicia Humeniuk.
The violin belonged to Natalie’s grandfather, Abraham Lewinsky, music tutor to the children of the Tzar of Russia. Abraham and his family fled at the time of the Russian Revolution, walking 1,000 miles to Odessa and being given passage to England.
His daughter Rosa joined the Berlin Philharmonic but was arrested by the Nazis and put in a series of concentration camps, ultimately Belsen, somehow managing to take the violin with her, and surviving mainly because she was chosen to play in the women’s orchestra and was therefore relatively well fed. She testified at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, but died in England of tuberculosis in 1947.
The violin passed to her brother – Natalie’s father and a member of ENSA, the wartime entertainments organisation – and then to Natalie on her father's death in 1985.
It lay neglected for many years until she took it to The Repair Shop, the BBC programme on which it was featured last year, and it was restored by John Dilworth.
The precious instrument has been bequeathed by Natalie to the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music.
Reservations for a place at the talk can be made through the church's website, www.stalkmundschurchshrewsbury.org
