Juliek's Violin

Even here? In this snowbound barrack? Suddenly, the illicit sounds of Beethoven’s concerto erupt from Juliek’s smuggled violin, suffusing this doomsday shed teeming with the trampled and the barely alive, realm of frostbite and squalor, clawing panic and suffocation— Insane, God of Abraham, insanely beautiful: a boy insisting winter cannot reign forever, a boy conveying his brief, bounded life with a psalmist’s or a cantor’s arrow-sure ecstasy— One prison-striped friend endures to record the spellbinding strings, the woebegone— and the other, the impossible Polish fiddler, is motionless by morning, his renegade instrument mangled under the haggard weight of winter-killed, unraveling men. Music at the brink of the grave, eloquent in the pitch dark, tell-true, indelible, as never before, as never after— Abundance, emending beauty, linger in the listening, truth-carrying soul of Elie, soul become slalom swift, camp shrewd, uncrushable; abundance, be here, always here, in this not-yet-shattered violin.