The Piano Player of Budapest by Roxanne de Bastion
Sometimes, a parent’s death can trigger a search for the family’s past. For British-based singer-songwriter Roxanne de Bastion, the death of her father led her to a remarkable cache of materials left in his hands by her grandfather, Istvan Bastyai Holtzer, who Anglicized his Hungarian birth name to Stephen de Bastion. The family kept his letters, photos and cassette recordings, where he played piano and mused about his past. Stephen was a popular pianist in prewar Budapest, “a smorgasbord of art, film and music,” the author writes. He came from a secular Jewish family, and despite the tightening antisemitic noose, he confessed later in life, “I seemed to be blissfully blinkered not to notice all this.”
The Piano Player of Budapest is written like a memoir of someone else’s life, but the author admits to many gaps in her grandfather’s story, is “bemused” by his womanizing and is aware that he was “composing his own story” through his reminiscences. He was fortunate in having a talented writer for a granddaughter, willing to invest the time to tell his unique story of surviving the catastrophe of fascism.
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