Looking for Kol Nidrei

CURT LEVIANT

One day, nearly a decade ago, I walked into a Jerusalem bookstore – and stepped into a mystery. At the store, I met a man named Reb Moshe Ashbel, an elderly, white-bearded Russian immigrant from the Soviet Union. As we got to know each other, Ashbel told me that he was a Lubavitch Chassid, a math teacher and a lover of classical and Jewish music who had spent five years in a Soviet gulag for expressing joy in 1948 that the state of Israel had been founded.

Before the end of my stay in Jerusalem, Reb Moshe asked me to send him some things he could not find in Israel – musical scores by Max Bruch (a non-Jew who wrote the famous Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra) and the Swiss Jewish composer Ernest Bloch, and a couple of geometry texts. “And also,” he added, “if you can, a copy of the score to Kol Nidrei by Mikhail Erdenko.” Here was a composer and a composition of which I had never heard.

As Ashbel explained, in 1910, the famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy told his young friend, Erdenko, that the Jews had a beautiful, age-old Yom Kippur melody, and asked the violinist and composer to arrange a version for violin and piano. When Ashbel finally realized his dream of making aliyah, the Soviet authorities confiscated his Erdenko sheet music at the Moscow airport, and he now wanted another copy.

I was able to fulfil all his requests – except the Erdenko Kol Nidrei. Thus began a 10-year odyssey.

I wrote to music academies and conservatories in the United States and in the Soviet Union, and asked every musician I met for possible leads. One musician in Philadelphia told me that Erdenko had come to the United States in the early 1930s and had even performed in Carnegie Hall. He suspected that Erdenko might have been Jewish and changed his name. Another musician suggested I contact

Rostislav Dubinsky, the founder of the famed Borodin Quartet and the author of Stormy Applause, a moving memoir of a Jewish musician in the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors.

Dubinsky taught at the great School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington. I called and was referred to his wife, the pianist Luba Dubinsky. She sadly informed me that her husband had died a year earlier – but in response to my Erdenko story, she said she was sure that Erdenko was a Jew and that the Soviets had purposely erased every trace of him. But if Erdenko had been Jewish, why, when Tolstoy asked him about Kol Nidrei, did he not say, “Of course, I know that melody”?

Still, none of this information brought me any closer to the music. Meanwhile, my beloved elderly friend, Moshe Ashbel, died in Jerusalem.

Later, I wrote a short piece for a newspaper about my fruitless search for the Erdenko score – and a sea change occurred. It was like a tonic shift from minor to major key. Events that had moved like tar suddenly speeded up, like those scenes in double-quick motion in the old silent comedies.

The first person to call was a New York Post reporter. He said he did a search for “Erdenko, violin” on his computer and found that a man named Sergei Erdenko had given a concert with his Loiko Trio in a Phoenix, Ariz., synagogue. The synagogue’s website stated that the Loiko Trio was based in, of all places, Ireland and – drum roll, please – Sergei was identified as the great-grandson of Mikhail Erdenko. Now a new fact was added: in addition to being a friend of Tolstoy, Erdenko had been a professor at the Moscow Conservatory.

The synagogue website also listed a woman named Luba in Phoenix, who was involved in ticket sales. I called her and she immediately gave me two addresses: the Loiko’s Ireland address and Sergei Erdenko’s private address in Paris. Since the trio performed in a synagogue and was listed as playing Russian, Gypsy and Jewish music, I asked Luba about the Jewish component of the concert, for I was still in a quandary as to whether Mikhail Erdenko had been a Jew. If there was a Jewish substance to the trio’s music – passed on from father to son over four generations – then the Jewishness of Erdenko would be confirmed. But Luba laughed. No, she said, they just played “Hava Nagila” and one other old Jewish musical chestnut from ages ago.

With the two addresses that Luba had given me, I wrote one letter to the Loiko Trio in Ireland and another to Sergei Erdenko in Paris. I am still awaiting an answer from Dublin. The letter to Sergei Erdenko was returned, stamped “inconnu,” unknown, some seven weeks after I mailed it. The light shining through the door – my hoped-for opening to resolve the mystery – was suddenly extinguished.

Then, a couple of months later, I got a call from a Russian named Oleg Timofeyev. He left me a message telling me that his former professor at Duke University had read my article and passed interesting information on to him. A musician himself, Timofeyev was now at the University of Iowa, teaching Russian literature. He told me he had done his own search and learned that the library at the University of California had a copy of the Erdenko’s Kol Nidrei score, which he would order for me.

I waited patiently. I can’t say I dreamed about the score, but I did visualize it, reading the notes, in C Major of course, to make it easy for myself. (In fantasies, you have a choice of key signatures.) But I knew it was in a minor mode, so there would be sharps and flats.

A couple of weeks later, Timofeyev called me.

“I have bad news and good news,” he said. “The bad news is that the University of California cannot locate the score to the Erdenko Kol Nidrei. They have a listing for it but they can’t find it.”

“And the good news?” I asked.

“The good news is that I have a friend who works at the Moscow Conservatory….”

“That’s where Erdenko taught,” I exclaimed.

“Yes,” Timofeyev continued. “And I’m going to call him and ask him to see if perhaps the score is there somewhere.”

Here I was again. Hurry up and wait.

Meanwhile, someone else called to say that he had seen a composition by Erdenko on a CD but didn’t recall its name. I called a record store and was told that a CD by Erdenko indeed existed – in a performance by Nikolai Erdenko. Now there was a new name. Who was he? In typical Russian fashion, it was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Meanwhile, another man wrote telling me that the Loiko Trio had performed in Maryland – still more information retrieved from yet another website – and that by following it I might be able, in the man’s poetically formulated but factually incorrect words, “to fulfil Moshe Ashbel’s dying wish.”

Then, Timofeyev called back.

“Good news,” he said, his voice glowing all the way from Iowa City. “My friend in Moscow phoned and told me that the Erdenko Kol Nidrei is in the Moscow Conservatory archives. It makes sense – Erdenko had taught there. My friend will try to get it Xeroxed and will mail it to me. By now, I’m as interested in seeing it as you are.”

Three more weeks passed. The mailbox empty. Day after day – nothing. I called Timofeyev again.

“It’s on its way,” he promised. “As we speak, it’s flying over the Atlantic.”

A few days later, the packet came.

I opened it and found the sheet music to Erdenko’s arrangement for violin and piano of the traditional Kol Nidrei. I rushed to the piano to play it. Erdenko’s version has all the haunting qualities of the Yom Kippur melody that Ashkenazi Jews have been chanting for some 500 years. The score is faithful to the melody we all know, with all its grace notes and cantorial ornamentation. Erdenko had evidently penetrated the soul of this stirring melody, which is the nonpareil expression of Jewish longing and spirituality on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

The score had two covers, one with the Hebrew words “Kol Nidrei” and, beneath it, “Kol Nidrei” in Cyrillic characters. The other cover had the title in Latin letters. The music was published in 1912, jointly in Kiev and Warsaw. The Kol Nidrei is Erdenko’s Opus 3, which means that it is one of his earliest compositions. The violinist wrote the composition and found a publisher in a relatively short time after his 1910 visit to Tolstoy (who died that same year).

Dear Reb Moshe! When I played the melody on the piano for the first time (not in C, but in F), I thought of you. I thought of sending you this melody that comes from the depths of Jewish hearts, a melody that binds you and me in love and friendship. Yes, it comes many years too late, but I know with what joy I would have mailed you the score that was wrenched from your hands by the Soviet authorities when you left for Israel, and with what joy you would have received it. But a happy conclusion to a search is always a simcha, no matter how long it takes.

Curt Leviant is the author of seven critically acclaimed works of fiction. His most recent book is a short story collection, Zix Zexy Ztories.

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