One-Sentence Story: A Baby Grand and a Room Full of Books

The Piano Player by Elin Danielson-Gambogi

It was the German Jews moving into his neighborhood in Manhattan, the father told his son-in law, that opened up the world to him—you can’t imagine what it was like for me, he said, the first time I walked into a New York apartment where there was a baby grand and a room full of books, until then all I knew were uncultured, superstitious, working class Jews, like my grandfather, and now, look at me, I’m an artist living in California—; but his son-in-law laughed because it was the same for him, he said, when he was growing up in suburbia in a house with a color TV but nothing to read and he walked for first time into the home of one of the few Jewish families in his neighborhood—which was in the Eichler tract, where the only houses Jews and African Americans in the area were allowed to buy were located—to see, just as his father-in-law had said, a baby grand and a room full of books, and how after that he had resolved to get a scholarship to a good university so he could get the hell out of that wasteland, and now look at him, too, a scientist, a reader, a theater goer, one of the cultured, upper middle class; only she, the daughter of one and the wife of the other listened to them both without comment, picking on a loose thread in the tablecloth, remembering the day when she met her husband’s grandfather and how he said, “You’re a heathen, and you must realize that you will surely be going to hell.”

by Nina Zolotow

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