A Page Turner
The Reluctant Conductor is most definitely a page turner. It is also timely and beautifully written. The cost of love and war and… the power of music. While the book is set during and after the war, WWll, it could’ve been written yesterday with all that is going on in the world – Ukraine and Russia. The authors, Turner and Gorbaty, have written a powerful historical novel. The hero, Elazar, a violinist, is both tender and audacious; his journey is filled with all of life – love, pain, devastation and hope.
— Amy Ferris is a screenwriter, influencer, badass and author of Mighty Gorgeous: A Little Book About Messy Love, as well as Marrying George Clooney: Confessions from a Midlife Crisis
Rich Portrait With Fascinating Historical Accuracy
Tim Turner and Moisey Gorbaty have written an emotionally powerful novel that captures Jewish life in the Soviet Union, before during and after WWII. The Reluctant Conductor depicts the hardship, oppression and hope of the era, combining the engaging storytelling of a novel against the turbulent
history of the era.
In addition to finding it a great read, I particularly enjoyed the history as it enabled me to better understand the situation in Ukraine and with Russia today.
– Sean Strub, author of Body Counts, A Memoir of Activism,
Sex and Survival.
Old Fashioned Storytelling. Deliciously Escapist
This is storytelling from the Old World, a panoramic sweep through the tortured times and people of Eastern Europe. It is the story of Elazar, a young Jewish violinist in search of redemptive love and transportive music, in a world full of ugly bigotry and hate. Drifting back and forth between Uzbekistan and the Ukraine between 1922 and 1944, our hero navigates wedding-night steam rooms and birch-branch floggings; rivers of refugees and rivers of blood; lice and typhoid and refugee tent camps; horse-drawn carriage rides through betrayal and death and flattened shtetls; and the small luxuries of the desperate, a simple plate of chicken and cabbage. But always, always, the ebb and flow of music, weaving in and out of a life lost in the terrifying wilderness, searching for family and home. Does our hero find what he is yearning for? Read the book to find out. I picked it up and had to find out what happened to Elazar, a narrator I cared about.
— Richard C. Morais, author of the New York Times and international best-selling novel The Hundred Foot Journey.
Touching Novel of a Jewish Family’s Flight Across
War-Torn Europe
The authors touchingly handle themes of loss and belonging as they dramatize, in brisk and poignant scenes, the everyday yet extraordinary experiences of refugee life… Despite the complexity of the political instability of the era, The Reluctant Conductor is at heart an elemental story of one family caught up in the larger context of geopolitics and genocide, a humane examination of the cost in individual lives of ancient hatreds.
— BookLife
An Indomitable Man Guides His Jewish Family Through the Horrors of World War II in Eastern Europe in this Debut Novel.
Turner and Gorbaty’s engaging debut novel is promising and timely, considering what is going on in the protagonist’s part of the world. Elazar, the narrator, carries the story and will win readers over right from the start… A scene involving the family member fighting typhus is beautiful and poignant (Dickens would approve)… A moving family tale with a strong cast that readers will love.
— Kirkus Reviews
ABOUT the book
THE WRITER OF THE EXTRAORDINARY, CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED PLAY OUT LATE EMERGES WITH A POWERFUL, EMOTIONALLY REVERBERANT DEBUT NOVEL THAT CAPTURES THE HARDSHIP, OPPRESSION AND HOPE OF A JEWISH MERCHANT’S LIFE BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER WORLD WAR II IN THE USSR.
Feeling stifled as a Jew living in a Moldovan shtetl, violinist Elazar just wants to find love and eventually succeed his father as conductor of the family band and hardware business. But that could take years, and in 1922 Kalarash, there are very few girls his age and he’s known all of them since he was a child. He would love to move to Kishinev, Odesa, or Kyiv on his own and become a musician, but he knows it would kill his mama, and he’d feel guilty for the rest of his life.
At his cousin’s wedding in Kishinev, Elazar falls for Ita Kaplan, a wealthy heiress from Bolgrad, a key trade city on the Black Sea near the Romanian border, but she shuns him because she dreams of moving to Paris and becoming a painter. He then loses his heart to Mariam Gabashvili, the blossoming daughter of a local vintner, but his papa forbids him from marrying her because she’s not Jewish.
History—the rise of Stalin, his brutal takeover of Ukraine, and later Hitler’s invasion of the USSR—grants Elazar’s wishes in ways he never dreams, sending he and his family on an epic flight to Uzbekistan, where they endure the war, and then back to Moldova, where they pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.
In this stunning novel based on true events, Tim Turner and Moisey Gorbaty brilliantly re-create Jewish life in the Soviet Union, where, while life was punishing and brutally unfair, one violinist finds music in devastation and conducts his family—his orchestra—in such a way as to not let the horrors defeat them or hate to overcome them.
