Ladies and gentlemen, the original music of the Hebrew alphabet, and
Subtitle: Weekend in Mustara : two novellas
By: Curt Leviant.
Contributors: Leviant, Curt.
Series: Library of American fiction
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Madison, Wis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 156
Subjects: Manuscripts, Hebrew -- Fiction.; Holocaust survivors -- Fiction.; Jews -- Europe -- Fiction.; Musicologists -- Fiction.; Islands -- Fiction.; Budapest (Hungary) -- Fiction.; Europe -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Other titles: Ladies and gentlemen, the original music of the Hebrew alphabet, and, Weekend in Mustara; Weekend in Mustara.
Description: ""Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet" is set in Budapest during the Communist era. The story focuses on a tenuous seesaw between Dr. Isaac Gantz, a musicologist, and engineer Ferdinand Friedman, a Holocaust survivor who believes that he possesses one of the greatest manuscripts of the ages, a Rosetta Stone of Judaica.

Friedman is willing to share it - but there is a "but." In pursuing this prize, Gantz enters a world of strange human relationships filled with doubts and surprises. A vibrant cast of characters adds dimension to this story in which Jewish folklore, music, and history coalesce.".

""Weekend in Mustara" unfolds on the fictional island of Mustara in southern Europe, a mountainous, totalitarian country that tolerates Judaism. Its few Jews cling to their heritage, embodied in their beautiful but sparsely attended synagogue and their museum, where a great memorial book is inscribed with the names of all Mustara Jews martyred during World War II.

A scholar of medieval Hebrew manuscripts comes to the island, searching for traces of Yehuda Halevi, the great Hebrew poet of the Spanish Golden Age. He is soon enmeshed with elusive personalities and tangled loyalties but only when he finds himself displaced in time - in a kind of theater of the absurd - are the purposes of his journey finally realized."--BOOK JACKET.