Award-winning film director brings Orchestra of Exiles to Westport Mar. 23

By Cindy Mindell

John Aronson

In the early 1930s, Hitler began firing Jewish musicians across Europe. Overcoming extraordinary obstacles, Polish-Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman moved these great musicians to Palestine and formed a symphony that would become the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. With courage, resourcefulness, and an entourage of allies including Arturo Toscanini and Albert Einstein, Huberman saved close to 1,000 Jews – along with the musical heritage of Europe.

“Bronislaw Huberman was a man who performed a unique and extraordinary feat of sustained heroism,” Aronson says. “And yet, when his story was told to me by the daughter of one of the men he saved, I had never heard of Huberman or his powerful journey. I was instantly intrigued and soon learned that little had been written about this great man and a film had never been made of this story.”

Orchestra of Exiles tells this remarkable story through original letters, archival photos, reenactments, and interviews with Jewish musical luminaries Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, Pinchas Zukerman, Joshua Bell, and others.

First broadcast on PBS in 2012, and soon to debut in Israel, Orchestra of Exiles will have its Westport premiere on Sunday, Mar. 23 at the Westport Town Hall, a collaborative initiative of the Westport Cinema Initiative, UJA/Federation Westport Weston Wilton Norwalk, The Conservative Synagogue’s Jewish Cultural Arts Council, and the Jewish Arts & Film Festival of Fairfield County.

Aronson is also a concert pianist and regularly plays chamber music in New York and at the Telluride Musicfest, the chamber music festival he founded in 2002 with his wife, violinist Maria Bachmann. He spoke with the Ledger about the riveting story behind his film.

Q: What inspired you to make Orchestra of Exiles? 

A: Bronislaw Huberman was uneducated until he went to the Sorbonne in the late ’20s, because he was a violin prodigy and his father took him around Europe like Mozart, just to make money for the family. He used and abused him, took him from his childhood, his friends, and his mother in Poland. In Huberman’s correspondence, we see a little boy forced to grow up; the photos show a man who never smiled.

When Huberman was 20, his father died, and the young man realized that his father had taken advantage of him, that all his fortune had been sent back to his mother, that he had been an indentured slave. In the wake of World War One, he saw what had happened in Europe and realized that he didn’t know anything – why human beings and societies would do these things, why people would kill each other – because he had been living in a bubble of classical music. So he just stopped playing, even though he was at the height of his career, and enrolled in the Sorbonne.

The university has no record of his being there, but he focused on politics and sociology, became a real political animal, and wrote books on unifying Europe. When Hitler came in in 1933, it was devastating for Huberman’s dream of unifying Europe.

Even though he was a secular Jew, Huberman saw Palestine as a solution and as a great place for an orchestra and changed completely from a guy who was just collecting money so that he wouldn’t be poor in old age, to another being. He spent most of his time fundraising and refused to play in Germany because the Nazis were firing Jewish musicians – even though he made half his income there and said that he wouldn’t play there again until all the Jewish musicians were returned to their places. He turned into this heroic, egalitarian figure, and dedicated himself between 1936 and 1939 to getting Jews out of Germany.

The story is known among the cultural community, but not among the common population. People are far less interested in classical music in Israel, like elsewhere in the world. That’s one of the reasons I made the film: here’s a man who created the culture of Israel, saved one thousand Jews from the Holocaust.

He could only bring out 70 people and there were thousands and thousands of musicians who might have been saved – who knows how many were killed – but he couldn’t take out everyone, and there are moments in the film where he was very pained. Many of them may have had options to go to other orchestras or were working freelance. But he could only bring the very best that he could possibly find, in order to form an orchestra of the first rank.

Huberman also had to convince them how dangerous it was going to become in Germany and that they had to get their families out. It wasn’t easy: their families had been in these places for generations and considered themselves to be protected as native citizens. They had always lived with antisemitism and the pendulum came and went for the Jews – worse and better, worse and better. Their attitude was that it’s bad but it will get better; the National Socialists may be in now but they won’t stay, they’ll be driven out.

Huberman saw it, he had some prescient sense, and he would talk and write about how dangerous it was and how bad things were going to become for Jews. He had the weight of his conviction that this was mortal – and this was in 1936, before the concentration camps.

Q: How and where did you conduct your research for the film? 

A: This was the hardest part of the film, other than fundraising. I first heard the story in 2008, from the daughter of one of the men Huberman saved. I decided that I wanted to make a film that would have recreations in it because I didn’t want to use archival footage or still photographs exclusively. I realized that, in order to have the voices of the characters present, I had to have first-person voices in all the different accents. So I had to have everything in letters and it turned out that Huberman was a prolific letter writer and had created the orchestra through letter-writing. His longtime companion and assistant moved to Israel after Huberman’s death in 1947 and spent the rest of her life compiling his letters, worked with a composer in Israel and donated to Huberman Archive in Tel Aviv. I visited the library and earned the trust of the administrators. It wasn’t particularly well organized because they didn’t have money; there were piles of letters from Huberman to various recipients, and millions of photos.

I hired a translator to go through the letters with an eye to what was important to the story. He did a rough translation and, when a particular letter seemed interesting, I would have him do a more in-depth translation. I had another translator doing the same in Berlin. I sat at my computer, read the letters, pulled out interesting quotes, and assembled them into a linear narrative structure. It ended up being hundreds of pages of quotes which I whittled down to tell the story, and interviewed people to fill in the holes, then wrote a voice-over narration to tie it all together. It took over a year to do this.

Q: How did the filmmaking experience affect you personally?

A: There were a lot of reasons that I was so grabbed by this story. I had not done all the reading about the Holocaust, so it was a real reason and permission to do it, to stop my life in order to learn about the Holocaust.

It deepened my sense of being a Jew and of our history, though I had grown up in a secular Jewish community. I learned an awful lot about Israel – a lot of good and bad, and what happened to Zionism. The film is about the early years of Zionism, 30 years after Herzl first proposed the idea of a Jewish state, and what the dream looked like in the ’20s and ’30s, when people were living Zionism in an actual place and thinking about the shape of the future Jewish state.

I spent a great deal of time in Israel, learning and reading, and have continued to learn about the very complicated and painful politics of the country. It’s hard to know what to believe because there are so many different perspectives.

My hope was that the film would be used educationally long after it was first broadcast, to give kids an example of altruistic living, standing up against intolerance, and what a heroic figure from the 20th century looks like. So far, audiences have largely been in the older age range. This is a frustration and a problem: kids aren’t interested in classical music, Israeli history, or Holocaust education.

I’ve made documentary films on a wide range of subjects and have learned that the ones I’ve been most proud of, and that made a difference in the world, are the films in which the basic human story grabbed me viscerally from the start and whose subjects engaged me for the thrilling extended ride of exploration and research. Orchestra of Exiles was one of these projects.

Orchestra of Exiles with director Josh Aronson: Sunday, Mar. 23, 4 p.m., Westport Town Hall, 110 Myrtle Ave., Westport | Tickets/info: westportcinema.org / (203) 434-2908.