Motto: You live as long you are remembered (Russian Proverb)
November 25, 2021 marks 10 years since Bela Stein Zaharopol Welt left this world, a world she has preserved over the years unusually rich in music and beauty.
At the age of 16, I met her for the first time, at her home in Bucharest, where I spent my first New Year’s Eve as a teenager, with a small group of friends. Our last meeting was in October 2011, during a visit to the apartment in the Gilo district of Jerusalem. It was the last time I could show her affection and respect.
Bela, who knew many foreign languages, was a woman of culture whose life could be opened like the calendar of a dramatic historical period, from the Second World War, to taking refuge in the remote regions of Soviet Russia, returning to Romania and then through her emigration to Israel. His talents were innumerable, but the main one was that of piano pedagogy, a field in which he spent most of his professional life. In Jerusalem, through his presence, but especially through the memorable piano lessons enjoyed by the city’s intellectuals concerned with the musical education of their children, they offered Bela a legendary halo, and created an endless source of friends and human connections with his students. With Bela, watching the delicate but wise touch of the keys, or listening to the voice of the inflection of the Russian accent, you had the chance to enter the gate of a world of yesteryear, where her heart beats with boys and girls, the students of that time, who have become adults in the meantime, who have kept their passion for music. For some of them, the piano has become their true self, the essence of the future life.
After trying to summarize a few memories of Bela Zaharopol, I got in touch with some of those former students and friends that I remembered quite vaguely.
Succeeding to some extent, I have reached out to some of Bela’s loved ones and to whom Bela was a great friend, a guide, an example of a person with an unusual intellectual and human capacity, I asked them to participate, if they wish, by their few words, to portray the image of Bela for each of them.
I will reproduce below this potpourri of thoughts somehow resurrected due to the discussion I generated, accidentally, but also intentionally, with its remembrance, a decade since it remained only in the memory of those who were around it. Some thoughts will be expressed in English.
Udi Sommer, a dear student of Bela, whom I often heard about, and who studied piano for many years, later spread his wings to other fields, from psychology to political science, now serving as a professor at the University of Tel. Aviv:
It has been nearly two decades since I saw Bela last. We were visiting with her in Boston on the occasion of her grandson’s graduation from college. She was so immensely proud of every aspect of the graduation weekend, including the little show they put together on the occasion, based on a play he’d written. Bela was always a “bigger than life” person. Walking into her apartment in Gilo, whether it was for a piano lesson or for an afternoon coffee (with various Romanian delights), meant walking into a different place and time. She was able to maintain the kind of vigour and appetite for life that few are able to, being always passionate and compassionate, having a new love in her life in the person of Levi Welt, at a point in life where most people just try to hang in there. It was a privilege to know her and learn from her not just the wonders of music but also how to walk the paths of life.
Professor Udi Sommer, Tel Aviv
A second text came to me through the kindness of Ms. Vicky Abramovich, the wife of the well-known violinist Avy Abramovich, and the mother of pianist Michael, one of Bela’s students, for whom, as I wrote above, the piano became the essence of his profession. Living in Gilo, Vicky was one of Bela’s friends, and part of her life in Jerusalem. Shortly after Bela’s death, Vicky wrote the text below, a sensory, spiritual part of the connection between them.
The Pink Robe
The pink robe hung
In the hanger by the closet.
With its color of a candy
It seemed to be a Fondant
Quickly melting in your mouth
The robe was soft and fluffy
Warm and light
On the body, he molded
It tenderly your body enveloped.
Wearing it in the evening,
After the day’s toil
You felt relaxed and blessed by rest.
He had served for many years, and in faith
Wrapping the same dear being,
Tall, distinguished and good-looking,
Offering a generous friendship around,
And its sweet perfume
Until today it emanates,
Dear pink robe … like a candy …
Viki Abramovich, Ierusalim 2011(in amintirea prietenei mele BELA)
During the time she had lived life in Jerusalem, one of Bela’s best friends, was Professor Yehoshua Lustmann, a surgeon specializing in maxillofacial surgery at Hadasa Hospital in Jerusalem. The text I am reproducing was sent to me by Professor Lustmann in Hebrew, I translated it into English, below:
“Bela a spus” “Thus spake Bela”
For almost 8 years, my daughter Yael had studied piano with Bela Zaharopol, a choice that we, Yael’s parents, have often blessed. In addition to being an exceptional piano teacher, Bela also showed a special educational personality. Yael, a sprightly girl, became the best child near the piano and in the company of Bela turned into the most wonderful child. Over time, a warm and close bond was forged between us, which remained reciprocal forever.
When Yael got married, Bela was one of the most important guests.
Prof. Yehoshua Lustmann
But not only did the Professor agreed and accepted to write a few words in memory of Bela, his daughter, Yael Lustmann, sent me her thoughts concerning those feelings she had, as a child, but also held them today, after a few decades. Yael, who, after studying law in Israel and at Yale University, worked in the finance system of some large companies in the United States, cannot forget the defining moments of her life, among which of course the spiritual instructor Bela, her piano teacher from Jerusalem:
Meidale, that is how she used to call me, Yael, was only when I didn’t practice enough. I was very young when I started playing. I think I was 6 or 7. I don’t remember if I enjoyed playing the piano, but I do know that I loved Bela. Few people in our lives leave a mark. Bela was one of them. She was not an ordinary person. She was grand but managed to do it in a small and delicate way. Music was her life. Every piece had a story. Every note, every pause or rest had a meaning. There were soldiers, and rivers, wind and children, the moon and the sun, it had it all. One page of notes was a world in and of itself. I was fortunate to have Bela as my teacher. She took me into her world and bestowed onto me the love of music. Till this day when I listen to music, I hear her voice telling the stories that lie beneath the notes. Teaching for Bela was not a job. It was a calling. She truly loved the children and cared about each and every one of them. Bela shaped who I am today and the lessons that she passed onto me is what I try to pass on to my girls, I only wish she could be here to teach them herself. I know that they would have loved her. I am grateful for every moment that was spent with her. Bela is someone that cannot be forgotten. She will forever be in my heart.
Dr. Yael Lustmann
I will end the series of memories about Bela with the dizzying evocation of his student, for whom the piano has truly become the essence of life. It is about the pianist Michael Abramovich, who in his youth, in Jerusalem, studied piano with Bela Zaharopol. Today Michael is pursuing a prestigious piano career.
Reading the words written by Michael, you will have the opportunity to participate in a virtual recital this time, among the many real ones, which, more than once, Bela gave in front of her friends:
Bela Stein and Zaharopol and Welt were from Chernovitsi, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, Romania. Her father had loved her in Viennese German and her mother had not loved her in Hotinian Russian. In ’41 she fled with the Russian troops in the USSR in a summer dress, otherwise without anything … Bela’s stories about those Russian years were of extraordinary force. The war intertwined poverty, cold and terror with the fidelity of true friendships, the evacuation of the Muscovite Conservatory in Saratov with a love of the piano and a duty to music, even in the most tragic circumstances of life – as Professor Kagan taught. Her brother was one of Babi Yar’s survivors, and her father died in Transnistria.
After the war she lived in Bucharest with her mother. He accompanied the class of opera director J. Rânzescu at the Bucharest Conservatory; the two were bound by an esteem, a deep mutual admiration. Bela also taught piano from adolescence to old age with a total devotion to students and music. She was truly loved by her students. A certain family in Jerusalem was putting fresh flowers when Bela was coming for their daughter’s piano lesson, saying that Bela’s coming to their house was always a celebration. Bella’s language skills enlightened and enlivened her whole life. Everything she thought existed for her simultaneously in German, Russian and Romanian. Everything he expressed was of extraordinary plasticity, accuracy and verbal richness. He possessed the virtuosity of a translator in this threefold fabric of his tongues. He taught these languages and translated, for example, into German, P. Dumitriu’s short story “Family Jewels”.
Much later in his Jerusalem apartment he asked me, “Do you want me to tell you how I bleached one night in Russia?” In those countless evenings over the years, the thread of Bela’s stories almost never broke, it was like a living legend … about music, books, people, stories she had gone through, political systems, family dramas lived by her or many others. his friends, the tenderness of Yiddish singing. I often came to sing to her old Steinway, and on that stone road, with Bela as my guide, the red thread of Mozart’s song had to burn, the darkness of darkness had to be humanized and personified by the warmth of touch, the breadth of feeling and the rigor of thought. Other times I read a volume with various Romanian translations, comparing them with the Baudelaire original. My Berlin friend Jenny and I used to visit her to get drunk on her stories dressed in a gorgeous old German. I was joking translating such Romanian expressions into German clothes, so the Balkan shoehorn cow became a well-shodded Teutonic dude, “die beschuhte Kuh”.
Together with Daniel his nephew, whom I also met, Bela and Jenny, we paid a visit to Paris, a kind of farewell to his travels.
This short and far too incomplete portrait of Mrs. Piatră (Translation of Stein in Romanian), as a force of character and physical massiveness, of Mrs. Sugar Maker (form Greek sugar expression – Zahar – ζάχαρη) , with the sweetness of her speech, of Mrs. Lume (Translation of Welt in Romanian), in the depths of the worlds that surrounded her, I dedicate to the unforgettable Bela.
On the banks of the Elbe in Hamburg, in the background of the Elbenoper building, Michael performs a Chopin nightly:
Bela will always remain in the hearts of so many loving and close people and that is why she will never be forgotten.
Dr. Veronica Rozenberg, Haifa, Israel, January 2022
