Hungry Generations

About the Book

“A poetic story”: “More than combustible, it marks a collision of cultures and worlds: Petrov’s Europe, decimated by the Nazis, versus Jack’s fantasyland of Hollywood. A past that haunts the soul versus a present that has none.” --Cleveland Plain Dealer “The Weinstein Sonata brings the characters richly to life, beautifully weaving music and musical composition into the fabric of the storytelling [and] eloquently capturing the musicians’ past and historical era with precision and panache.” --Publishers Weekly “Melnick seems to have absorbed the tragedy of music which Adorno knew so well…For those who [love] serious music, it will be supremely satisfying.” --The TLS The Weinstein Sonata, volume one of Hungry Generations, imagines the world of émigré writers and musicians who fled from Nazi Europe and settled in Los Angeles. In 1972, Alexander Petrov, a legendary larger-than-life classical pianist, befriends the young composer Jack Weinstein, a distant relative who begins work in one of the Hollywood Studios. Petrov’s stories about his fellow émigrés deepen his friendship with Jack, who yet finds himself disrupting the balances in Petrov’s turbulent family: the pianist’s gay son is drawn to Jack, and the daughter falls in love with him, which leads to Petrov’s violent, tragic reaction. All the while, Petrov’s brilliant stories have mixed myth-making with memory - about Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and above all the great twentieth-century composers Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartok. Jack’s love of their music – and of Beethoven’s – infuses a piano sonata he composes, and soon these composers enter his Chagall-like dreams, criticizing and blessing his music.

About the Author

Daniel C. Melnick was born in Los Angeles, attended UC Berkeley, and taught for years at the state university and at CWRU in Cleveland, where he and his wife, a painter, raised their family. He published two other novels, The Ash Tree (short-listed for Stanford’s Saroyan Prize) and A Burnt Offering (about Israel and a possible nuclear war). Also published: essays, stories, and a scholarly book, Fullness of Dissonance.