Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
March 2004
Hungry Generations
A Novel
by Daniel C. Melnick
At the center of “Hungry Generations” is the great European piano virtuoso Alexander Petrov, one of the émigré geniuses who lived in the incredible community of gifted Europeans in Los Angeles during the Second World War. Fleeing from Nazi Germany, the legendary classical pianist – like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, the Werfels, and the Manns – settled in L.A. and attempted to raise a family there on the edge of the Pacific. In September of 1972, Jack Weinstein – a young composer and a distant relation of Petrov – is newly arrived in L.A., living near Venice beach and seeking a job in the movie studios. Jack develops a friendship with the émigré virtuoso, who is nearing seventy and struggling to maintain his psychic and physical health in the midst of intense conflicts with his wife and his adult children. The renowned pianist tells the young man stories of his life from the thirties to the present, and soon Jack is absorbed into the family life of the Petrovs. Jack becomes a catalyst for confrontations among the Petrovs, as he intrudes on the family’s delicate balances. He falls in love with the pianist’s daughter, Sarah, who becomes Jack’s troubled muse, and in one climax, the father erupts in jealousy and desperation, assaulting his daughter’s lover. The son Joseph Petrov is a gifted, cynical, intense pianist himself, who also befriends Jack; resentments – new and old – build between son and father, and these too erupt in destruction and self-destructiveness. Also, Joseph is gay, and after a surreal New Year’s Eve party at the Polo Lounge, he makes a pass at drunk, dismayed Jack. Then there is Petrov’s wife, Helen, and her confession to Jack is one of the final assaults on the young composer. The remarkable expatriates living in Los Angeles during World War II figure both in Petrov’s stories and in Jack’s inner struggle to resurrect himself in the face of his experience of the Petrovs, of music, of sex, of the movie studios, of L.A. itself. During the year 1972-73, Jack composes a piano sonata infused with his love of Petrov’s famed recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata as well as the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg – those composers even begin to enter Jack’s dreams, simultaneously blessing and critiquing him as he works in his Venice apartment. Hungry Generations paints a vivid portrait of the conflicts and struggles which erupt in L.A.’s singular expatriate community. At the center of the novel is finally the confrontation between émigré parents who survived the Holocaust at the peculiar remove of Los Angeles and their grown children. Each “hungry generations” reveals its yearning for meaning, love, and transcendence.
