By, John Nathan
3 min read
ByJohn Nathan, John Nathan
When concert pianist Lisa Jura taught her young daughter Mona to play the piano, she used to say to always think of story when playing music. She could never have known that the story that Mona now most often thinks of when playing the piano is of her mother Lisa, the brilliant Viennese musician whose ticket to life and safety on the Kindertransport was won by her tailor father in a poker game.
It was the only way he could provide for his family after Jews were banned from doing business. This and other details make up the rich story of survival and hope told by Mona Golabek in her one-woman show at London's St James Theatre.
"She would sit at the piano and tell me stories," says Golabek. "She said each piece of music tells a story, Mona."
It's a story that American pianist Golabek first thought of telling when, some time after her mother Lisa died, Mona was engaged to play the Grieg Piano Concerto in A Minor. "I woke up thinking this is the piece she always told me about," says Golabek.
She is in her London hotel relaxing between performances of The Pianist of Willesden Lane, the show that charts her mother's escape from Nazi Austria to the north London hostel where she and many other Jewish children were given refuge. There, are of course, many Kindertransport stories.
It's so difficult putting your heart out there to inspire people
"They all have a particular resonance because we have the most terrible refugee crisis," says Golabek. "And the show is also a tribute to the British people who, during that time, saved the lives of 10,000 children. Without them I would not be alive."
But what sets Golabek's story apart is that it is set to the most exquisite, and exquisitely played, music. All of it is played by Golabek who narrates, acts and plays the piano - sometimes all at the same time.
As Lisa's experience is recounted using stories she told Mona during those lessons, the narrative is accompanied by passages of Beethoven (the Moonlight Sonata), Debussy (Clair de Lune), Chopin (Nocturne) and even a smattering of Gershwin for the moments when the 14-year-old Lisa played piano for the armed forces in a posh London hotel. But it's the Grieg that has particular resonance.
Golabek was raised in Los Angeles where her mother and her Polish-born, French Resistance fighter father lived after the war. But the distance between the young Mona and wartime London was always bridged by Lisa's stories.
"After the piano lessons, I remember how she would put me to sleep at night. It was a more sombre ritual and she would talk about my grandmother and my grandfather." Both perished in the Holocaust.
"She desperately wanted me to know who they were. And when I came along, I became her best friend. I think it was a destiny for me to go and play the piano," says Golabek of her mother who became a piano teacher. Her most dedicated pupils were her daughters, Mona and Renée.
"I went on to live out what was cut short for her" says Golabek. "She branded my heart. However, it was not just Lisa who had stories to tell.
"My father would regale us with stories of the French Resistance," remembers the pianist. "I regret I never wrote them down. He spoke seven languages. He was a tall, gorgeous, Polish Frenchman," says Golabek mistily.
Her father was Michel. He was born into a well-to-do Jewish family from the Bialystock region of Poland, a part of Europe that didn't need German occupiers to tell some of its locals how to kill Jews. But, before war broke out, Michel was sent to boarding school in France which is how he ended up in the Resistance. "He was one of the highest decorated Jewish officers in the French Resistance," says Golabek proudly. "He received the Croix de Guerre from De Gaul. He wanted to be a doctor but, when he and my mother arrived in Los Angeles, the thing he knew best was how to use a gun. So he became a security guard and then had a business manufacturing sports shirts."
So it is her mother's story that has survived intact - first as a book called The Children of Willesden Lane, now as a hit play adapted and directed by Hershey Felder and it may be turned into a film as the film rights have just been sold.
Telling the story remains a difficult but, for Golabek, vital task. "It's nerve-racking, it's exhausting. You put your heart out there and hopefully it will inspire people through this story. Everyone who lived through the war years has an incredible story. But I think what makes this one stand out is the music. It enters the heart. It's a delivery method for universal themes.
"I have a memory of making my debut and seeing my mother as I walked home from school," she says. "I saw her in the car driving and I could see she was crying because I had got a rave review in the LA Times."
'The Pianist of Willesden Lane' closes at The St James Theatre this weekend.
