The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse
In Occupied Paris, in the middle of the night in November 1942, Ruth, a Greek Jewish mother and her sixteen-year-old son, Leon, are pulled from their beds and deported to German concentration camps.
Ruth’s eleven-year-old daughter, Josephine, manages to escape, running to the home of her piano teacher, Andrée Levallois. Andrée hides the little Jewish girl, gives her the name of Levallois and shares the scant rations allowed to the Parisian population. Andrée is a Second Lieutenant in the French Resistance, and along with her parents, is a member of one of the underground networks active in Paris.
Their protection of the child, alongside their clandestine activities, places them all at enormous risk. Then their apartment becomes a hub for another network undertaking dangerous preparations for the Normandy landings. The threat of exposure, capture and arrest is ever present. When disaster comes to the Levallois family, it comes suddenly. This is the true story of Andrée and Josephine (although her name is here changed), and also of Andrée’s piano, which Josephine plays to help her cope without her mother and brother. It now resides in Santa Monica, California, where Josephine’s granddaughter composed the film score on it for Morris’ earlier Holocaust novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
The story of Josephine and the Levallois family is closely informed by French archives of the Resistance, and is the latest of Morris’ fictionalised true stories following the Tattooist series. Her works are a testament to the lives decimated by Nazism and how love and the human spirit can transcend the politics of genocide. This novel is another important story to tell, of the stakes and the terrible consequences of resistance. Like Morris’ other novels of survival against impossible odds under a brutal regime, it will make you cry.
