“Music played a much bigger part in our lives than brisket.” It was as much a part of the house as some families remember the smell of cooking wafting through the home,” he says. We know this is part of our history and our real connection to our parents’ history.”ĭavid Salm, who is six years younger than Susan, remembers running his electric train set under the legs of the two pianos. “To say it’s going home does not really capture it. “As a musician, and as a person, I’ve changed a lot, but it means a great deal ,” she said.

Susan, whose trio has performed all over the world, says it’s emotional for her to be performing again with her mom’s piano. “That was how she would finally get us to go to bed: She said she would play the Brahms ‘Lullaby.’ Sometimes she also played Schumann’s ‘The Happy Farmer,’ which I loved.” Congregant John Maas leading fellow congregants on a piano with a remarkable history We heard her play every day,” Susan remembers. “My mother was playing on them, and she also taught lessons at home. The four Salm children slept in the one bedroom of their apartment, the parents crammed into a smaller room, and the living room was reserved for the pianos. Susan Salm, a noted cellist and co-founding member of the Raphael Trio, will bring her New York-based chamber group to Cotati on March 24 for a performance of Beethoven and Dvorak that will officially inaugurate her mom’s piano at Ner Shalom.įor Susan, the Steinway and a Knabe baby grand piano - both of which made the journey from Germany to Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood - were key elements in her childhood. Now, after two decades of sitting quietly at radio station KRCB in Sonoma County, the piano is getting plenty of attention at Ner Shalom, a Reconstructionist congregation that has been called “the singing synagogue” because of its focus on music. Along the way, it was in hiding in Rotterdam for years, and then for even longer in a home in Chicago, where Erna loved to play it. It’s a 1926 Steinway baby grand piano made in Hamburg and bought in the 1930s by Erna and Arthur Salm, and donated last year to Ner Shalom by their children. That’s the itinerary of a Holocaust survivor, but in this case it’s not a human being who made that trip. From Nazi Germany to Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati, with stops in Rotterdam and Chicago.

Anyway* by Arthur Salm