David
The Fiddlers Glow – The Music Speaks
A novel of music, memory, and the indestructible thread that connects us — from the pogroms of Russia to the far shores of New Zealand.
The music survived everything. So did they
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The Fiddler’s Glow is a sweeping work of historical fiction based on the author’s own family history — the story of one Jewish family’s journey from the pogroms of the Russian Empire to the streets of London to the far shores of New Zealand, and the extraordinary musical legacy they left behind.
At its heart is David Levitsky, a blacksmith’s son from the town of Brailov who discovers, under the guidance of his teacher Hirsch Feldman, that music is not something you make — it is something that moves through you, if you are willing to become hollow enough to let it. This teaching, rooted in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, becomes the lens through which David understands everything: love, loss, exile, survival, and the question of what endures when everything else is taken away.
David escapes to London in 1906, just ahead of the violence that will eventually consume his entire community. He builds a life as a tobacconist in Whitechapel, marries Rose Bennett — a working-class English woman with the voice of a coloratura soprano — and together they raise three children of extraordinary musical gifts. But the shadow of what happened in Brailov never leaves him, and when his daughter Chana falls dangerously ill, the family is set on a course that will take them to the opposite end of the earth.
Rose boards a ship with three children and crosses the world. David follows later, failing in health but determined to reach them. He dies in Auckland, New Zealand, having held on just long enough to pass on the clarinet, the teaching, and the knowledge that the music must continue.
It does continue. Across generations, across continents, across the deliberate forgetting that comes with assimilation and survival — the music persists. And in the novel’s epilogue, set in Jerusalem in 2024, a woman who doesn’t even know she is descended from a Ukrainian Jewish fiddler stands in the tunnels beneath the Western Wall and hears something in the ancient stone that her DNA has been waiting a century to recognise.
The Fiddler’s Glow is a novel about what genocide can and cannot destroy. It is about the strange persistence of consciousness through music, through memory, through the unbroken chain of people who kept playing even when they had every reason to stop.
It is dedicated to the 3,000 Jews of Brailov — every one of whom was murdered between 1919 and 1942. None survived.
One family did.
A song written for this book by Lyndall Kai
The Wall That Wails was written as a companion to the novel — a song born from the same vision that closes the book: an ancient cave beneath the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where violinists once played, and where the music never quite left the stone.