Reviewed by Anna del C. Dye for Readers' Favorite

A Penny for the Violin Man is a very interesting book that portrays the life of Norman, an immigrant Jewish teacher being forced to choose between employment or the unions in New York. The tale is vivid and intriguing, though the extent of the vulgarity in the beginning didn’t let me enjoy it as much. It seems to be out of character for Norman, who is a practicing Jew and teacher, to resort to swearing in English to communicate with other Jews—I don’t buy it.

The book starts with Norman, his wife, Marsa, and their son, Ira. It keeps alternating between his life now and what happened in his past, which made the flow a bit hard to follow. Like many others refugees, he and his family of three had to endure trials and tribulations to survive in a new land. Sometimes things got right down tough for them and their refugee friends. Lack of food, sickness, unemployment and so forth were ghosts that haunted them for years before they could see a little light at the end of the tunnel. For this family, life seems to bring lots of pains with the joys.

They almost lost their only child to sickness when he was young. Then when war starts, without permission and enabled by a birth certificate that had an obscure year of birth, Ira enrolls in the air force two years before he should have. By now his mother has another child, this time a girl. With the tragic yet senseless death of their son at the end of the war, they turn their grief to love focused on their daughter Edith.

In time the young woman marries and gives birth with difficulties to Miriam. In the surgery performed to give birth, she receives tainted blood—which ruins her life and that of her family that is now separated by the likelihood of being contaminated with aids. Norman and his wife take over the bringing up of their granddaughter until she becomes a well-off businesswoman who works by the twin towers on 9/11.