I didn’t set out to write a book about being Jewish. My book is about falling in love with a Scottish singer who died before I knew she existed. She sang Gilbert and Sullivan, so my book is about that, too—and G&S, at least on the surface, is about as un-Jewish as you can get, though there are a whole lot of American Jews who can quote every word of these Victorian comic operas.

Sometimes you don’t know what kind of book you’re writing until you’ve written it. That Voice is very much concerned with growing up as a Jewish Baby Boomer in Syracuse, New York, in the 1960s. My father’s parents were Yiddish-speaking immigrants who went to an Orthodox synagogue; my mother’s parents were second-or-third generation Americans who used Yiddish only when they didn’t want their kids to understand what they were saying. My family belonged to a Reform Jewish congregation; we didn’t keep Kosher, but we lit Shabbos candles every Friday night. I wasn’t taught Hebrew, though my brothers learned to read it (but not understand it) when they were Bar Mitzvahed. We were average secularized American Jews, leaning away from, rather than toward, our Jewish heritage.

We were also leaning away from the events of the Thirties and Forties. In religious school, I was taught that there had been a Holocaust but that it would Never Happen Again. My father wouldn’t talk about the three years he had spent as a medic in the war. His mother, my tiny, widowed Yiddish grandmother, sank into a depression so deep that she was given electro-shock therapy; she ultimately dwindled away till there was little left of her body or mind. I wasn’t told that all the Jews in her home town had been lined up and shot at the beginning of the war. I still have no idea how many of her friends and relatives were among them. I was being protected by parents who wanted to believe that protection was possible.

That Voice is also about studying music, and my most important teachers—indeed, all the important Classical musicians of the time—were European Jews. I never wondered why they had all come to America. But as I researched their lives, I began to understand the terrible things they had lived through, and to appreciate my father’s experience as an American Jew trying hard to assimilate. Late in his life, he said to me, with some bitterness, “The melting pot is a myth.” I realized that even for so-called secular Jews, there is no escape from being Jewish.

My Scottish singer, Ann Drummond-Grant, knew something about this. I was aware that her husband, the conductor Isidore Godfrey, was Jewish. But I was floored to discover that his parents had come to England from the same shtetl my grandmother emigrated from. This impeccable Englishman was kin to me as a musician and as a Jew. It’s a connection I could not possibly have imagined.