Exile Music is the story of Viennese Orly. She is a young teen when Hitler moves in. She and her parents must get out of Austria. They flee to Bolivia, the only country that will take them. Her brother had already escaped to Switzerland. Orly is leaving behind everything she knows as well as her best friend, Anneliese.
In Vienna, Orly's family's lives revolve around music. Her father is a viola player and her mother is an opera singer. Once they are in La Paz, her mother has no more music left in her. Her father continues to play his viola and eventually Orly learns how to play an Indian instrument.
This is a Holocaust novel. Yes. But it's also a novel about Orly's adjustment to Bolivia, both physically (that thin air!) and emotionally. She begins to make friends with all sorts of people. She learns Spanish. At first she must work. Eventually, she returns to school. We learn about the waves of refugees. Those that came during the war, like Orly and her family, as well as those arrived after the war. We learn about the political turmoil in Bolivia as well as the racial intolerance native Indians experienced. There's so much more.
Because I listened to the novel, I wasn't able to highlight lines in the book that could have been written to describe the situation in Ukraine - and in Europe - today. But many times, I thought about timeless authoritarianism and intolerance is. Sadly.
I highly recommend Exile Music.
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