A View Across the Rooftops

by Suzanne Kelman

What is life without art, music, or poetry? It helps us know how to feel, love, and live!”

Sometimes the most courageous love is whispered in the quietest moments.”

Their meeting had a strange déjà vu quality to it. It wasn’t like meeting someone new, but more like finding someone she had lost. Someone who had always been near, circling her, just not in human form until today. She didn’t know why, but as she licked cream cheese from her fingers, she knew in some subconscious way she had been waiting for him, and it was shocking and comforting all at once. She sat peacefully by his side, eating their stolen bounty, watching the life along the canal banks, and she heard her soul whisper to her, “He is the one.”

“One doesn’t know how brave one is until the cost outweighs the fear,” he said thoughtfully. “You may surprise yourself if the cost becomes something precious, worth fighting for.”

“You are my safe port in a turbulent ocean, the steadfast candle that guides me and when the swelling darkness threatens to overwhelm me, your light shines ever brighter. Never faltering to lead me home.”

“… Your quiet strength a reminder that the wind finds its voice not in tranquility, but in the roar of a stormed-lashed sea.”

I have survived. But now I have to learn to live.”

“One doesn’t know how brave one is until the cost outweighs the fear.”

“Invincible.” … I am battle-worn without lifting a weapon And scarred without a cut to my flesh But still I will lift up my head. Still I will not give up the fight.

When he’d taken in that young student so long ago, he hadn’t known it, but he was about to become the pupil and Michael was to be his teacher. Without Josef realizing it, the young man’s passion and enthusiasm for love and life had slowly worn down the bricks and mortar of his internment, like a relentless ocean on a seawall. Even in the confinement of an attic, Michael had drunk larger and deeper from the well of life than Josef ever had. He had taken all of his fearless vitality and lust for life and had honed it into his craft. And as Josef dwelt on this, it humbled him to realize how much of life he had been asleep to. Numbly moving through a world of hurt and sadness, he hadn’t taken even a moment to absorb anything of good around him. And there was so much good, even in the depths of a desperate war.

‘What is life without the beauty of art or music or poetry to help us interpret it, encourage us to know how to feel, how to love and how to live?’ In music I see the darkness, the light, the messiness, the beauty, and the complexities of life that simply can’t be summed up like an equation. Music, for me, helps bring down the walls, to open those locked doors. And I hope it has been that way for you too, tonight.”

This book is dedicated to my hero, my friend, and my professor, Josef Held, who taught me algebra but also taught me in the darkest nights of my soul the true meaning of the words, “Sometimes the most courageous love is whispered in the quietest moments.”