Sometime during that awful era, I began fiddling around on the piano

As told to Shoshana Itzkowitz

I was only four years old when my mother passed away. Immediately after her petirah, my father, an older European man who didn’’t have much experience with child-rearing, packed up our house in Brooklyn and moved us  — my twin brother, me, and our older sister  — across the country to live near his sister. It was an act of both sacrifice and survival on his part; he wanted us to have a shot at a normal upbringing, and moving near Aunt Mira would afford us that.

We moved into a tiny ranch in the heart of Small-Town, USA. The previous owners had left lots of furniture, the most prized of which would become my best friend over the next 15 years: an old upright piano.

I have no memories of preschool; my nightmare life began in first grade. I still have pictures of that day: My older sister had painstakingly braided my freshly washed hair, and I wore my absolute favorite dress (it had been Cousin Chana’’s first, then her sister’’s).

For reasons I couldn’’t comprehend, I became the class queen’’s target. From Day One, I was bullied mercilessly. If I drank from the water fountain, Sarah announced that it was contaminated and no one else would drink from it. If I brought chips for a siyum, I’’d walk around the class trying to distribute them, but one by one the girls would grimace and motion me onward.

It never dawned on me to tell anyone what went on in school. Daddy was out at work every day, trying to keep it all together, and we kids would never burden him, and my older sister was a teenager trying to work out her own life, and school was my brother’’s haven. For me… for me it was agony just getting out of bed in the morning.

Sometime during that awful era, I began fiddling around on the piano. Sounding out tunes first with one hand, and then slowly, tentatively, with a two-fingered chord, I’’d spend hours at the piano. By the time I was eight, I had an impressive command of chords that I’’d taught myself through trial and error and would spend every moment I could playing.