Remembering Hoffy

Today would have been Hoffy’s birthday. Had he lived, he would have been well over 120. He was already in his sixties when I first met him, being at that point a hugely nervous twelve-year-old who had barely started on the cello.

Reuben Hofmekler of Latvia — he took the first name Robert, though everyone on Earth called him Hoffy — already looked older than his age. Almost entirely bald, despite having once sported those blond curls which had deceived Hitler’s ghoulish minions into wrongly believing him Aryan, he boasted a prominent nose, a Santa-esque paunch, laughing eyes, a wonderful hand-span for the cello and a vaguely professorial mien.

His alert mind, not to mention unappeasable fury, had taken him straight from escaping Hitler — almost all his family perished in the concentration camps — into US Army intelligence. He never even told my mother — who was briefly a CIA operative herself — what he did there.

After WWII he married an American and settled in northern Virginia, to become the local cello teacher. One of his brothers also escaped, and become principal cello in the Israeli Philharmonic. Every single member of the Hofmekler family was a gifted musician.

Hoffy, who never lost his heavy Baltic accent, was born to teach. In his immaculate basement, smelling equally of waxed furniture and expensive cello polish, he admitted screeds of students into the great cello mystery. He possessed not only the usual cello studies but a huge number of finger exercises of his own and Klengal’s devising, hand-written…