Music: Fiddlers in Russia

Food rations were down to a quarter of a pound per person and machine guns were spattering the St. Petersburg streets with dead when a family of five Russian Jews who lived in one small room across from the central police station scrambled a few belongings together and hastily escaped from Russia. There were 16 refugees crowded into the third-class compartment which carried them across Siberia. And when they reached San Francisco via Japan and Honolulu nothing seemed so strange as the way U. S. residents spread themselves out, unless it was the way they ate soup for the first part of their dinner instead of the last. Last week Jascha Heifetz arrived in New York on the fashionable Conte di Savoia carrying, besides his $45,000 Guarnerius, a $5 quarter-size violin on which he, aged 3, had learned to play. He had been in Russia for the first time since 1917 when he fled with his parents and sisters from their one-room home during the Revolution. The Russians had queer ideas of their countryman who was coming back to play for them. He would arrive with two Ethiopian bodyguards. His violin would be in a bright silver case. His wife would be either a Miss Ford or a Miss Rockefeller instead of Cinemactress Florence Vidor. Even so, there were Russians who took five-day journeys to hear Heifetz fiddle in Leningrad and Moscow, Russians who paid as high as 24 rubles ($19.20) to squeeze into his concerts, Russians who stayed long after the lights went down to hear his Schubert's Ave Maria. Heifetz's earnings for his twelve Russian performances amounted to $10,000 in rubles, none of which could he take out of the country. He earned half that much playing half an hour over the radio last Sunday night to advertise such Lehn & Fink products as Lysol, Pebeco toothpaste, Hinds' Honey & Almond Cream.