(2 of 2)
The Russian reception and the souvenirs in which he invested his earnings made the trip a high point in Heifetz's career. He had bought a rare 17th Century tapestry and twelve richly-bound volumes on numismatics which had belonged to Alexander III. And his Uncle Naum had met him with the little violin en cased in the shabby home-made box on which his mother had sewn a Russian H. The bow and bridge were gone but two strings remained, along with the little tape handle by which it used to hang on the wall. Heifetz's father, a violinist in the orchestra at Vilna, bought the instrument when his young son showed enough musical sense to tug rebelliously at his coattails when he sounded a wrong note. The little fiddle had finished its service by the time Heifetz was 9 and the youngest pupil of the late great Leopold Auer at the Imperial Conservatory. Another great Russian violinist played in Russia last week, for the first time in 23 years. Like Heifetz he was an Auer pupil. Like Heifetz he was born of poor Jewish parents. But Efrem Zimbalist's tour will take him beyond the two big Russian cities. Among other places he will go to Rostov-on-Don, the Cossack town where he was born. There his father used to conduct the local orchestra and at 9, because the players demanded it, young Efrem became first violinist. To leave Rostov for St. Petersburg, Zimbalist's parents had to bribe the town of ficials. The boy and his mother arrived in the capital late at night when lodgings were closed, walked the streets until morning to keep from freezing. In 1914 Zimbalist married Soprano Alma Gluck, then in her heyday at the Metropolitan Opera House. Mrs. Zimbalist, in Moscow for the recent May Day celebration, became so excited that she jumped down from the grandstand, danced in the Red Square with the workers. Until he went to St. Paul's School to prepare for Yale, young Efrem Zimbalist Jr. took violin lessons from Jascha Heifetz's father, who still follows the old Russian custom of eating his soup at the end of his dinner.