Free Out of Tune by Margaret Helfgott

increase until he left
     for London in 1966. The whole family felt the changes. As my little sister Suzie said, David’s attitude at the time was “I’m
     better than anyone.” At one point, totally out of the blue, he actually stopped talking to me altogether. Then one day, he
     wanted me to type up a poem for him, which I did willingly—I thought he had got over whatever it was he was holding against
     me. However, after I gave David back the typed-up poem, to my absolute astonishment, he promptly stopped talking to me again.
     I was flabbergasted.

7
STALIN, MAO, AND TABLE TENNIS

    T here was more to life in the Helfgott household than music. David and my father shared a keen interest in politics. They were
     both on the left of the political spectrum and believed that socialism was the way to achieve equality and justice. Sometimes
     they had heated discussions about which brand of socialism was best, Russian or Chinese.
    My father had finally become disillusioned with Russian socialism as a result of the “Doctors’ Plot” of 1953, when Stalin
     accused his Jewish doctors of trying to poison him. This was a total fabrication, intended to prepare the way for a vicious
     wave of anti-Semitic persecution across the whole Soviet Union. Stalin announced that his doctors were part of “an international
     Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization established by American intelligence.” He then had his doctors tortured in order
     to extract confessions from them.
    The official Communist Party newspaper
Pravda
described the Jewish doctors as “the pack of mad dogs from Tel Aviv,” which it characterized as “loathsome and vile in its
     thirst for blood.” After this my father finally made the break with Russia and decided that Chairman Mao’s Chinese socialism
     was far more pure and correct; David meanwhile still adhered to a belief in the Russian variety as “the true socialism.”
    Even though my father no longer sympathized with Soviet communism, he nevertheless kept an eye on developments in the communist
     world. He and David would visit the left-wing Pioneer Bookshop in Perth, and buy magazines called
Soviet Union
and
Red China
(the latter may have been called
Pictorial China
—I can’t now recall for certain).
Red China
was overflowing with propaganda. Each issue seemed to be filled with pictures of smiling, rosy-cheeked girls picking apples
     in the field, or carrying baskets bursting with agricultural produce.
    Australia had its own Communist Party, and David struck up a friendship with Katherine Susannah Pritchard, one of its founding
     members. But while he sometimes went to her house for dinner, neither he nor my father ever joined the Communist Party, nor,
     as far as I am aware, did they ever go to the Soviet Friendship Society, as they are shown doing in
Shine.
    David always yearned to visit the Soviet Union and see the situation there for himself. In 1986, by which time Mikhail Gorbachev
     was in power, he got his wish. He visited music conservatories and took in the sights in Moscow and Leningrad. He returned
     to Russia in 1993, after communism had collapsed, and gave a small recital of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” at
     Rimsky-Korsakov’s home in St. Petersburg, which is now a museum. That year he also visited what had been one of the world’s
     last bastions of hardline communism, Albania, and performed Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto at the Tirana Opera House
     accompanied by the Albanian Symphony Orchestra.
    Politics is still one of my brother’s chief interests. In particular, he closely follows events in Russia and Israel, reading
     news magazines such as
Time
and watching CNN International. When he visited me in Israel in 1988, I was very impressed by his in-depth knowledge of the
     intricacies of Israeli political life.
    Although he loved talking to my father, outside the house David was not very sociable. As a teenager, he was somewhat of a
     loner. He