Susan Lynn Meyer

While I was thinking about what I learned about Baltimore history from reading Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Hired Girl, I happened to come across another book that taught me more about Baltimore: Lesléa Newman’s adorable picture book, Ketzel, the Cat Who Composed, with charming, lively illustrations by Amy June Bates (Candlewick 2015).

If you have a young child who loves cats, lives in Baltimore, plays the piano, or loves true stories, you must rush out and get a copy of this book! And if you are a teacher looking for appealing non-fiction to add to your classroom library, this book is certain to be very popular.

Moshe, a composer, who has learned to listen “outside himself and listen . . . inside himself” and turn those sounds into music, hears the mew of a kitten one day while out for a walk. He adopts Ketzel and brings her home. One day, while Moshe is struggling with a piece of music, Ketzel walks across the piano keyboard—and the rest is music history!

Moshe Cotel and Ketzel

It is Baltimore history too. And, like The Hired Girl, it also intersects with the story of Jews in Baltimore. Moshe Cotel, the composer on whom the story is based, was born in Baltimore in 1943 and taught music composition at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University (my alma mater!) from 1972 to 2000. He then became a rabbi.

The Peabody Conservatory, Baltimore

And—what are the odds on this?—it turns out I get to mention my favorite George Eliot novel again in this blog post!

Cotel composed an opera titled Deronda inspired by George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda! (This novel is less well-known than Middlemarch, but I feel it deserves just as much attention. It’s about an adopted Englishman who discovers that his birth mother is Jewish.)

Hugh Dancy as Daniel Deronda in the BBC adaptation

And the ten-year-old girl who first performed Moshe Cotel’s “Piece for Piano: Four Paws,” in 1998, Shruti Kumar, a piano student at the Peabody, was then also a student at Friends School (see my post on The Hired Girl) and connected with the Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. So was I, and so were some of my siblings, years ago, when it was just beginning, under the leadership of Professor Julian Stanley, then in the Johns Hopkins Psychology Department.

Small world!