"Music transcends war trauma in this extraordinary novel that opens in 1938 Vienna when 19-year-old Jewish cellist Otto Shalmik is arrested with his father and interred at Dachau concentration camp. To remain sane, Otto approaches every task - from shoveling sand to cleaning the latrine -- as rhythmic in his imagination. One day the Nazi Adjutant, Dieter Birchendorf, takes Otto to his home where he instructs him to play a coveted Stradivarius cello stolen from a Jewish family. Birchendorf's pregnant wife Katja is a musician who is suffering idiopathic deafness, but he believes she will feel the vibrations as Otto plays. By 1943, Otto learns that his mother, sister and five-year-old niece have been imprisoned at Terez