REYKJAVIK, Iceland (JTA) — This city in the autumn of 1935 was a small fishing port of corrugated-iron houses battered by high winds, cod trawlers idling in the harbor, and geothermal steam curling up from hot springs that would one day heat the whole city. Fewer than 30,000 people lived there. There was no concert hall, no real orchestra, and no conservatory worth the name.

Onto this isolated island, in late 1935, stepped a 22-year-old pianist from Berlin named Robert Abraham. He carried almost nothing with him and hoped no one would ask too many questions about why he had left Germany.

He wasn’t the only one. Three years later, a Viennese conductor named Victor Urbancic disembarked with his Jewish wife, Melitta, after years of trying and failing to find a safe harbor elsewhere in Europe. And somewhere in between came Heinz Edelstein, a cellist and teacher from the German town of Freiburg, who arrived with his wife and two sons.

None of them had chosen Iceland. For a classically trained European musician fleeing the Nazis, an island near the Arctic Circle with no symphony orchestra and a government hostile to Jewish immigration was about as far from a dream destination as it got. Yet Urbancic, Abraham, and Edelstein went on to build the institutions that still define Icelandic classical music today.

Iceland is a nation that has always known how to keep its stories alive, from the medieval sagas to the living oral traditions that shaped its literature and language. But its more recent history of Jewish exile has gone largely untold for nearly a century until now — as scholars have worked both to recover the music that Nazi persecution scattered across the globe and reconstruct an Icelandic musical history that offers a painful reminder of the country’s Holocaust history.

The musicians’ story is the subject of a newly translated book, “Music at World’s End: Three Refugee Musicians from Nazi Germany and Their Contribution to Iceland’s Music Life,” by Icelandic musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson. It was published in English this year by SUNY Press following the Icelandic edition in 2024.

The book reconstructs the three refugees’ individual pathways to Iceland. Urbancic was born in Vienna in 1903 and trained as a pianist, composer, and conductor at the Vienna Conservatory, working his way through theaters in Mainz and Graz. He was raised Catholic, but his wife, Melitta, came from a Jewish family, and under the Nazis, that was enough to end his career. After doors closed on him in Switzerland and the United States, an old classmate helped him find a foothold in Iceland in 1938.

Abraham’s path was more solitary. Born in Berlin in 1912, the son of musicologist Otto Abraham, he trained at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik before fleeing Germany in 1934, at age 22. Denmark turned him down. In late 1935, he sailed for Iceland alone and was advised to settle first in the fishing town of Akureyri, in the north.

Edelstein’s journey looked different from the start, a father bringing his family into exile rather than a young man traveling light.

“Today, there are as many as 100 descendants of these three men living in Iceland,” Ingólfsson said in an interview.

Their arrival was never guaranteed. At least four other Jewish musicians, including composer Viktor Ullmann, who would later die in Auschwitz, applied for Icelandic work permits around the same time and were turned away under a government that had largely closed the door to Jewish immigration. At the time, Icelandic immigration policies were very restrictive, similar to Denmark’s policies before and during the war. Iceland was a poor country with economic hardship, and........

© The Times of Israel