Episode Details

Hold On to Your Music: A Mother's Legacy with pianist Mona Golabek will be screened for the JFilm Festival on Saturday, May 2nd at 6:30pm in McConomy Auditorium at CMU. Mona joined Jim Cunningham to chat about the documentary.

Mona will play the piano with selections from the documentary inspired by her book The Children of Willesden Lane and the Hershey Felder-directed play, The Pianist of Willesden Lane, telling her mother's story and the story of her family during WWII. The family story involves the Kindertransport, which transported 10,000 children from Nazi occupied Europe to England but asked parents to make terrible choices of who left and who stayed behind. Mona's maternal grandparents died in Auschwitz; her father was a resistance fighter in France.

Mona tells Jim Cunningham about her radio show The Romantic Hours, which aired on WQED-FM and how the documentary film she has made touches on events of today. Mona connects Korngold leaving Vienna with the Nazi presence building up before the war and Rachmaninoff's longing for his homeland, as well as other European expats who wound up in Mona's birthplace, Los Angeles. The film is a story of resilience and hope, the power of music and honoring your family legacy.

You can watch Hold on to Your Music: A Mother's Legacy as part of the JFilm Festival on Saturday, May 2nd at 6:30pm at CMU's McConomy Auditorium. For more information and tickets, visit JFilm's website.

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