TABLET MAG
Ramon’s Piano
by Tal Miller and Yoav Sivan
June 20, 2016

In 1974, 20-year-old Ilan Ramon, a recent graduate of the IDF flight school who would go on to become Israel’s first astronaut, bought a Steinway piano that had once had its home in Germany during World War II. Ramon, the son of a piano teacher who survived Auschwitz, spent his entire first paycheck on it. This piano symbolized the survival of the Jewish people—a people that could make new melodies in the homeland. The piano is now at the Tel Aviv apartment of Ilan’s second son, Tal, who just released his first album, Character (Dmut in Hebrew). “The piano gave birth to this album,” he said in a recent interview in Hebrew in his Tel Aviv apartment, “which I dedicate to my father and to Assaf.” READ MORE