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Persecution against Jews came early into conductor Ami Porat’s childhood in Romania. “There were daily anti-Semitic attacks, even from little kids who obviously repeated what they heard from
their parents,” Porat said in a recent phone interview. “I remember a 4-year-old boy who lived in our building, who used to throw rocks at us daily when we came home from school, ‘You dirty
Jews, get out of my country.’ ” “And I remember the insults that even the teachers inflicted on us. How would you like to be called (in class), ‘the Jew Ami Porat’? “We had no other choice
but to get straight A’s. That they couldn’t take away.” Porat, the son of survivors of the Holocaust, grew up in Cluj, the capital of Transylvania. His mother had been in Auschwitz and his
father had been taken to the Ukraine. “They found each other after the war,” Porat said. He recalled the mood of his hometown: “There was a great mentality of siege because of the bleak
economy and widespread anti-Semitism. We were forced to expand and beautify our inner world. We had very few avenues of expression left.” Classical music was one of the open avenues of
expression, but even so, Porat recalled, the authorities “put incredible obstacles in our way.” “I started on the piano, when I was about 9 or 10. I wanted to play a string instrument. I was
taken to a concert, fell in love and wanted to play the cello. But they would not let me play the cello. There were two kids in my class who already played cello. It was too late for that.
The only instrument I could learn was the double-bass. I didn’t choose it at all.” Politics soon entered Porat’s life, too. His father was an avid fisherman whose hobby was to make
artificial lures and flies. Word spread, and friends and neighbors would come by to get the gear. “Many insisted upon paying him something--pennies, no way it was proper compensation,” Porat
said, though it provided enough money to buy a modest piano, which was later confiscated by the police. “When we applied to emigrate, my father was called up to the offices of the
Securitate. They showed him a list of every single person who had ever given him money for his fishing flies. They said this was illegal, a crime against the state. “They had two choices,
they said: They could put him away for life; or he could emigrate, but he would have to do some industrial spying for them. They wanted some pictures of (military) installations in Israel.
“They gave him the name of a contact and a telephone number in an embassy. . . . He, of course, accepted on the spot. One chooses freedom over life in prison.” The Porats, like the
Schwartzes and others, had to buy their way out of the country, despite the “agreement” with the authorities. “The government made you pay--$10,000 per person--for the privilege, for the
right to renounce Romanian citizenship,” he said. “Our house was confiscated. We were allowed to leave with about 50 pounds of personal belongings each. When we got to the border, I remember
throwing cash out the train, Romanian currency because we weren’t allowed to be caught with it.” The family arrived in Israel on May 1, 1961. Porat was 14 1/2. The next month, his father
tried to call his spy contact at a Western embassy as prearranged. “By tremendous coincidence, there had been a natural gas explosion in the embassy,” Porat said. “The contact vanished, and
my father was free.” Why did his father even try to keep his end of the bargain? “There were lots of family members still left in Romania,” Porat said. “There was a claim against all the
land . . . also, they told my father (that) they had ‘very long arms.’ “It’s very hard to describe the feeling of living in a police state for 20 years,” he added. “Believe me, everybody was
afraid. There were informants of the Securitate everywhere. We lived in a U-shaped building, with maybe 30 to 40 families. Every one of the buildings had at least one or two informants.”
Upon arrival, Porat went to a kibbutz called Givat-Haim (the Hill of Life). His parents remained in Tel Aviv. The kibbutz members heard him improvising at a piano one night and decided to
send him back to his family so he could pursue music. “Slowly, slowly my chains fell off,” he said. “My mother says my posture improved. I was no longer standing beaten down. I was standing
tall and proud.” He joined the National Youth Orchestra in 1963 and toured with it to North America and Canada a year later. He went on to attend a music academy in Tel Aviv, was drafted
into the Israeli army and in 1969, won a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music in New York. Since 1975, he has lived in Orange County. He formed the Mozart Camerata in 1980 as a
private organization; in 1985 it was reorganized and began to give public concerts. Like his compatriot Sergiu Schwartz, Porat would like to return to Romania now that the move toward
democracy has begun. “I have a desire to go back and see the place I was born,” he said. “Also I want to see the place where I got my first music lessons. I want to see the cathedral in the
center square, where I used to lean out the window to see the time . . . and also I want to see where I caught my first fish with my father.” MORE TO READ