The story starts back in the early 1900s when my Polish born grandmother was a child in Brooklyn. The family scraped together enough to buy her a decent German violin. My mother remembers "Nana" still playing it when she, herself, was a kid. 

The violin itch then skipped two generations.
Fast forward to 1994, Cologne.
Six year old Ben had just finished three years of typically German early music classes and needed to choose an instrument to enter 1st grade. Since he had a big time crush on his kiddy-music-teacher and since she also gave private violin lessons, choosing the violin was a no brainer for him. Lots of squeaking ensued. But as we're all experiencing, practice makes better (not perfect) and that's what happened.

By about 1990 Ben was was ready for a 4/4. I think Nana's violin was still with my mother in New York so we went on the hunt in and around Cologne. No well made, affordable Chinese instruments in sight yet. The numerous local string instrument shops were all pretty posh... their prices too. We finally found a French violin from the late 1800s from a hobby luthier who would buy old instruments in Poland and fix them up himself. Because of the odd source (and the lovely, relatively quiet, mellow sound) we thought we had found a great buy. What did we know... It certainly looked the part:

The violin did indeed serve Ben well through his school years... and then the instrument was retired to the back of a closet as so often happens.

About 2010, the French-Polish violin made its was back to Florida with me. I stayed in Florida while the instrument was soon sent as a loaner to friends in Canada for one of their talented daughters. 

Moving forward to this Spring, Ben was in Boca for a quick visit and saw Nana's violin, without a case, up on... you guessed it... a shelf at the back of yet another closet. "Oh, cool" he said, "There's stuff you can't play on a guitar, I think I'll take it back with me".
Unfortunately, no case, no shops open to buy one on Sunday and his return ticket to London that night. 

Cliff hanger, ha, ha...

And now the happy end and back to the start:

This is the gorgeous sample violin bought from Fiddlershop yesterday (you've seen the cool label inside in my first post up top):

It was one of the more reasonably priced choices from their "antique/used" page:
https://fiddlershop.com/collec.....ed-violins and now happily on its way to a really pumped Ben in London.

As for the French-Polish beauty, Felix at Fiddlershop hopes to have one of his apprentices restore it as a practice instrument. If that is possible, Michael Holstein suggested they would like to donate it to the music project in Haiti which Fiddlershop has been supporting. Nice!

Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute. 

THE END