Publisher's Synopsis
Fiction. Music. In HOW HIGH THE MOON a seventeen-year-old Adolf in 1950 Czechoslovakia deals with the growing totalitarian oppression. He loves jazz and Jean Simmons. Nothing he hates more than the Commies who replaced the Nazis after the war. The native sycophants turn out to be more beastly than were the fascist interlopers. Adolf plays blues and boogie-woogie on piano to wall himself off from the obnoxious hammer and sickle apparatchiks. They consider his music counter-revolutionary, undermining the principles of socialism. In 21 chapters of humorous narrative describing his daily struggles we come to understand better the meaning of Sidney Bechet saying: If you play jazz you cannot lie. Adolf is convinced that he was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. The country he set his heart on lies over the ocean where the sound of jazz first emerged. His dream to escape the hellhole he lives in remains a dream until one day, like in some fairy-tale, he boards a train which takes him beyond the Iron Curtain to freedom.
