Playing Dad's Song

by D. Dina Friedman

Gus Moskowitz knows that sixth graders are too old to curl up under a quilt, but that’s the only place he can hide from the school bully, his nagging older sister, and, worst of all, his father’s death. It’s been two years since Gus’s father was killed in the World Trade Center, and Gus can’t figure out how to move on. His mother thinks he needs to do something – anything – so she rents him an oboe and signs him up for lessons with her boss’s elderly father, Mr. M. As Gus’s friendship with Mr. M. develops, so does his passion for classical music, and soon he decides to compose a song of his own, a tribute to his father. But even if Gus can find a way to wrap up his father’s life in a single song, will he ever find the courage to play it?

In turns playful and poignant, Playing Dad’s Song personalizes the losses at the World Trade Center in New York City by focusing on one child’s struggle with the tragedy.

144 pages, Hardcover

First published September 5, 2006

About the author

D. Dina Friedman grew up in New York City, a place she still holds close to her heart. She met her husband forty years ago at an open poetry reading in a fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village. Three years later they moved to western Massachusetts, (where she still lives—next door to a farm with 600 cows) because it was “a compromise between Brooklyn and the Ozarks.”

Dina’s five books include two young adult novels: Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) an Association of Jewish Libraries Notable Book for Older Readers and an American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults nominee, and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar Straus Giroux) a Bank Street College of Education Best Book. Her newer work, Immigrants, (Creators Press, 2023) and Here in Sanctuary—Whirling (Querencia Press, 2024) draw heavily from her years as a social justice activist. Dina has published poetry and fiction in more than 100 literary journals and received four Pushcart Prize nominations.

To learn more about Dina, and for inspiration on living a creative life in a creatively challenged universe, visit Dina’s blog on her website and on Substack.

Reviews

[Stephanie Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very moving story.
From under his beloved blanket, Gus likes to remember how life was before September 11, 2001, the day his life became a Before and After…
Before, his father filled their time together with music and laughter.
Before, Gus wasn’t nervous being in front of people performing, with his dad and sister there.
Before, there wasn’t a gaping hole in the New York Skyline, that Gus has to see every day.
Before, his dad had always worked the night shift at the WTC. But on That Day, his dad was called in to work early.
Gus desperately wants to feel his father’s presence again. After beginning oboe lessons with an elderly, gifted teacher, who lost his father in WW2, Gus slowly starts to heal through the power of the music.

Memorable Quotes:
(Pg.16)-“In my life the way I’d like to compose it, I wouldn’t be the only person I knew who lost a parent on September 11, 2001. Not only that: if I could compose my own life, September 11 never would have happened. We’d skip that day and go right to September 12.”