I have never argued that such claims by Avrum sounded anything but crazy. They did—his claims and his stories. And he was called that—called crazy—by a lot of people who knew him, or thought they knew him. I was one of them. When I first saw him, I mean.

He was sitting on a sidewalk bench made of concrete and heavy timbers in the small village of Pine Hill, New York, in the Catskill Mountains. His eyes were closed, his head tilted back. A soft smile was on his ancient face. He was listening, Harry Burger told me, to Amelita Galli-Curci.

“Who?” I asked.

“An old opera singer,” Harry explained.

“I don’t hear anybody,” I said.

“So? Do I hear her? Does anyone hear her? Only Avrum. What can I say?”

The people who knew him, or thought they knew him, muttered smugly that Avrum was an old fool preoccupied with romantic nonsense. Who could hear a voice when there was no voice? Who? It was nothing, they declared. Nothing but Avrum Feldman’s way of getting and keeping attention, this hearing of voices. An old man’s begging to be seen. Nothing more.

But the people who scoffed at him, who ridiculed him, did not know of Avrum’s wondrous power to be where he wanted to be merely by wishing himself there. He could do that—could transport himself—as freely and jubilantly as a dreamy child. He could will himself back through memory, leaping time like a joyful, streaking star, back to a night when all that he had been and all that he was and all that he would become gathered in serene harmony, and a voice—one that was both within and without, one that entered him and surrounded him— spoke with such absolute command, Avrum could only obey it.

That night was January 28, 1918, one day past his thirty-first birthday. Because he loved the opera, his wife of eighteen months had presented him with two tickets in the least-expensive section of the balcony at the Lexington Opera House in New York City to hear Amelita Galli-Curci sing the title role of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s spirited Dinorah.

Avrum’s wife was a Polish immigrant who had Americanized her name to Marina. She disliked the music of the opera. “I would play my recordings and she would complain,” Avrum reported. “ ‘Such squealing,’ she would say, and I would tell her, ‘You do not listen. Listen, and the voice of the music will speak to you.’ But she would not listen. She did not believe in the voice of the music. If you do not believe, you cannot hear.”