Coming Soon to a Multiplex Near You?

You know that sensation when you’re reading an article in your morning newspaper and, about three grafs in, you start imagining the movie version and you can practically hear the Hollywood studios scrambling to get hold of the writer and the subject in order to lock up their life rights?
O.K., maybe we don’t all read the paper that way. But that was my experience this morning upon reading this Times feature by Daniel J. Wakin about an 18-year-old Palestinian whose dream is to be a world-class violin repairman. It has all the requisite elements for a Hollywood weeper: fettered youth, yearning to break free; an opportunity for a constantly swelling soundtrack; and of course violins. The only thing the producers need to invent is the proper love interest — perhaps, to give it some Romeo and Juliet, a young Israeli woman whose precious violin (maybe smuggled out of Germany by her late, beloved grandfather) was damaged in a Hamas rocket attack?