After all the stirring words, noble sentiment and beautiful music at my uncle Yehudi Menuhin's memorial in Westminster Abbey, my companion and I emerged from the ancient cathedral into a din of ringing bells.

We were part of a procession coming out the Great West Door, not far behind Prince Charles, former Prime Ministers Thatcher and Heath, and diplomats, religious figures and royalty from all over the world. The photographers' flashes were appropriate accompaniment to the strangely harmonious ancient-sounding, mind-altering cacophony of the bells. The dignitaries were getting into their Bentleys and Daimlers to be whisked away, but we walked on past the police barricades and out into the street looking for a taxi.

My companion was London violinist Gillian Cohen.

"They haven't done anything like this since Princess Diana," she said with awe about the memorial for my fiddler uncle, easily the 20th century's greatest child prodigy whose first recordings dated back to 1928. A day later The Times confirmed Gillian's words by describing the memorial as "the most glittering the Abbey has seen in years..."

Yehudi had died at 82 in March, but his memorial wasn't held until June.

We sat perhaps 15 feet away from Prince Charles, who had walked toward the foot of the Sacrarium with a bemused even humorous look on his very familiar face. His expression was not inappropriate -- Yehudi had asked that those who survive him not mourn but celebrate what's best in the human condition.

Because Gillian is Jewish she had expected to feel quite uncomfortable in the cathedral whose builders hundreds of years ago had killed Jews because they were thought to worship Satan.

She has lived all her life around artists and musicians in liberal Hampstead. She used to bump into Jacquelyn Du Pre when she walked to and from school. Six months earlier when we had discussed the movie "Hilary and Jackie," Gillian had recalled the cellist fondly. Gillian's brother, Robert Cohen, an internationally celebrated cellist, had the same teacher as Du Pre. The two were the teacher's star pupils.

We talked about my home town of Los Angeles, to which she had never been. But she might visit L.A. soon and visit one of her good friends, a colleague violinist, who married Esa Pekka Salonen, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

So Gillian knew only peripherally about royalty and memorials at Westminster Abbey. She was surprised that there were few visible crucifixes.

Church of England clergy officiated, to be sure, but a representative of the Dalai Lama, Prince Sadruddin Aga Kahn who quoted the Koran and a rabbi who said Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, were also among the speakers. My two cousins, Yehudi's sons Gerard and Krov, had read from a prayer Yehudi had written for himself at 80.

Gillian and I agreed, however, that the most impressive speech had been a short and simple one by Desmond Tutu, formerly Archbishop of Cape Town, who came to deliver a message from Nelson Mandela.

Before Tutu read Mandela's message, he talked how he had found lifelong inspiration as a teenager hearing Yehudi play in the shanty towns where he grew up.

George Steiner, a great and learned philosophy professor and master of 20 languages had also gone on at some length about Yehudi, but there was something special about the way Tutu described his memories of first hearing Yehudi. They sounded so real, so vivid, as if he were telling a few friends about some important childhood memories.

All this ecumenical outpouring for the son of a Hebrew School teacher from San Francisco who during the Six-Day War between Israel and her Arab enemies had wanted to lead a delegation of 10 souls to stop the conflict by standing on the battle field between the opposing armies, served to sharpen my memories about the last time I saw him.

In "Fat Man on the Left," my newest book where I explored the California roots of my Jewish family saga, I told about the last time I saw Yehudi, which was two years ago. He rented a dining room at the Huntington Hotel on San Francisco's Nob Hill to hold a family reunion. There had been some hard feelings between Yehudi and me, so we hugged each other tentatively and hardly talked after that. He kept glancing at me as if to say let's talk, but I just couldn't. Considering that in the past I had many long conversation with my famous uncle, this proved to be a fateful decision on my part.

l to r: Yehudi Menuhin, pianist Ronan Magill, and Menuhin's sister Yaltah

It was a good reunion. I learned from one person how my mother Yaltah used to put her baby basket under the Mason & Hamlin piano when she practiced -- and now I know how I got my love of music so early.

But while it had some pleasant moments, that reunion was probably no more successful in reuniting the family from its various hurts and wounds than his efforts to stop the Six Day War would have been.

This time, after the memorial in Westminster Abbey, a successful family reunion was staged by the Australian side of the family -- a gathering of the clan, all of whom had been in one way or the other mightily affected by being related to this incredible man.

My family moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles early on, but I never stopped struggling with the effects of being related to Yehudi. My first book, which I wrote in the '70s with Yehudi's very reluctant help, traced the family from Russia to Jerusalem to California. As far back as the early '50s, Yehudi used to come to Los Angeles always bringing something new to our lives. On one occasion he introduced us to raw fish. He cut some tuna up for us and we ate it. He also introduced Yoga to the west when Life Magazine ran a picture of him in the Lotus position, and for a while my mother was taking me to see Indra Devi, his yoga teacher who lived in the Hollywood Hills.

Lionel Rolfe with his mother Yaltah. ( Photo: Sasha Rosen)

Of course later he made his enormously popular "West Meets East" recordings with his old friend from the 50s, sitarist Ravi Shankar.

And later yet, whenever he came to Los Angeles, we would meet at various hotels and talk at length. At one of these meetings, he told me I was the most creative and intelligent of the eight Menuhin grandchildren. And I don't think Yehudi was given to base flattery.

He told me I was the only one who could carry on the grand tradition of our mystical, cabalistic rebbe-ancestors.

Despite the religious aura of the Westminster Abbey memorial, it would not be accurate to say Yehudi was religious. Making music was his way of worshipping and he had done so in abbeys as well as concentration camps. Once I carried his violin case across the campus of the University of Southern California on some occasion or another. I was carrying a Guarnerius and a "Strad" as well as a third instrument. He had an impish side. He liked to announce he was playing on one instrument, and actually play on the other. He said no one ever complained or seemed to notice.

The most unnerving of our meetings was at a dinner at a hotel in Pasadena whose name I forget where he warned me the world was going to become an uglier place and being a social activist was going to become an increasingly risky proposition.

Although Yehudi, my aunt Hephzibah and mom Yaltah came out of the west in the early part of this century, it probably was fitting that Yehudi was memorialized in this, the last year of the century and millennium, at Westminster Abbey.

* Lionel Rolfe is the author of Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground, in which he writes about Yehudi. He is a well-known Los Angeles journalist who has also written a book entitled, In Search of Literary L.A. and most recently, Death and Redemption in London and L.A., published by Dead End Streets, a premier online electronic book publisher. The latter is a powerful narrative that will especially appeal to anyone who follows classical music and in particular has been curious about the career of Lord Yehudi Menuhin.
© 1999-2000 Lionel Rolfe. All rights reserved.