The man, she discovered, was Joseph Feingold, who had made his donation after hearing a similar segment on WQXR. A retired architect who was born in Warsaw, he moved to the United States in 1948 after spending six and a half years in a labor camp in Siberia. He was later reunited with his father and one of his brothers; his mother and his youngest brother were both killed at Treblinka. Joseph bought the violin in a displaced-person’s camp, in exchange for a carton of American cigarettes, while he was waiting to be moved to America. He said that in that moment, after years of extreme hardship, as he walked around the streets of the camp, playing the violin, “I finally lived as normally as could be.”

Cooperman’s short documentary “Joe’s Violin,” which premièred at the Tribeca Film Festival, recounts Feingold’s story and also follows his instrument into the hands of a twelve-year-old girl named Brianna, the daughter of Dominican immigrants, who goes to school in the Bronx, in the poorest congressional district in the U.S. The film examines how a beloved object can come to carry meaning, memory, and love by showing how this particular violin brings together two people who are from very different walks of life but who find a similar comfort and “light,” as Brianna puts in, in music.

“I really don’t identify this film as either a Holocaust film or a film about a city kid in the pure sense of those genres,” Cooperman said. Instead, the power of “Joe’s Violin” comes from the convergence of those two stories. The first meeting between Feingold and Brianna is a little tense, a little awkward, but both the old man, whose hands can no longer play the violin, and the adolescent girl, who wears flowers in her hair, seem to be brimming with a bittersweet kind of joy that they can’t quite express.