My friend Morris Kahn, who has died aged 89, was an independent publisher of music books. His Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides are still important documents. In 1976 he published my Music of India, with a foreword by Ravi Shankar, which is still widely accepted as a basic handbook on the subject.
He was born Moshe Kahan in Schlabokta, near Vilnius, in Lithuania, where his father owned a shoe shop and his mother was a homemaker. Jews were despised and persecuted, and when he was three, his mother persuaded his father to flee to South Africa. An uncle, his father's older brother, ran alongside the tram singing a Yiddish song of good luck and farewell. That uncle and all the other relatives who stayed on in Lithuania perished in the Holocaust.
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