Gray-green scrub and toothed with great molars of limestone often the ubiquitous lavender and almond gave way to low, hostile cactus, gnarled kermes oak, rusty lentisk, or wind-stunted pistachio. The grapevines and olive trees and rows of skyward-pointing cypresses p resented themselves, as expected, but often they appeared against hills f urred with ugly With echoes of Henry James, she excels in particular at the art of description: Nor can anyone argue Orringer’s literary gifts. Orringer’s novel is likely to increase awareness of the deeds that ultimately earned some additional public acknowledgments, including a traveling exhibition organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.Įqually indisputable: the prodigious and varied research that Orringer has put into this project, which is detailed in an essential “Author’s Note” at the book’s end. Posthumously, Fry became the first American whom Yad Vashem recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” for his Holocaust-era actions, but his name remains too little-known. Some 2,000 people were assisted by Fry and the Europeans and Americans with whom he worked to procure both valid and forged papers arrange travel by car, train, ship, and foot and finagle the occasional concentration-camp or jail release. For a period of time in 1940-41, with no ostensibly relevant operational experience but keenly aware of the dire nature of what was unfolding in Europe (based in part on what he’d earlier witnessed and reported from Germany), he represented a privately-organized American “Emergency Rescue Committee” on the ground in France. In September 1940, he was a 32-year-old Harvard alumnus with a wife named Eileen at home in New York and a background as a journalist and editor.

Franz Werfel (Alma Werfel having previously been known by another married name: Mrs. In addition to the Chagalls, an incomplete list of familiar refugee names includes Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, multiple members of the extended Thomas Mann family, and Mr. Across the intervening pages, the reader follows Fry’s efforts, based in the port city of Marseille and aided by a small team, to facilitate the flights of high-profile European artists and intellectuals made vulnerable by their Jewishness and/or politics. It ends with Fry returning to New York about a year later. Julie Orringer’s latest novel, The Flight Portfolio, opens in early September 1940 in southern France, with an American named Varian Fry visiting Marc and Bella Chagall in the Provençal village of Gordes.

Julie orringer the flight portfolio