Sundays in September

FIVE STAR READ!!!

I AGREE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT with this review:
By Na’amit Sturm Nagel – July 1, 2019

The Flight Port­fo­lio reminds read­ers that despite the pro­fu­sion of Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture, poet­ry and film, there are still sto­ries from the mar­gins of World War II that need to be told. Julie Orringer’s nov­el tells the tale of Var­i­an Fry, a jour­nal­ist and edi­tor, who went to Mar­seilles, France, in 1941 as part of an orga­ni­za­tion called the Emer­gency Res­cue Com­mit­tee (ERC). His mis­sion was find­ing the endan­gered intel­lec­tu­al and artis­tic lights of the world and smug­gling them out of Europe to safe­ty. Orringer del­i­cate­ly brings the true his­to­ry of Fry and his orga­ni­za­tion to life, while also pep­per­ing the nar­ra­tive with fic­tion­al­ized char­ac­ters to add dimen­sions and lay­ers to some of the moral issues around the work of the ERC.

The book pro­vides the excite­ment of watch­ing Fry save the likes of Marc Cha­gall, Han­nah Arendt and Andre Bre­ton, among many oth­ers, but also forces the read­er to think about the eth­i­cal com­plex­i­ties of decid­ing whose life is worth sav­ing. See­ing the nooks and cran­nies of the streets, cafes and hotels of Mar­seilles in 1941, and meet­ing the lumi­nar­ies of the lit­er­ary and art world are undoubt­ed­ly high­lights of this nov­el. Going to Chagall’s vil­la pre-war, for exam­ple, watch­ing how he and his wife inter­act­ed and step­ping into his stu­dio, gives read­ers a win­dow into the past and some of the most impor­tant peo­ple who shaped mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion. But these moments of light­ness are then bal­anced by the seri­ous prob­lem with the ERC’s whole under­tak­ing. As one char­ac­ter notes, ​“I know that what we’ve been doing is wrong. It doesn’t feel human­i­tar­i­an. It feels the oppo­site. Inhumane.”

Much of the book is about hold­ing on to human­i­ty in the face of the scape­goat­ing, racism and anti­semitism. How do you keep the parts of your iden­ti­ty that you want to love, in a soci­ety so hate­ful? Orringer ques­tions build­ing iden­ti­ty in rela­tion to race and sex­u­al­i­ty that, sad­ly, still feel rel­e­vant. A cen­tral char­ac­ter strug­gles with hav­ing a black father and spends most of his life pass­ing as white. Iron­i­cal­ly, the brav­ery of those fight­ing anti­semitism and try­ing to escape is what makes the char­ac­ter want to own their iden­ti­ty. This book is not just about flee­ing from the Nazis, but also from your true self, and how peo­ple in any time in his­to­ry can run away from their iden­ti­ties in pur­suance of a per­son­hood that feels more in-line with the mainstream.

One of the nicer sur­pris­es of the book is the beau­ti­ful rela­tion­ship between two gay men. While the read­er is held by the sus­pense of which char­ac­ters will sur­vive the war and escape Europe and which will not, they are even more cap­ti­vat­ed by whether this almost impos­si­ble rela­tion­ship blos­som­ing in the midst of con­cen­tra­tion camps and air raids will sur­vive, as well. The char­ac­ters are robust and well-drawn, which allow the read­er to care about and hope for their hap­pi­ness. The invest­ment in her char­ac­ters as well as the rich detailed world Orringer paints, makes this excep­tion­al­ly writ­ten nov­el dif­fi­cult to put down.

MARSEILLE, 1940. Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated journalist and editor, arrives in France. Recognizing the darkness descending over Europe, he and a group of like-minded New Yorkers formed the Emergency Rescue Committee, helping artists and writers escape from the Nazis and immigrate to the United States.

Amid the chaos of World War II, and in defiance of restrictive U.S. immigration policies, Fry must procure false passports, secure visas, seek out escape routes through the Pyrenees and by sea, and make impossible decisions about who should be saved, all while under profound pressure—and in a state of irrevocable personal change.

In this dazzling work of historical fiction—one that illuminates previously unexplored elements of Fry’s story, and has, since its publication, brought us new insight into his life.

I adored this read and it will likely stay with me forever. One of the heroines Mary Jayne Gold is buried here in my town and I have loved researching her, and the research will be ongoing for quite a long time.