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. If you too need to be zapped back to life by a really good book, then this big ass, big-hearted novel is for you.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. There are moments of lightness (a Surrealist party conducted in the nude, for starters), and of course, the inevitable darkness. Like 2017 Book of the Year winner The Heart’s Invisible Furies, this novel follows closely the life of a likable man struggling with his identity in an unforgiving world. The topics in this book are massive-forbidden love, prejudice, the price of a life-but Varian’s story never feels overbearing instead, it just feels real. But when a former flame seeks Varian out to save the life of a boy he knows, Varian finds himself torn between duty and love for the man he never thought he’d see again.
From securing false passports, to bribing police officers, to hustling refugees across the border, Varian and his team risk their own lives daily to save the lives-and works-of now-legendary figures. The Flight Portfolio is a fictionalized account of the life of Varian Fry, an American who saves renowned Jewish artists from the Holocaust by smuggling them out of occupied France. So when I tell you this book reignited my reading life and restored my fried brain, it’s not hyperbole. 3) I picked it up during a massive reading slump that left me no choice but to binge-watch Game of Thrones. 2) It’s about World War II, and, having read more World War II novels than I can count, I’ve grown tired of tropes that often repeat in these stories. Before I tell you why I *loved* this book, let me tell you why I thought I wouldn’t: 1) It’s over 500 pages, which often makes me wish a book had been more harshly edited.
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