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The Flight Portfolio (2019)

door Julie Orringer, Julie Orringer, Julie Orringer

LedenBesprekingenPopulariteitGemiddelde beoordelingAanhalingen
379766,789 (3.49)21
"The long-awaited new work from the best-selling author of The Invisible Bridge takes us back to occupied Europe in this gripping historical novel based on the true story of Varian Fry's extraordinary attempt to save the work, and the lives, of Jewish artists fleeing the Holocaust In 1940, Varian Fry--a Harvard educated American journalist--traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to rescue within a few weeks. Instead, he ended up staying in France for thirteen months, working under the veil of a legitimate relief organization to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and set up an underground railroad that led over the Pyrenees, into Spain, and finally to Lisbon, where the refugees embarked for safer ports. Among his many clients were Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall. The Flight Portfolio opens at the Chagalls' ancient stone house in Gordes, France, as the novel's hero desperately tries to persuade them of the barbarism and tragedy descending on Europe. Masterfully crafted, exquisitely written, impossible to put down, this is historical fiction of the very first order, and resounding confirmation of Orringer's gifts as a novelist"--… (meer)
  1. 00
    Costalegre door Courtney Maum (doryfish)
    doryfish: Both touch upon the flight of surrealists from Europe prior to World War II.
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1-5 van 7 worden getoond (volgende | toon alle)
Wanted to like it because I was fascinated by the story of Jews in Hungary she told in The Invisible Bridge, and by the characters she conjured to tell the story. There was too much of the personal story of Varian Fry (fictitious) and that did not portray him as someone who could have gotten at least 2,000 refugees out of France which the real Varian Fry did. ( )
  CharleySweet | Jul 2, 2023 |
In 1940, Varian Fry, literary scholar and foreign policy historian, arrives in Marseille facing an impossible job: pry a handful of stateless, mostly Jewish refugees out of Vichy France and get them to safety. They belong to the intellectual and artistic cream of Europe, which poses a difficult question, whether it’s moral to save Marc Chagall or André Breton while letting nobodies die.

In any event, Vichy won’t grant exit visas; the police have informers everywhere; the American consul in Marseilles, Hugh Fullerton, won’t help; and the U.S. State Department, patently anti-Semitic, sends threatening cables to Varian.

Varian Fry has long been a hero of mine; you’ll know why if you see the small exhibit about him at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington. So I was very much looking forward to reading The Flight Portfolio, whose first hundred pages will take your breath away. You get the full flavor of Marseille, the perilous work of escape, the constant setbacks, arrests, and exposures, and how absolutely out of touch Varian’s Stateside supervisors are about the danger, the stakes, the costs, the methods required.

On the bright side, helpful people just show up at the committee office in Marseille, like Miriam Davenport and Mary Jayne Gold, whose skill, coolness under fire, judgment, and private funds keep the effort afloat. Orringer does a terrific job with these secondary characters (these two women, incidentally, are real historical figures) and how Varian learns from them to handle a job no one could have prepared him for. Together, their inventions are ingenious, their subterfuge and play-acting essential, their courage and humanity the stuff of legend.

Yet despite all that, The Flight Portfolio disappoints me. Partly that comes from the repetitive rescue process, similar to a revolving door. For instance, when Chagall refuses, at first, to heed Varian’s warnings that he’s in danger, there’s Walter Benjamin, the eminent philosopher, to consider; and after him, Walter Mehring, the poet and satirist of the Nazi regime.

Each person’s case differs, and the traps and obstacles vary too. Yet, when one refugee makes it through the door (or not), another steps up. Despite the myriad complications and tension that results, it never spirals upward. That’s the nature of the story.

Perhaps to add context — personal and political — Orringer invents Elliott Grant, a former lover from Varian’s Harvard days, and ties him to the escape narrative. (Varian is bisexual; his wife, Eileen, remains an off-stage presence.) Grant doesn’t appeal to me; he seems like a golden boy too conscious of his aura, and a snob to boot.

He’s there to teach Varian the symbolic link between saving hunted refugees and being hunted oneself as a homosexual, but that doesn’t click into place until the last hundred pages. During the huge chunk in the middle, Grant’s presence almost always leads me to ask why I’m reading about him when the clock is running out on the great intellectuals of Europe. The revolving door gains no tension, and in fact slows down.

Orringer wishes to argue that Varian’s devotion to the cause results partly from his sexual identification. Fair enough; but if so, must this home truth elude him for so long? I’m particularly puzzled because he readily grasps a different moral parallel, regarding a shameful incident from his past, which Orringer introduces as though it’s crucial, yet makes little use of it.

I could have read more about that. I’d have also liked to hear more about Miriam Davenport, Mary Jayne Gold, and Vice-Consul Harry Bingham, who disobeys his boss to aid Varian, and about the others who do much of the clandestine work.

It’s a daunting task, biographical fiction — what do you include, omit, embellish, or invent? Orringer pours her heart out for The Flight Portfolio, and I admire her imagination and gift for putting it on the page. All the same, for me, this novel remains earthbound. ( )
  Novelhistorian | Jan 29, 2023 |
The Flight Portfolio - Orringer
Audio performance by Ballerini
5 stars

"An artist cannot bear witness if he's dead.”

This book begins with a meeting between Marc Chagall and Varian Fry. Fry is attempting, without success, to convince Chagall that he is in danger, that he must find a way out of France before Vichy arrests him. Before he can be handed over to the Nazis to an eventual death in a concentration camp. Even though I already knew the historical fact that Chagall and his wife do leave France safely, I could still feel the fear and tension that they would not.

Flight Portfolio is detailed historical fiction. Today, Chagall’s art is widely known. Varian Fry has international recognition for his part in saving the lives of Jewish artists, writers, and political dissidents. That’s the history. Recreating history, Orringer dropped other famous names into the conversation of her fictionalized characters; Jacques Lipchitz, Max Ernst. She also added one completely fictional Jewish artist, Lev Zilberman. Zilberman becomes a fractional, but morally important, part of a fictional plot that Orringer has inserted into the historical accomplishments of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee.

The content of Orringer’s fictional plot line has been criticized and is a topic of some discussion.* She gives her fictional Varian Fry a fictional lover, Elliott Grant. Historically, it is clear that Fry was bisexual, or a closeted homosexual. Orringer isn’t guilty of outing the man with her fiction. But, is it important? And, why make it the focus of a novel? It is a major focus of this novel. The desperate activity and life threatening crisis of the rescue committee run parallel to a fraught love story and Fry’s psychological angst.

Orringer discusses her decision to highlight Fry’s sexual orientation in this book. “A novelist, free to extrapolate, may draw the veil aside. In these pages, I’ve portrayed a real history - Varian Fry’s heroic lifesaving mission in France - alongside an imagined one, his relationship with the entirely fictional Elliott Grant. …….I envision Varian Fry as a brave and brilliant person whose sexuality happened to resist easy categorization. My hope is that he’ll be celebrated that way in the twenty-first century and beyond”

I am usually unhappy with authors who mess with historical facts in their novels. It so often turns a good story into something that is awkwardly contrived. That didn’t happen with this book. It is not a step by step recounting of clandestine activities providing details of each refugee escape.There’s plenty of artistic name dropping although few of the artists become major characters. Orringer depicts the intense interactions of a diverse set of highly gifted individuals. I enjoyed the surrealist dinner party as stage managed by Andre Breton. The author’s inclusion of the homosexual, biracial, Elliott Grant, among the artists and writers housed at Villa Air Bel seemed entirely natural given the unnatural set of dangerous circumstances.

This book has all the tension of a spy thriller. That is not what made it a great book. Orringer makes her characters grapple with the moral consequences of their choices. It’s no accident that Elliott Grant is passing as white, while passing as straight. The author forces her fictional Varian Fry to confront the elitist bias of his priority listing of refugees. She forces him to question his personal choices along with his political choices. She allows him to be a vulnerable, flawed human being. Even if she does mess with historical accuracy, it can’t be too far out of line. It was definitely compelling and thought provoking for this reader. I did not feel that the sexual content of this book was exploitative or prurient. I never felt that the fictional content of this book was disrespectful of Varian Fry’s heroic accomplishments.
*
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/books/review/was-varian-fry-gay-julie-orringe...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/books/review/flight-portfolio-julie-orringer.... ( )
  msjudy | Oct 1, 2019 |
Varian Fry was an American journalist who, after witnessing Nazi atrocities, formed the Emergency Rescue Committee in occupied France. Fry and his staff went to great measures to help those under threat escape, circumventing the usual French visa processes and working tirelessly to find new avenues for smuggling people to safety. In The Flight Portfolio, Julia Orringer attempts a deeply personal portrait of Fry, focused largely on his relationship with college friend Elliott Grant, who turns up in Marseille after a twelve-year separation.

I found most of this novel to be a page-turner, sometimes because I desperately wanted refugees to reach safety, and at other times because of developments between Fry and Grant. There is historic basis for Fry to have had romantic relationships with men, and extremely likely that the details would have been a closely guarded secret. The love story unfolded in the context of the Emergency Rescue Committee’s work and became the predominant focus of the novel. I would have liked more emphasis on how the ERC’s work: how they determined which people to save, and the details of their rescue missions.

Because Grant was a fictional character, Orringer eventually needed to write their relationship out of the story so Fry could resume the life that is known to history. Unfortunately, she did this by having Fry make an uncharacteristically snap decision near the end of the novel. Normally astute and savvy, he came unglued and acted in ways that were not believable. While this was a tidy way to deal with “the Grant problem,” it came at a point when Fry had lost the support of the US government and was being ousted from France. I would have preferred Orringer to focus primarily on how he dealt with that situation.

In short, while I enjoyed The Flight Portfolio, I would have preferred more balanced coverage between Fry’s personal life and his work. ( )
1 stem lauralkeet | Sep 26, 2019 |
The Flight Portfolio, by Julie Orringer. Orringer, bestselling author of The Invisible Bridge, has brought us another gripping historical novel based on the true story of Varian Fry’s extraordinary attempt to save the work, and the lives, of Jewish artists fleeing the Holocaust. Fry, working with the Jewish Rescue Board, rescued more than 2,000 European dissidents and artists including Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, and countless others. In addition to recounting his daring work, the novel delves into Fry’s inner life, giving him a back story that involves daring and elusion. Orringer also creates a fictionalize account of Fry’s homosexuality even though there is no real evidence of this beyond hunches and hints. NY Times reviewer and author, Cynthia Ozick, calls it a “sympathetic and prodigiously ambitions novel”.
  HandelmanLibraryTINR | May 14, 2019 |
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"The long-awaited new work from the best-selling author of The Invisible Bridge takes us back to occupied Europe in this gripping historical novel based on the true story of Varian Fry's extraordinary attempt to save the work, and the lives, of Jewish artists fleeing the Holocaust In 1940, Varian Fry--a Harvard educated American journalist--traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to rescue within a few weeks. Instead, he ended up staying in France for thirteen months, working under the veil of a legitimate relief organization to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and set up an underground railroad that led over the Pyrenees, into Spain, and finally to Lisbon, where the refugees embarked for safer ports. Among his many clients were Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall. The Flight Portfolio opens at the Chagalls' ancient stone house in Gordes, France, as the novel's hero desperately tries to persuade them of the barbarism and tragedy descending on Europe. Masterfully crafted, exquisitely written, impossible to put down, this is historical fiction of the very first order, and resounding confirmation of Orringer's gifts as a novelist"--

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