The Flight Portfolio

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Varian is married to Eileen and has been passing for straight, yet he doesn’t fit the stereotype of a homosexual hiding behind marriage to a woman. Rescue Committee—by putting together a fundraising album of original lithographs from the artists the committee had rescued. Fry is the first person to be recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” for his service protecting the Jews during the Holocaust, one of the highest humanitarian honors ever created. The paper was an influential voice of moderation amid anti-Reconstruction demagoguery and widespread lynching, and the murder trial—of a man infatuated by the Dawson family’s Swiss nanny—was national news. This moral question is not unique, and today, as we battle Covid-19, many hospitals have had to choose who gets the ventilator, a younger person or an older person, a black person or a white person.

In 1940, when Varian is 32, he travels to Marseille to coordinate the ERC’s operations on the ground. Similarly, I wish that this novel included a map to situate not only the numerous “real” French cities and towns where so much of the narrative takes place—and perhaps one map devoted entirely to Marseille and its environs—but also the essential and oft-mentioned Spanish, Portuguese, and North African locales. This brings me to the second problem: The treatment of the real people who actually existed and accomplished things. This is an exquisitely written book about Varian Fry and his efforts during the Nazi occupation of France to get Jewish artists safely out of France.The series closed the 2023 Festival Séries Mania in March [4] ahead of its Netflix premiere on 7 April 2023. Interspersed with diary excerpts and news clips, this novel re-creates events leading up to the murder, in 1889, of the author’s great-grandfather Frank Dawson, the editor of the Charleston, South Carolina, News and Courier. You wait to see if a humanitarian really will get convicted for putting food and water in the desert for migrants. The community of talented and terrified refugees with whom he surrounds himself feels enticingly real. Drawing mostly on the American experiment, Rosenfeld analyzes political spin, the idealization of journalistic objectivity, and the echo chambers within which news is either believed or derided.

Varian Fry has good intentions and in the novel, when someone from the French government accused him of assisting Jews, anti-Nazis, degenerate Negroid artists and sexual inverts, Fry says, “If I don’t help them, no one will. At one point in the book Varian is about to get caught and all of the Jews he is harboring are about to be sent to concentration camps.Orringer jumps into this notion with both feet, inventing a character named Grant, who comes back into Fry’s life in France and rekindles a relationship that leads to a thriller-ish plot.

The pacing is good, and there is enough humor to grant relief from the overall tension in the story. There are a host of intriguing characters, and while it's an interesting authorial choice to create a fictional character in a novel about a real person, I had a hard time caring about the long history and new nature of the love relationship between Varian Fry and Elliot Grant. Renewing their affair shows Varian that he empathizes with the refugees, in part, because he too must live underground, as a bisexual man. I usually have no trouble suspending my disbelief, but in the midst of all Fry was trying to do, would his absorption with Grant have had the same weight as his humanitarian efforts?Orringer had no obligation to deliver a morality tale, but as her novel so clearly strives to be one — at least in part — one wishes that she had stayed more interested in the nauseatingly confusing purgatory through which Fry, in life, day by day had to wade.

As Orringer explains in the author’s note: “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. Who should get tested first, health care workers, elderly people, residents of lower income neighborhoods? BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. I often avoid historical fiction because I get uncomfortable when people ascribe words, motives, and actions to people who were real.The seven-part series is created by Winger and Daniel Hendler, and produced by Winger and Camille McCurry. p>Sign up to the Dialogue Books newsletter for news of upcoming publications, competitions and updates from our authors. Fry, an American journalist who from 1940 to 1941 helped between 1,000 and 4,000 refugees escape Europe, was in 1994 named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. The actual Varian Fry had a very interesting life leading up to the year 1940, but you wouldn't know about it from the book - according to the book he graduated Harvard, then sailed around the world crying because Grant dumped him, kept crying that Grant dumped him, then somehow ended up smuggling Jews?