The Flight Portfolio

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I put a lot of thought into how I was going to review this. I originally rated it as 2 stars, but the more I think about it, the more I have real and serious problems with this book that can't be ignored. There are two main problems with this book. The first is its misrepresentation of what kind of book it is, and the second is how it treats and portrays the legacy of people who existed, who mattered, and who have and had people who loved them.

Altogether satisfying. Mix Alan Furst and André Aciman, and you'll have a feel for the territory in which this well-plotted book falls. Varian Fry, a young American journalist, arrives in Marseille armed only with three thousand dollars and a list of writers, thinkers and artists he hopes to rescue – so long as the Nazis don’t get to them first. Passionate and thoroughgoing. . . . [ The Flight Portfolio] brings to light a truly inspiring episode in history.”— The Wall Street Journal GAZETTE: You worked with undergraduate researchers during your time at Radcliffe. Can you talk a little bit about what that process was like and how it helped shape your work?

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We Live in Cairo" tells the story of coming of age during the 2011 uprising in Egypt and the age of social media. Another significant person in the US administration who was sympathetic to the Jewish plight in Europe was the First lady of the United States, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. It does become more of a morality tale presenting the question: Are some individuals worth saving more than others? The story is woven quite tightly around this question. ORRINGER:At the beginning of the year, when I learned it was possible for fellows to work with undergraduate research assistants, I thought how fantastic that would be for the other fellows — for the scientists and historians and literary scholars. I couldn’t imagine how a novelist might work with a research fellow. But [Fellowship Program Associate Dean] Judith Vichniac … encouraged me to expand my thinking on the subject. At the very least, wouldn’t it be interesting to talk with a couple of young writers about how one goes about conducting historical research? Transatlantic is a television miniseries created by Anna Winger and Daniel Hendler for Netflix, based on the novel The Flight Portfolio (2019) by Julie Orringer. The novel explores the historic Emergency Rescue Committee that operated in Marseilles, Spain, and Portugal in 1940 after the fall of France. [1] [2] [3] The series includes or refers to well-known artists or scholars of the time who were saved by the Committee or interacted with it, including Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Marc Chagall and his wife, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, Walter Mehring, Victor Serge, Victor Brauner, and Hans Bellmer. The series closed the 2023 Festival Séries Mania in March [4] ahead of its Netflix premiere on 7 April 2023.

Flam, Charna (8 February 2023). " 'Transatlantic': Netflix Reveals First Images of Upcoming Limited Series (TV News Roundup)". Variety . Retrieved 10 February 2023. No book this year could possibly compare with The Flight Portfolio: ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Equally 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. Nor can anyone argue Orringer’s literary gifts. With echoes of Henry James, she excels in particular at the art of description: Orringer has done a great deal of research and gives us the details of Fry’s work, which is challenging, frustrating, dangerous and inspiring. She also gives us insight into Fry’s humanity and the doubts he sometimes has about many aspects of his mission and about himself. She’s an elegant writer and her descriptions of France, especially Marseilles, are beautiful and evocative. These things are obviously all to the good.

Book Summary

There are many real people interspersed among some fictional characters. All are so well portrayed that at times you don’t know who is real and who is fictional. I actually googled one character, only to find out that he was not a real person. Ha! gray-green scrub and toothedwith 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. T he sky was the washed-out blue-green of weatherbeaten copper; the few cloudsoverhead seemed wrung out and dry. Focusing on the era that informed her first novel, The Invisible Bridge (2010), Orringer opens with an encounter in which Marc Chagall, one of the most beloved of modern artists, figures. He is living in Vichy France, convinced that because it is France he will be kept safe from the Nazis—"These things happened in Germany." he says. "They won't happen here. Not to us." His interlocutor is Varian Fry, who, under the auspices of the Emergency Rescue Committee, is combing the country for a couple of hundred "artists, writers, and intellectuals," most of them Jewish or politically suspect, who similarly imagined themselves to be safe in France even as the Holocaust begins to unfold and the Gestapo arrest lists lengthen. Fry has allowed himself a month to get those 200 sure victims to safety, and in doing so, as his old friend—and more—Elliott Grant, a shadowy figure of many connections, warns him, he is proving "inconvenient to the American diplomatic mission in France." The cloak-and-dagger element of Orringer's story is effective, though it runs somewhat long. Woven into the action is the slow reconciliation between Fry and Grant, whose friendship is deep but at first tentative, finally heating. Orringer nicely captures two worlds, the fraught one of refugee rescue and the more genteel but still complicated one of intellectuals in orbit, with the likes of Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, and Victor Serge among the cast of characters. The central point of intrigue, providing a fine plot twist, is also expertly handled, evidence of an accomplished storyteller at work.

I melted when Varian included an e.e. Cummings poem to his wife - which he once gave her years before as part of his Valentines card. I loved the poem. An elegant, meditative novelistic reconstruction of critical years in the life of Varian Fry, the American classicist who is honored at Yad Vashem as "righteous among the nations" for his work rescuing victims of the Holocaust. I ended up working with two marvelous fellows, Victoria Baena and Anna Hagen, the editor and the fiction editor of The Harvard Advocate. Both are fiction writers themselves, so they already understood a lot of what went into the process of engaging history in a novel. The research they conducted was essential to my project, and continued to help for years afterward. They created a timeline of events in Varian Fry’s 13 months in Marseille, and assembled mini-biographies of the writers and artists he saved. They combed through his student file at Harvard, a rich trove that contained, among other things, his Harvard application, letters from his professors and the dean and his parents, all his grade transcripts, and a record of every place he lived in Cambridge. Anna and Victoria spent a lot of time capturing important facts, transcribing letters, and cataloguing documents online so they would be available to me even when I left Harvard. An elegant, meditative novelistic reconstruction of critical years in the life of Varian Fry… The central point of intrigue, providing a fine plot twist, is also expertly handled, evidence of an accomplished storyteller at work. Altogether satisfying. Mix Alan Furst and André Aciman, and you’ll have a feel for the territory in which this well-plotted book falls.”

Our daughter says the same,” Bella said. “She’s been saying it for months. But you understand, Monsieur Fry—my husband’s reputa­tion will protect him. Vichy wouldn’t dare touch us.” From award-winning author Julie Orringer: a gripping, emotionally powerful narrative that, like her first novel, The Invisible Bridge, brilliantly juxtaposes the sweep of history with the fate of the individual. In 1940, Varian Fry, American scholar and historian, arrives in Marseilles from New York facing an impossible task: pry a handful of gifted refugees out of Vichy France and get them to safety. These unfortunates, mostly stateless Jews, belong to the intellectual and artistic cream of Europe—Marc Chagall, André Breton, and Walter Benjamin, for starters. But the collaborationist Vichy regime would just as soon deliver them to their German overlords, and American officialdom, patently anti-Semitic, wants no part of saving anyone.