Memento Park

Matt Santos grew up in the home of his parents, one generation removed from the horrors of the Holocaust, displaying a Christmas tree and not celebrating Jewish holidays or attending synagogue.  He can recall the three times he entered a synagogue as a child with his grandfather.  Now, as an adult working as an actor and living with his fiancee, Tracy he is as far removed from his Jewish heritage as he can get.  Then a phone call changes everything.  A lawyer is offering to handle a case of Holocaust art restitution for a painting by Ervin Kalman that last hung in his grandparents apartment in Budapest, in 1944.

On the surface this novel, Memento Park, written by Mark Sarvas, seems to be about the process of recovering Budapest Street Scene, the painting that was lost by the Santos family when his grandfather escaped to America and his grandmother was killed in a concentration camp.  But underneath there are multiple interactions that are all ripe for discussion and analysis.  So many different points that different readers will relate to and connect to.

Matt decides to work with Rachel, the Los Angeles attorney and follow the path of the painting back to Budapest and his relatives to discover if it really belongs to his family.  During this journey he tries to come to terms with the charged relationship he has with his father.   He says his father never taught him anything.  Matt and his father have, he says, a relationship of fear and and lies,  "This, I suppose, is my father's legacy, the ease of the lie the comfort of the half-truth.  The actor born in fear, borne by fear."

So many times in this book, Matt describes interactions as scenes, and watches himself from off stage acting a part.  He struggles with emotion and actually showing himself to others.  He remains hidden, the actor performing.  This, he also says, was because of his father,  "He also never taught me the more essential things - right and wrong, how to read a stranger, how to love.  That this omission went unnoticed by me for so long is, in itself, telling."  He comes back to this struggle with his father over and over again.  It informs all of his interactions with other people.  How he gets along with Tracy and Rachel, the lawyer.

He replays the story in remembrances, that he is supposedly telling to a night guard in the art auction house where Budapest Street Scene will go up for bidding in the morning.  He talks about growing up with his father and working with him at toy trade shows.  His father is a collector of toy cars.  Now he is going with his father to another toy show, Matt recounts,   "Once again, I knew the part I was intended to play, had so internalized this character, this first great role, that I knew precisely how to step in and play him.  My father understood, as good actors do.  He'd picked up on my rhythms and responded in kind and , all at once, we found ourselves returned to the roles that made us famous, these earliest portrayals of ourselves."  Such wonderful prose.

Tracy, the fiancee, a model, is struggling with her own demons.  She is working with a lawyer, to help a young man on death row in a Texas jail.  Tracy has been, interceding for nearly a year, helping to underwrite his legal team and coordinating an 'awareness campaign' for clemency.  Each morning Matt still wakes up surprised to see that she is his.  Tracy, he describes her, "..my flaxen goddess... I pursued her hard, proposed early, knowing how rare openings for men like me are with women like her."  This is another plot line that we follow throughout the book.

Another wonderfully descriptive quote about Tracy, that I could relate to in my own personal relationship,  "She was late, always late, I would learn, for her internal clock, set at a permanent forty-five-minute delay.  Even when I used the time-honored technique of padding departure times, Tracy maintained the forty five minute window without fail, some inner gyroscopic mechanism inexorably attuned behind time's flow. "

There is the lawyer, Rachel, and her relationship with her own elderly father, both religiously observant Jews.   There is the Rabbi from Chicago who may also have a claim on the painting.  All these characters help Matt realize his Jewish roots and give him questions and change his interactions with Judaism.

So many complicated characters and choices to make through out the book.  It is a gripping story and even if you think you know what may happen next you will be surprised at the ending.  People and objects are not always what they seem.