The Flight Portfolio

Once again an enjoyable novel can teach us a valuable lesson.  First there is the history lesson that I had never known.  Then there is the morality question that one must face while reading this novel.

Julie Oringer has again written a beautiful sweeping novel of a time period in history that has so many unspoken incredible stories to be told.  This is the story of Varian Fry, a journalist from New York, who goes over to France after they are captured by the Germans in 1940.

Fry flies to Marseille as a representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an organization created to assist in the escape of artists and writers to immigrate to the States.  The ERC has sent Fry with a list of artists they have decided are the most talented and the loss would be great if they were killed during the war.  As Fry works in the Marseille office to arrange the visas and papers for these famous artists to travel out of the country, many other citizens in danger come to ask for help. 
With limited resources there are only so many people he can help.  Whose life is more valuable becomes a constant refrain.

In one discussion with an artist who Fry is hiding as he waits for the necessary papers to help him escape, the artist gives him a German proverb to explain the dilemma.  Zilberman said to Varian, "You are like the boy in the German proverb, the one who carries the pail of milk.  Oh, it goes like this: Who's most important, the farmer who feeds the cow, the cow who makes the milk, or the girl who milks the cow?  None of them.  The most important person is the boy who carries the milk to market.  One wrong step, and the work of all the others is lost in an instant."

Oringer has taken the facts and woven an intriguing, fast paced, captivating novel around the facts of Varian Fry and the many people was able to rescue.  She has added fictional characters and imagined the details that could have happened to fill out the story of Fry and his experiences. 

This is an incredible story based in fact about Varian Fry, who grew up in Ridgewood, NJ, graduated from Harvard and was a New York journalist and editor.  He risked everything to help artists and writers escape the Nazis after France was invaded.  He was able to save among others, Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and Marc Chagall.  Many years later, in 1994, he was honored as the first American to be "Righteous Among The Nations"