Villa Air-Bel
the recent book by Rosemary Sullivan
(HarperCollins, October 2006)
Reviews and
Comments
--for reference only,
with all Lexis-Nexis info
Copyright 2006 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London, England)
December 16, 2006 Saturday
SECTION: FT WEEKEND MAGAZINE - Book Reviews; Pg. 37
LENGTH: 826 words
HEADLINE: Escape artists How the engineers of German culture fled the Nazis
- and what happened once they got away
BYLINE: By JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER
BODY:
Villa Air-Bel: The Second World War, Escape and a House in France
by Rosemary Sullivan
John Murray Pounds 25, 476 pages
FT bookshop price: Pounds 20
Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America
by Jean-Michel Palmier
Verso Pounds 29.99, 852 pages
FT bookshop price: Pounds 23.99
The villa, the young American wrote home, was "not far from perfect. We have
one of those magnificent views which only the Mediterranean can boast, a
view of pine trees and olive branches, dark green and light, of soft
red-tiled roofs... and back of it all the rugged grey limestone mountains
which surround the Marseille area like a great amphitheatre. The only
trouble is the war."
Varian Fry was a Harvard classics graduate and journalist who had been
shocked at the treatment of Jews he witnessed in 1935 during a visit to
Berlin. In June 1940 he opened The New York Times and read the headline
"Nazi Shadow Falls on Half of France." Six weeks later, he arrived in
Marseille carrying Dollars 3,000 taped to his leg, a clutch of American
visas and a list of 200 artists, writers and musicians to be smuggled out of
Vichy territory. He looked a naive, unflappable Yankee prig: tortoiseshell
glasses, Brooks Brothers suit, homburg hat, Patek Philippe watch and a
"cordial, impersonal smile suggest(ing) his business was above reproach".
Fry moved into the Villa Air-Bel, an 18-room chateau whose rent was paid by
a flighty American heiress, Mary Jayne Gold. All the other tenants, and the
many desperate visitors, were Jews or artistic or political refugees. They
included the artists Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Marc Chagall, the
revolutionary Victor Serge, and the novelist Franz Werfel with his wife Alma
Mahler, whose trunk contained the scores of her second husband's symphonies.
Between 1940 and September 1941, when he was deported back to the US, Fry
saved all their lives. But he was haunted until his death by the many he
could not rescue.
Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel is a marvellous addition to the surging
literature on occupied France. Sullivan writes not as a historian - she has
little new material - but as a dramatist. Her scene-by-scene evocation of
life at the house reads like an updated Chekhov comedy laced with horror.
Leading modernists hang their paintings on trees in the garden, to sell for
a few sous. Fry tours Romanesque churches and goes birdwatching. Dinners on
the terrace, love affairs, conversations, surrealist games - are all
exquisite, the calm shattered by random round-ups and constant surveillance.
And still they all wait, for exit visas, travel permits and tickets,
passenger boats then cargo ships, as Fry frantically wheels and deals behind
the scenes. The distractions sound idyllic - but existed solely, Breton
said, "to outwit the anguish of the hour".
It is often asked why those at risk from Nazism delayed their escape so
long. Sullivan's book is important because it answers from within, showing
what it felt like to move from freedom to occupation, threat, then
restraint; how slowly, relentlessly, ordinary existences turned into lives
filled with terror.
Fry's cases wound up in New York, Hollywood, Cuba or Martinique. What
happened to them there, and to thousands more who fled Germany from 1933-41,
is recounted in Weimar in Exile, a pioneering work of scholarship when it
appeared in France in 1987, and still pertinent and magisterial on its first
English translation today.
In terms of historical detail, Jean-Michel Palmier's book establishes more
fully than any other the extent of the emigration of Germany's greatest
minds and talents, and that neither the exiles nor Germany ever fully
recovered. "Grateful and unhappy" - the Mozart biographer Annette Kolb's
response to being in the US - summed up the mood of those who left homes and
cultural milieu. "We live our by now deeply habituated waiting room days
among our palms and lemon trees," the novelist Thomas Mann wrote from
California in 1943. Palmier writes with dry wit on Hollywood
dissatisfactions, and with black humour on life-saving deceptions such as
the dadaist Tristan Tzara and writer Arthur Koestler in Marseille cafes, too
frightened to acknowledge one another. But ultimately this is a tragic epic
made vivid, like Sullivan's account, by the diversity and pathos of
individual responses to fear and loss.
How indissolubly are we part of our culture? How would we adjust in similar
circumstances? These are relevant questions for many people now. "This paper
has turned quite yellow - look, the page is crumbling between your fingers,"
the satirist Kurt Tucholsky addressed an imaginary reader of 1985. "We
probably don't have too much to say to each other, we little people. We are
lived out, our essence has passed away with us. And now you're off. But let
me tell you one more thing: You aren't any better than we were, or those
before us. Not in the least, not in the very least... "
Jackie Wullschlager is the FT's art critic.
LOAD-DATE: December 15, 2006
Copyright 2006 Ottawa Citizen, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publication
Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Ottawa Citizen
December 10, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition
SECTION: THE CITIZEN'S WEEKLY ARTS & BOOKS; James MacGowan's christmas
picks; Pg. C2
LENGTH: 4713 words
HEADLINE: ... all is bright
BYLINE: James MacGowan, The Ottawa Citizen
BODY:
Villa Air-Bell: World War II,
Escape, and a House in Marseille
By Rosemary Sullivan
HarperCollins, $34.95
A page-turning thriller focusing on the efforts to save and protect some of
the biggest cultural figures of the 20th century. The Villa Air-Bell, the
house in Marseille the title refers to, was where these figures were housed.
It was run by an American named Varian Fry who was on a mission at the
behest of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private relief organization
based in the U.S., to get as many of these people out of the country as
possible. Things, of course, didn't always go according to plan, and
Sullivan does a wonderful job of conveying the feeling of everyday terror
that permeated that time.
This review of Villa Air-Bel comes from Canada, where its author
lives; this is the only review that "Mendelsohn" has ever posted on
Amazon.com.
from Amazon.com
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
'Villa Air Bel' is a stunning story of endangered
artists and intellectuals in pre-WW2 France.
Rosemary Sullivan has masterfully juxtaposed
personal histories and historical events to create
an urgent and tense book. It is a riveting account
of the ordeal suffered by individuals who were being
hunted down by the Nazis and of the heroism of young
rerscuers willing to endanger their own lives in an
effort to help them escape. This book is a
compelling page-turner. I couldn't put it down.
Copyright 2006 Toronto Star Newspapers,
Ltd.
All Rights Reserved
Guelph Mercury (Ontario, Canada)
December 2, 2006 Saturday
Final Edition
SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. C5
LENGTH: 108 words
HEADLINE: Marseille villa was a refuge for artists
BODY:
There have been books and movies about Villa Air-Bel, the Marseille chateau
where fleeing artists and intellectuals took refuge after the Nazi invasion
of France in 1940. But it remains one of the lesser known stories of the
Second World War.
In Villa Air-Bel - World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (Harper
Collins, $34.95 hardcover), Toronto writer Rosemary Sullivan looks at the
private lives of Varian Fry and other supporters of the private Emergency
Rescue Committee -- and of the people they rescued.
Sullivan, who will speak in Kitchener on Wednesday (see Bookmarks), is the
author of Shadow Maker, a biography of poet Gwendolyn MacEwan.
GRAPHIC: Photo: Book cover of In Villa Air-Bel - World War II, Escape, and a
House in Marseille
LOAD-DATE: December 2, 2006
Book Review by Michael Kenney
Boston Globe, Nov. 28, 2006
Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille
By Rosemary Sullivan
Between late October 1940 and the following September, Villa Air-Bel, a
crumbling hilltop chateau on the outskirts of Marseille, served as a way
station for an elite group of refugees from Nazi-occupied France and a
dormitory for their equally well-positioned rescuers.
For all the eccentric activities - a pair of copulating praying mantises
provided one evening's dinner-table "entertainment" - there was an
atmosphere of jittery uncertainty and apprehension that Canadian writer
Rosemary Sullivan captures to chilling effect in "Villa Air-Bel."
Marseille, which was under the control of the collaborationist Vichy
government, had by then become a city of refugees - "the spout of a
horrifying human funnel" as Sullivan puts it - "pouring into its clogged
quarters," hoping not only to escape the fighting, but to secure the exit
permits and entry visas needed to escape to more secure places in the United
States and the Americas.
Sullivan, a poet and professor of English at the University of Toronto,
centers her moving and richly detailed account of that time of anxiety at
the villa, which was, she writes, like "a stone interrupting the stream," a
fixed point in a dangerous world.
And it is there that her extraordinary cast of characters comes together.
Among the refugees were the surrealist writer Andre Breton and the Soviet
exile Victor Serge, and among their risk-taking rescuers, the Harvard
graduate Varian Fry and the Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold. Sullivan first
heard the story of the villa and its occupants from the English painter
Leonora Carrington, whose lover, the surrealist painter Max Ernst, had
stayed briefly at the villa.
Sullivan's story is also about the getting away from the villa and "the dark
attics all over the Marseille region" where other refugees waited. In that
story, Fry is the central figure.
He had been sent to France by a hastily organized American relief agency,
the Emergency Rescue Committee, which had drafted a list of "people who
needed to be rescued" - artists as well as anti-fascist writers and
politicians.
Arriving in Marseille, he learned of the escape routes that had been mapped
across the Pyrenees toward Lisbon, and of the fraudulent visas that could be
bought at a Chinese agency.
Luck played a large role in many escapes. While Sullivan opens her account
with the failed escape of the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who committed
suicide at the Spanish border, there were other cases like that of the
German poet Walter Mehring.
Fry had obtained passage to Martinique for Mehring, but when he arrived at
the dock, a security officer told him that he was on a list of those
"forbidden to leave France." As he "tried lamely to disguise his terror,"
Sullivan writes, the officer went into a back room. "Incredibly, when he
returned, he handed the poet his stamped papers. `Perhaps it's another
Walter Mehring,' he said. `Depart."'
By the late summer of 1941, the villa had been emptied of its guests and
Fry's operation had wound down. Fry estimated that it had aided some 4,000
people, either to escape, or, as Vichy tightened its controls, by locating
safe houses in the surrounding countryside for those who could not get away.
There are powerful, wrenching stories here. One that may stay in many
readers' minds is an account by the journalist Eric Sevareid of a
police-escorted visit to an internment camp for political refugees outside
Paris.
Among the "dirty and bearded men" who crowded around him, some crying,
others "red with anxiety and rage," he found journalists who, as his
colleagues, had covered the rise of Nazism. As he headed for the gate, one
"slipped one arm over my shoulder, and I turned away from him and began to
cry. I was filled with shame and self-loathing. But I could not help it; I
stood still in the mud, dressed in my fake French uniform, before my officer
hosts, and cried into my handkerchief" - and as he reached the gate, handed
the man his topcoat.
Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company
Copyright 2006 New York Magazine Holdings LLC
All Rights Reserved
New York Magazine
November 27, 2006
LENGTH: 1886 words
HEADLINE: Ask a Shop Clerk: Holiday Edition;
What the experts-in-residence plan to buy from their employers.
BYLINE: Emma Pearse,Denise Penny
BODY:
Carol Wald Three Lives 154 W. 10th St., at Waverly Pl. 212-741-2069
What gifts are you buying from here? The first is a book by Rosemary
Sullivan: Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille
[$26.95]. It's history, it's intrigue. It's nonfiction. It's a real
page-turner.
Who's that for? I am going to buy it for my husband, who is into this
kind of thing.
What else? A fun book? Amy Sedaris's I Like You [$27.99]. It's very
funny, and it actually has good tips in it.
What's your favorite tip in there? She's got a great recipe for a cheese
ball that I've actually made. It was delicious.
What's the big fiction pick? For just a whopping good read: Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie. Her new one is called Half of a Yellow Sun [$24.95]. It's
like Gone With the Wind, except in Nigeria.
Say a 17-year-old guy came in to buy a gift for his girlfriend? Dave
Eggers's book What Is the What? [$26] just came out, and I'll tell you,
I've got my beady little eye on that.
What's a sexy gift? One comes instantly to mind.
Oh, really?It's called The Ages of Lulu, by Almudena Grandes [$13.95]. I
liked the cover, and I thought, What the hell, I could use a saucy read.
So I started reading, and I thought, Oh, my God.
Mark Haldeman Paul Smith 142 Greene St., nr. Houston St.; 646-613-3060
Who are you shopping for here? First on my list is my partner. In the
boutique's gallery, there's one photograph in particular [$3,400] that
would be perfect in our guest bedroom. It's a famous photograph of the
Duke of Devonshire asleep on his eighteenth-century sofa.
What about for your friends? For our friend who's a total fashion plate,
there's a faux-ocelot-print trilby hat by Rod Keenan [$575]; an ocelot
is a cat that looks like a leopard, with spots. You can get fabulous old
vintage hatboxes at the 26th Street market, if you get there by 8 a.m.
on Saturday.
Any family members on your list? I have a twin brother. He's very
artistic. Anything really wild is right up his alley. There's a
beautiful tapestry jacket from the men's collection; it's basically a
takeoff on the old wall hangings of hunting scenes made into a sport
coat [$1,245]. It's very tongue-in-cheek. It has hunters, dogs, and
pheasants. It's a thick coat, so it can be worn for walks along the
lake. My family's from Minnesota- the "Land of 10,000 Lakes"-so that's
what everyone does on the weekend: They go walking around the lakes.
Amanda McCreary The Future Perfect 115 N. 6th St., nr. Berry St.,
Williamsburg, Brooklyn; 718-599-6278
Who are you buying for this year? I will be buying for my little sister,
for my boyfriend, and I usually get something for my grandma from here.
It's fun to bring something cool and design-y from Brooklyn back to the
suburbs of Illinois.
What are you buying for your sister? My sister is totally into nature
stuff. Sarah Cihat takes old dinnerware and then reglazes them with all
these stencils-she's known for her skull-and-crossbones plates [$75 to
$90], but she's doing new stencils now with spiders and owls on them
that are really cute.
What about for Grandma? I think I'm going to get a teapot by Jason
Miller [$90]. It's called Second. It's a regular teapot, but he places
beautiful bird designs on the teapot and they are all crooked and wrong.
What's a tween-friendly gift? We have rings called Bling Blink; they're
made to look like the outline of a diamond, like an engagement ring. But
the artist does it in cool, bright colors [$7].
What are you buying for your boyfriend? We have this silver baby rattle
[$75] that makes a beautiful noise. He's definitely checked it out. The
other thing would be way more spendy. It's a retainer [$300],
gold-plated. It's a sort of cool, hip, bling necklace for a guy.
Hermine Evelyn Takashimaya 693 Fifth Ave., nr. 54th St.; 212-350-0100
What will you be buying as a gift this year? Definitely the body cream
[Takashimaya private label Vetiver, $28; fifth floor]. It's very soft,
like soufflé.
Who is that for? I buy it for myself all the time. My sister loves it,
too.
Anything for your mom? Anthousa, from our home-fragrance line [Anthousa
diffuser with sticks, 500-ml., various scents, $90; fifth floor]. It
comes in a nice keepsake bottle. Bamboo sticks go in the bottle, and
they are very porous, so the scent works through the sticks. I'll
probably buy a floral scent. Either a bottle of Cliff Rose or
Bougainvillea-I'm torn.
For your boyfriend? I haven't decided yet. He loves luggage, and we have
some really classy leather bags. I'd probably go with the Ro overnight
bag. It's in brown leather [$425].
Are people holiday shopping already? Oh, yes. One woman who comes in
very early, she gets a lot of attention, and she likes that. I
recommended a cashmere robe by Daniel Hanson for her sister, but she
bought one for herself while she was at it. At $2,000 a pop! Well,
$1,995, actually.
What's a good ex-boyfriend gift? I'd march down to the second floor and
buy one of our pocket watches [Ettinger, $165; second floor]. On one
side there is a flap for a picture, so I'd stick one of myself in there,
looking really good.
Jerry Eaderesto Geppetto's Toy Box 10 Christopher St., nr. Greenwich
Ave.; 212-620-7511
Who are you shopping for? My grandnephew, who's 5. I'm going to give him
a miniature wooden fort by a German company, Haba [$69.95]. Or maybe a
wooden race-car set [$44.95] by a 100-year-old French company that
reproduces the company's designs from the twenties and thirties.
Who else is on your list? My grandniece loves stuffed animals. We have a
high-end German line called Sigikid [from $34.95] that very few other
people in the city carry.
Do you have a baby to buy for? My cousin's daughter. I found a lady,
who's part of a collective of artists in Chicago, who does beautiful
offbeat blankets [$100].
Any teenagers? I have a 13-year-old nephew. We have a company who makes
state-of-the-art science kits. I'm going to get him the Physics Solar
Workshop [$59.95], which gives him different experiments in solar-power
technology. So maybe he'll save the planet for us.
Does he have a sister? Yes. She's a tomboy. I'm considering a silver
speedster racer [$79.95]. She lives in a pretty big house in Long
Island, so there's room.
Is there a new dollhouse?The Chalet Dollhouse [$120] is modern in
design, very open-it has a tower, a skylight, and a little outdoor
staircase. It's not like the Playmobile Victorian that we had. Parents
would tell me that it had all these insanely little parts-that it took
two bottles of Chardonnay to assemble it.
Anna Dunn Marlow & Sons 81 Broadway, nr. Berry St., Williamsburg,
Brooklyn; 718-384-1441
What are you going to buy as a gift from the store? I buy my best friend
olive oil a lot. We sell a blood-orange oil [Stella Cadente Olive Oil
Company, $22] and a Meyer-lemon olive oil [Stella Cadente, $18], and she
uses it on salads and fish. It comes in little Mason jars, like jam.
What gift would you consider "not obvious"? We just started carrying
these Japanese knives [$70 to $200] from a family who has been making
them for 700 years. They used to manufacture samurai swords. The knives
are hand-hammered, so each one is different. You use them for basic
chopping and preparing. They are supersharp.
What's a great cheap gift-under $10 or $15? Bronx Bee Honey. I can tell
you about the guy that makes it. He's in the South Bronx, and he's based
at the St. Augustine's Catholic Church there. He started keeping bees so
that the community gardens would become more fruitful [$10 a jar].
How does it taste? It's not creamy. It's a little bit rich, not too
sweet, pretty smooth. But it's better than regular supermarket honey
because it comes from the Bronx.
What about a gift for a teacher? Teachers are kind of dorky, so some
tea. Keemun Mao Feng loose-leaf black tea [In Pursuit of Tea, $5.75].
Which tea do you drink? I drink the wild mint. Because it tastes the
least like tea. It tastes as if you were chewing on a mint leaf-not like
peppermint.
What's sexy? Would it be too goofy to say the Cream-Nut peanut butter? [Koeze
Company, $5].
What's sexy about it? It's silky. And it's called cream nut.
Nina Robinson Lyd 405 W. 44th St., nr. Ninth Ave.; 212-246-8041
Who are you buying gifts for from Lyd this year? My four girlfriends.
What are you buying? For my roommate, I would go with the HOBO
patent-leather red clutch [Belinda, $98]. We'll also have it in black,
but the ruby red is perfect for the holidays.
Will all your girlfriends be walking around with the same patent-leather
red accessories next year? Two of them are from Pittsburgh, so hopefully
no one will know.
How would you describe the Lyd shopper? They are young, professional
women. We have students and lots of hip, young mothers-the fashions this
year are great for mothers who are pregnant. I had a 50-year-old woman
the other day.
What did she buy? She bought a QI cashmere sweater [$168] in black. Oh,
and also the HOBO clutch.
Are you buying anything for your mom? I like the cashmere neck warmer
for Mom instead of a scarf [Sphere One, $98]. It has a little rosette on
it. We have grays, oatmeal, violet, pink, and celadon. Tocca just put
out a new fragrance, Stella, and I've been waiting for it [$68]. We have
the candle already [$36].
Do you own the candle? Yes. I usually put it in our kitchen.
What's the gift someone is going to buy for you? I have my eye on a new
line by Zoe Chicco. She has this amazing silver-pendant necklace. It's a
bird in a circle. It's really pretty, really unique [$176].
Does your boyfriend know? Hopefully he will soon.
What would you suggest for an inexpensive gift? We have sterling-silver
charm earrings-birds and little leaves and stars [AH jewelry, $28]. I
was thinking of getting those for my little sisters.
Jules Siff Wempe 700 Fifth Ave., nr. 55th St.; 212-397-9000
Are you buying anyone a watch this year? I haven't decided. But I would
consider buying my wife the 24 by Patek Philippe in stainless steel
[$8,600]. It's like a cuff. It curves to your wrist.
Do you get a discount? Of course I get a discount. I would be insulted
if I didn't.
What's going to sell like hotcakes? The Submariner by Rolex in stainless
steel [$5,175] is always in demand. Thirty years from today, it will
still be in demand. I bought it for my son on his 30th birthday.
What's the watch brand to buy for the watch-obsessed person? Patek
Philippe and A. Lange & Söhne. The plainest Patek Philippe [$12,950]
takes nine months to make. More complicated ones can take two to three
years.
An inexpensive gift? I would say a set of cuff links in sterling silver,
like the Wempe cuff link [$195]. You can put an initial on it.
But what about a less expensive watch, in the $1,500 range? It would be
an automatic-self-winding. I would say a Tag Heuer [$1,450]. It has a
blue dial and a blue bezel, and it looks like a diving watch. It's
unisex-for a young lady or young man. With automatic watches, as you
move, it winds itself. If you leave it idle for a day, it will stop.
Have you been selling for Christmas already? I sold a Rolex this morning
to a gentleman from Mexico. He bought a Rolex for his wife, a Lady
Datejust [$6,525]. It is eighteen-karat yellow gold and stainless steel.
Are quartz watches popular? If you're a watch person, quartz is not even
in your vocabulary. If Mario Andretti came in and wanted a car, would he
ask for an automatic?
LOAD-DATE: November 20, 2006
from Amazon.com
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
This book centers on Varian Fry's year in Marseille
and is the third such biography to come out in the
last decade or so. This author is a Canadian and
previous Fry biographies were penned by a Brit (Andy
Marino) and an American (Sheila Isenberg).
Sullivan's work offers little new information on
Varian Fry or on most of his colleagues. If you look
at her bibliography you might get the impression
that she has done a great amount of research.
However, anyone familiar with the story, will find
echoes of previous works, and much that borrows from
Marino's book, which is superior.
The core of her book is transforming four memoirs
written by rescuers - Varian Fry, Lisa Fittko, Mary
Jayne Gold, and Danny Benedite - from the first
person to the third person voice. Her approach for
doing this has two misleading results. First, she
does not give enough credit to the memoirs of the
humanitarians who wrote them (just footnotes at the
back). Second, observations presented by the
memoirists related to passing events and
impressions, she introduces as facts, denying the
reader the original context for the various events.
Instead of organizing her material skillfully, she
presents scores of chapters, making for a choppy
narrative. Hopefully, this type of appropriation
will not become the standard for "creative
non-fiction."
Copyright 2006 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
All Rights Reserved
Daily Mail (London)
November 24, 2006 Friday
SECTION: ED IRE; Pg. 61
LENGTH: 893 words
HEADLINE: House party refuge from horrors of Hitler's hell;
Critic's choice
BYLINE: FRANCES SPALDING
BODY:
VILLA AIR-BEL: THE SECOND WORLD WAR, ESCAPE AND A HOUSE IN FRANCE by
Rosemary Sullivan
(John Murray, Pounds 25)
STORIES of heroism in World War II have become legendary, familiar to
many through books and films.
Nevertheless, each time we encounter acts of wartime bravery they never
fail to astonish and impress.
There are many heart-stopping moments in Rosemary Sullivan's account of
a rescue operation in France. With 60 per cent of the country under the
German Reich, and the rest governed from Vichy, in the Massif Central,
it soon became apparent that the Vichy regime, led by the octogenarian
soldier Marshal PEtain, was prepared to work hand-in-glove with the
Nazis.
This book asks us to imagine what it was like to move from freedom to
occupation, to be threatened and curtailed.
Under the terms of the armistice, the Vichy government agreed to
'surrender on demand' all refugees considered enemies of the Third
Reich. Suddenly, artists, scientists and intellectuals who had fled
totalitarian regimes elsewhere, feared for their lives.
It was a shocking capitulation. In August 1939 the rich in Paris had
been partying frenziedly. Janet Flanner, the New Yorker columnist, filed
a report that described the city undergoing 'a fit of prosperity, gaiety
and hospitality'.
This same month Hitler signed the ten-year Non-Aggression Pact with
Stalin.
Many understood that the intent was to ensure Russia's neutrality in the
coming war.
Hitler's territorial ambitions made this inevitable.
Hence the uneasy brew of camaraderie, hopelessness and panic which
Simone de Beauvoir recorded.
Like others of her age, this young writer lived through August 1939 in a
mood of agonised anxiety: 'Why had we been landed in this position? We
were scarcely over 30, our lives were beginning to take shape, and now,
brutally, this existence was snatched from us.
Would we get it back? And if so, at what cost?' She and others had good
reason to fear what was coming. In 1937 Picasso had painted Guernica in
protest at the destruction which German pilots of the Condor Legion had
wrought on the Basque town.
The following year, Hitler cracked down on avant-garde artists.
Inviting others to laugh at their work, he mounted a 'Degenerate Art'
exhibition and announced at the opening: 'We are going to wage a
merciless war of destruction against the last remaining elements of
cultural disintegration, all those cliques of chatterers, dilettantes
and art forgers will be picked up and liquidated'.
France itself was not immune from fascist leanings. There had been
mutterings in the 1930s about the drain on the economy and the threat to
public order posed by refugees, already pouring into France. In 1938 a
decree had been passed that made it legal to intern alien residents.
Far worse was to come.
WHEN France fell, an Emergency Rescue Committee was set up in New York.
It compiled a list of some 200 people who were thought to be in
immediate danger.
A dinner was held which raised over $3,000. But before the guests left,
it was pointed out that money alone would not save people.
Someone had to go to France to set up an organisation to help them
escape. A young man called Varian Fry volunteered.
At first sight this classical scholar, with his thick spectacles and
neat attire, seemed an unlikely hero.
But in 1935, in Berlin, he had witnessed the smashing of Jewish shops in
the Kurfrstendamm riots. He had seen an elderly Jew kicked to the ground
while his frail wife, protesting, was punched in the face.
Fry took refuge in a cafE where two stormtroopers spotted a Jew trying
to make himself invisible at a corner table. As the man reached
nervously for his beer, a knife flashed in the air and pinned his hand
to the table. These scenes Fry never forgot.
Soon after he arrived in Marseille, the Vichy regime announced a 'statut
des juifs' which barred Jews from all spheres of public influence.
They could no longer teach, join the army or the civil service and were
dismissed from positions within the Press, radio, film and theatre.
Though it took a year to implement, it was the beginning of a systematic
segregation that later hastened deportation to the camps.
Fry set up the Centre Americain de Secours (CAS). Outwardly it was a
legal organisation, giving advice and some financial assistance to those
who wanted to emigrate to the neutral United States. But behind closed
doors it was forging documents and paying guides to lead those on
Hitler's black list to safety over the Pyrenees.
Villa Air-Bel was the elegant, dilapidated house which Fry and his
colleagues found in the suburbs of Marseille. It sheltered a lively
clientele of artists and writers waiting for American visas, including
AndrE Breton, the leading Surrealist.
Sullivan describes the gaiety, the parties, games and relationships
which animated this private world, despite the constant threat of police
invasions.
It is a crowded tale. Sullivan avoids congestion by dividing her book
into short, lively chapters.
Some 2,000 lives were saved by the CAS.
Many thought at the time they were simply escaping the 'Nazi period'.
Only in retrospect did they realise they had avoided probable
extermination.
The American State Department, not fully realising what Fry was up
against, never gave him the recognition he deserved. But in 1997 Yad
Vasham, Israel's Holocaust Memorial, posthumously named him 'Righteous
Among Nations'.
GRAPHIC: QUIETLY COURAGEOUS: VARIAN FRY (TOP LEFT) WITH FELLOW MEMBERS
OF THE CAS
LOAD-DATE: November 24, 2006
Copyright 2006 The Conde Nast Publications Inc.
All Rights Reserved
HEADLINE: JOIE DE VIVRE
TAKE A TRIP TO FRANCE WITHOUT EVER LEAVING YOUR CHAISE WITH THESE
MEMORABLE READS.
BYLINE: MEGAN O'GRADY
BODY:
A wisteria-covered chAteau in Burgundy is the evocative setting of
Claudine's House (Hesperus), Colette's irresistible memoir of growing up
with her doting mother and a menagerie of eccentric pets. Written 20
years after the novels that made her famous, these Proustian snapshots
of a lost Eden-reprinted with a foreword by Doris Lessing-are all the
more poignant in light of the unhappy marriage that followed. Harvest
season in Provence lends a pastoral backdrop to Martin Gayford's The
Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles
(Little, Brown). In the brief time they shared a cottage, the two
painted some of their most celebrated masterpieces-a _creative idyll
shattered by Van Gogh's tragic breakdown, which Gayford credibly
attributes to bipolar disorder. Phyllis Birnbaum's Glory
in a Line: A Life of Foujita-The Artist Caught Between East & West
(Faber and Faber) recalls the flamboyant and gifted Japanese-born
painter who, in his trademark eyeglasses and hoop earrings, became the
toast of Montparnasse-_until the onset of World War II. The eponymous
suburban residence in Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel: World War II,
Escape, and a House in Marseille (HarperCollins) served as a safe haven
for dozens of artists and intellectuals on the Nazi hit list-including
Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, and AndrE Breton. With tremendous suspense and
emotional pull, Sullivan recounts the little-known story of Varian Fry,
the intrepid young American who sheltered them-helping them and hundreds
more escape from Vichy France. Expatriate sensualist Peter Mayle finds
inspiration in his adopted home once again in Provence A-Z (Knopf),
sharing his insight into, among other things, the history of pastis, the
game of pEtanque, and the sad fate of the Pont d'Avignon.
Rare are histories of Frenchwomen who were neither saints nor royal
mistresses. Judith P. Zinsser's La Dame d'Esprit: A Biography of the
Marquise du ChAtelet (Viking) is a welcome in-depth portrait of the
brilliant physicist and author whose intellectually combative romance
with Voltaire is emerging as the great love story of the Enlightenment.
A century later, George Sand was taking Paris by storm. Benita Eisler's
Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand (Counterpoint)
depicts Europe's first best-selling female novelist with admirable
nuance, from her political exploits to her intimacies with Balzac,
Flaubert, and a homesick Chopin, whom she seduced while dressed in
pantaloons the colors of the Polish flag. A deep sense of patriotism-and
a premonition of the bloodshed to come-led 24-year-old Charlotte Corday
to murder guillotine-happy despot Jean-Paul Marat in 1793, though as
Graeme Fife's The Terror (St. Martin's Press) vividly illustrates, the
assassination only fanned revolutionary flames. Finally, French Women
Don't Get Fat author Mireille Guiliano continues her campaign to
civilize les amEricaines in French Women for All Seasons: A Year of
Secrets, Recipes, & Pleasure (Knopf), in which she explains how to fold
a scarf, where to buy the best marrons glacEs-and why men should be
encouraged to eat oysters.
GRAPHIC: a year in provence
Top, Van Gogh's harvest landscape and sunflowers. Above, landscape near
arles by gauguin.
Clockwise from top left: SNARK/Art Resource, NY; ERICH LESSING/Art
Resource, NY; Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA/Gift in memory of William
Ray Adams/The Bridgeman Art Library; still life: JEFF HARRIS.
LOAD-DATE: November 21, 2006
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Limited
All Rights Reserved
Sunday Times (London)
November 19, 2006, Sunday
SECTION: FEATURES; Culture; Pg. 55
LENGTH: 149 words
HEADLINE: Villa Air-Bel
BYLINE: Sarah Curtis
BODY:
VILLA AIR-BEL: The Second World War, Escape and a House in France. by
Rosemary Sullivan. J Murray £ 25 pp477
Between 1940 and 1941, a grand but ramshackle villa in Marseilles
sheltered a group of flamboyant writers, artists and intellectuals that
an American charity helped to escape from Vichy, France.
Among them were Andre Breton urging fellow surrealists to defy fascism
"by singing, playing and laughing with the greatest joy", Max Ernst
hanging his paintings on the trees in the garden, and Victor Serge not
admitted to America because of his communist past. Sullivan brilliantly
interweaves personal histories with terrifying tales about flight over
mountains to Spain or Switzerland and by sea to Casablanca or
Martinique, and with stories of forging papers, bribery, love and
betrayal. At the centre is Varian Fry, the quiet American, now
forgotten, who managed the dangerous operation.
LOAD-DATE: November 19, 2006
Beyond the front lines: Three new books veer from the battlefields to
coping on the civilian front
by James MacGowan, The Ottawa Citizen, Sunday, Nov. 12, 2006
Yesterday was a day of remembrance, a time to personally and quietly
honour those heroic souls who gave their lives on the fields of battle
to preserve such a simple thing as freedom. Over the years, some
extraordinary books have been written about battle, but lately I've
noticed an interesting trend in books about war that has taken the focus
away from the guns and grime of the battlefield to the smaller
front-line of the civilian world and how they coped or collapsed in the
face of the onslaught.
Nowhere was this more evident than in Vichy France (as France's wartime
government was known), whose leaders were more than happy to collaborate
with the Nazis. For those unwilling to be a part of the killing machine,
it was a horrible time to be living in France.
Three recent books deal with this time, two directly with Vichy, while
the third begins in France but ends up in Germany. All three are
gripping, and have the decided effect of making you feel fortunate you
live here and that you live now. A thing to remember around Remembrance
Day.
- - -
Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France,
by Carmen Callil (Knopf, $40).
This was a frustrating book to get through but not because of the
writing, which is superb, or the research, which is scrupulous. It's
just hard to come face to face with the reality that such an odious man
as Louis Darquier existed, and not only throughout the war, but for 35
years after. Here is a man, the commissioner for Jewish Affairs in the
Vichy government (he was commonly referred to as "Hitler's Parrot"), who
bore personal responsibility for the deportation of thousands of Jews
and relished the death of each one.
"I'll tell you exactly what happened at Auschwitz," he told a newspaper
in 1978. "They used gas. Yes. That's true. But they gassed the lice." In
1947, Darquier was sentenced to death in absentia, but managed to live
to the ripe old age of 83 in Spain, at times working as a translator at
the Ministry of Information and Tourism for Franco's fascist government.
Callil does a masterful job of putting Darquier, and his fellow French
fascists, in the context of the time, and reveals a ridiculous looking
figure with a monocle who put money before anything, who lied
incessantly, borrowed continually and enjoyed himself unremittingly. He
was, Callil writes, "one of the few men to put on weight during the
Second World War."
He also, along with his alcoholic wife, Myrtle, had a daughter named
Anne, whom they virtually disowned three weeks after she was born in
1930. Anne Darquier became a psychiatrist and began treating Callil in
1963, after Callil had attempted suicide. One day, in September, 1970,
as Callil arrived for her appointment, there was no answer at Anne's
apartment.
Unbeknownst to Callil, she was dead on her bathroom floor, and it wasn't
until a year later, while watching a documentary about Vichy, that
Callil realized who Anne's father was. She hadn't talked much about her
father, other than to say, "There are some things and some people you
can never forgive." As Bad Faith makes abundantly clear, there is ample
truth in that statement.
- - -
Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille, by
Rosemary Sullivan (HarperCollins, $34.95).
In Vichy France, Sullivan writes, "destinies ceased to be a matter of
personal control. The life and death of any individual became merely
something to be haggled over in bureaucratic ministries. . . . Not
chance, not contingency, but someone else, a stranger, arbitrarily
decided who lived and who died."
It was, obviously, a horrible time, but Sullivan's book focuses on one
gleaming element of it: The Villa Air-Bel, a safe house in Marseille,
which housed and protected such artists and intellectuals as French
surrealist Andre Breton, German surrealist artist Max Ernst, writer
Victor Serge, painter Marc Chagall, French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp,
writer and painter Consuelo de Saint-Exupery and many others the Nazis
viewed as enemies.
The house was rented by an American, Varian Fry, who arrived in France
in 1940 with $3,000 strapped to his leg and orders from the Emergency
Rescue Committee, a private relief organization based in the U.S., to
get as many of these people out of the country as possible.
Fry's organization did have legal status in France, but there was plenty
of cajoling, bribing and sweating involved in dealing with the Vichy
bureaucracy. Eventually, Fry was thrown out of the country but not
before he -- with the considerable help of a French leftist, Daniel
Benedite -- had managed to get nearly 2,000 people to safety.
Along with plenty of intrigue, Sullivan's book -- which reads like a
novel, and a page-turner at that -- houses some terrific characters:
there is the rich hedonist Mary Jayne Gold, who props up Fry's efforts
with money, when he runs short; Peggy Guggenheim, who also supplies Fry
with money; Benedite, who knew how to work the underbelly of Vichy; and
some of the biggest cultural figures of the past century. A book you
will read in one sitting.
Copyright 2006 Ottawa Citizen, a division of CanWest MediaWorks
Publication Inc.
The chequebook saviour and his château
Jane Stevenson is captivated by the story of a Harvard classical scholar
who rescued Europe's intellectuals from the Nazis
Villa Air-Bel: the Second World War, Escape and a House in France
by Rosemary Sullivan
book review by Jane Stevenson
The Daily Telegraph, London, Nov. 11, 2006
When catastrophe strikes, most people wring their hands and say:
"Something ought to be done.'' It takes a rare spirit to add, "and I
ought to do something''. In the first years of the Second World War, an
unlikely group of people coalesced in order to carry out the work of the
American Emergency Rescue Committee and bring endangered writers and
artists to the New World. Hundreds of people - in the end, a couple of
thousand - were got out of occupied France, an enterprise that, on the
one side, involved human bravery and integrity on a scale seldom
surpassed and, on the other, bureaucracy and purblind human stupidity on
a level that would make the angels weep.
At the outset of the Second World War, Americans were on the whole
anxious to stay at some distance from European conflict. They were
certainly not anxious to open their arms to miscellaneous millions of
refugees, but they were still concerned about intellectuals and artists
whom the Fascists had marked down as specific targets. An argument could
be made, and was, that it was desirable to preserve European culture by
granting American visas to culturally significant figures.
Unfortunately, anti-Fascist intellectuals of the 1930s were, by
definition, Leftist. The State Department's ban on letting in
"Communists'' excluded, for example, Victor Serge, the Belgian-born
writer and fierce critic of Stalin. Thus the AERC might get someone out,
only to find there was nowhere for him to go.
The New York committee dropped a buttoned-up Harvard classical scholar
called Varian Fry into the human maelstrom of occupied Marseilles with a
list, a chequebook and a book of rules. By the time he left a year
later, loathed equally by American officialdom on both sides of the
Atlantic, he had plumbed the depths of his own personality and that of
his culture, and had been personally responsible for saving hundreds of
lives. Fry wrecked his marriage and his career, and the only people who
ever acknowledged his extraordinary achievements were the Israelis, who
cited him as "Righteous among the Nations'' at Yad Vashem.
This is a magnificent, complex narrative of courage, folly and
complacency. These were not always readily distinguishable: Mary Jayne
Gold, a ditzy American heiress straight out of F Scott Fitzgerald, threw
in her lot with the escape committee and spent thousands and thousands
of dollars of her own money on its behalf, yet endangered the entire
enterprise by her relationship with a professional criminal. Not all of
the workers were saints. They were all strong-minded people with a
variety of agendas, many of them conflicting.
The book opens with a reminder of what was at stake: the tragic end of
Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most important theorist of modern urban
life. An elderly, sick man, he was successfully guided over the
Pyrenees, resting every 10 minutes, but grimly clutching the briefcase
that contained the manuscript of hislast book. Once in Spain, he found
the rules had just changed. Since he did not have an exit permit, he
would be escorted back to the French border, from whence he could expect
to be sent to a concentration camp. That night he killed himself with
the morphine he kept on him. The briefcase he had carried on that
agonising journey vanished without trace, and with it his last book,
which he had rated as important as his own life.
As the book unfolds, many of the stories within it are just as dizzy,
sad, human and unfortunate. What makes it even worse is that Benjamin
was not delusional; he was one of the foremost thinkers of his
generation.
At the centre of this narrative is the strangely named Villa Air-Bel; a
château outside Marseille, rented for a pittance from an eccentric
miser. It was to prove an air-bell indeed for those who were not waving,
but drowning. It provided an island of safety for a succession of
brilliant people, André Breton and Max Ernst among them. Hitler had
branded their art "degenerate'': they had been marked down.
Charismatic and sexy, Breton defiantly continued to play his games with
words and images - to oppose not only the war, but the mentality of war.
Other individuals refused reality in less defiant modes: fatally, many
potential victims believed in the essential civilisation and humanity of
France; and ended up herded onto cattle trucks by French soldiers.
Among the many heroes of this beautifully narrated book is Lisa Fittko,
a Jew, who guided group after group of unfit, disoriented people across
a Pyrenean mountain pass to the relative safety of Spain, turned back,
and did it again the next day. Her words are as true now as they were
then: "One would so like to believe that the character of the German
people was responsible. For then one could also believe that it could
never happen here. Those who so believe have not learned anything.''
Copyright 2006 Telegraph Group Limited
Copyright 2006 The Irish Times
All Rights Reserved
The Irish Times
November 11, 2006 Saturday
SECTION: WEEKEND; Book Reviews; Pg. 10
LENGTH: 848 words
HEADLINE: A refuge from the Reich
BYLINE: Carlo Gébler
BODY:
History: An illuminating account of the French mansion where artists were
saved from Nazi harm.
Karl Frank, an Austrian psychoanalyst, fled Germany in 1933, changed his
name to Paul Hagen, and thereafter worked tirelessly to mobilise opinion
against Hitler.
After the invasion of Holland, in May 1940, Hagen realised something must be
done, and soon, for those on the Reich's list of state enemies, the majority
of whom were refugee artists living in France. Once the Germans invaded, as
everyone was predicting, they were finished.
Within weeks, Hagen established, in New York, the Emergency Rescue Committee
(ERC) to get these artists out. And to oversee the work in France, he hired
Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated intellectual of immense probity. In Fry,
Hagen knew he had a man who would stand up to fascist functionaries and get
those on the Nazi list out of France.
In August 1940, with $3,000 taped to his leg and a list of 200 names, Varian
Fry arrived in Marseille, then part of Vichy or unoccupied France. He
quickly established the Centre Américain de Secours (CAS) in that port city
and recruited staff to run his office, a mix of French, British, Romanian
and American nationals.
Fry lasted 15 months before he was deported. During that time 20,000
refugees approached him for help. Stretching his mandate as far as he dared,
he took 4,000 into the care of the CAS. He gave financial support to 600,
helped 1,500 to leave legally and illegally, and evacuated 300 British
soldiers and officers. He also established a dozen communities around Grass
and a charcoal business in the Var where refugees could work and hide. From
1942, after Fry's departure, up to the Liberation, the CAS helped a further
300 to escape.
Though these figures are simple, the individual stories of the refugees and
those who helped them are not. Sullivan has had to be selective, and her
choices are uniformly judicious. Her principal characters are Fry, of
course; Fry's English-speaking French assistant, Danny Bénédite; Bénédite's
British wife Theo; Mary Jayne Gold, the American heiress who partly
bankrolled the CAS; and the most famous of the artists saved by the CAS: Max
Ernst, the painter; André Breton, the writer; and, my favourite, Victor
Serge, the great anti-communist, anti-Stalinist and anti-fascist author of
the penal classic Men in Prison. Finally, there is the thing that allows
Sullivan to bring all the strands together and the most important character
of all in the story, the Villa Air-Bel, the decrepit mansion outside
Marseille that Fry rented and used to shelter many of his refugees - Ernst,
Breton and Serge included - while they waited for the papers to come that
would allow them to leave France.
As a piece of narrative Villa Air-Bel is considerable. It tells a number of
individual stories - about 40 - brilliantly and it places them in context.
Furthermore, as one would expect, the style is beautifully clear and
concise. It also illuminates a little known but important aspect of the
history of the second World War. I knew nothing about the CAS until I opened
this book and I am grateful to the author for informing me.
But more important, not to mention timely, is what this book tells us about
how things go wrong. The excesses of the Vichy regime, the Drancy interment
camp outside Paris, and the voluntary transfer of 75,000 Jews, most of whom
were French nationals, by other French nationals, bureaucrats and policemen,
to the Germans, who then murdered them, didn't happen by accident. These
things happened because of decisions made by politicians, often years before
the war started, which in turn created the conditions that made genocide
possible. Sullivan shows us, through the stories she tells, exactly what
those decisions were, as well as their dire consequences.
Fry did a lot to alleviate human misery, but what he achieved in comparison
to the suffering caused by Vichy and her allies was small: it is a
melancholy truth but the achievements of good men and women will always be
minor while the harm done by malevolent politicians and their states will
always be major. That was the way of the world back in the 1940s, and that
is the way of the world now. Nothing changes except in one respect: now,
arguably, we know more than they did about horror, or we should, because
today we have a book like this, which explains in the clearest possible
language what happened when politicians forgot it was their duty to leave
the world a better place than they found it, and decided instead to leave it
in a worse state. In which case, surely, there must be an argument that
Sullivan's book should be mandatory reading for contemporary politicians -
and I mean all of them, not just the despots. It would certainly do them no
harm.
Carlo Gébler is a writer. His play Silhouette was recently performed at the
Tricycle Theatre in London, as part of How Long is Never, an evening of
short plays exploring the current situation in Darfur, western Sudan
Villa Air-Bel: The Second World War, Escape and a House in France By
Rosemary Sullivan John Murray, 477pp. £25.00
LOAD-DATE: November 11, 2006
Copyright 2006 The Guardian, a division
of Transcontinental Media Group Inc.
All Rights Reserved
The Guardian (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island)
October 26, 2006 Thursday
SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. C10
LENGTH: 475 words
HEADLINE: Bio brings Graham Bell to life
BYLINE: CP
BODY:
When biographer Charlotte Gray was writing Reluctant Genius, her magisterial
life of Alexander Graham Bell, she did not anticipate that it would be
controversial.
Yet as she has travelled across Canada and the U.S. promoting her highly
readable book, she was berated by interviewers and callers to phone-in shows
who believe that Italian-American Antonio Meucci, not Bell, was the first to
invent the telephone. (In 2002, the Italian lobby got the U.S. House of
Representatives to pass a resolution to that effect.)
"There is no proof," says Gray smoothly, pointing out that Meucci did not
launch a patent challenge when Bell received his patent for the "speaking
telephone" in 1878. "He claims to have thought of it 10 years earlier, but
did not create a prototype or take out a patent. Invention is not about
having an idea; it is also about making it work and patenting it."
The award-winning, Ottawa-based writer is the only one to present a
biography at this year's International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront,
now taking place.
It is not a fertile time for biography. The only other notable Canadian
biographies this year have been Private Demons: The Tragic Personal Life of
John A. Macdonald by Patricia Phenix and The Half- Lives of Pat Lowther by
Christine Wiesenthal, the story of the murdered poet that has been nominated
for a Governor General's Award.
"The 1990s was a great period for biography; biographies by Deirdre Bair and
Michael Holroyd were pouring off the press," says Rosemary Sullivan, who has
previously written the lives of three women writers: Elizabeth Smart,
Gwendolyn MacEwen and Margaret Atwood. "Then in early 2000, it was memoirs
and autobiography. I don't think we feel now that by reading the biography
of the great we can get a handle on the anxieties that surround us."
Sullivan read at the festival on Sunday from her new book "The Villa Air-Bel:
World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille" about a group of remarkable
artists and writers, including Max Ernst and Andre Breton, sharing a house
in Vichy, France, while awaiting rescue by a private American relief
organization headed by classics scholar Varian Fry.
She is now interested in writing about groups of people who affect one
another rather than individuals.
"I wanted to see what happens to artists in a war u who becomes a refugee
and who doesn't see the danger in time? Who finds the courage to become a
rescuer? I would call my book a biographical history," Sullivan says.
"You need a lot of money to do the research, the travel, the archival
research and it takes years," says Sullivan, suggesting another reason why
good biographies do not appear more often.
"My advance for the Elizabeth Smart book was $7,500 in 1989 and for Gwen
MacEwen, not much more."
Work on her latest book was supported by the Camargo Foundation in France
and other grants.
LOAD-DATE: October 26, 2006
Copyright 2006 Toronto Star Newspapers,
Ltd.
The Toronto Star
October 25, 2006 Wednesday
SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. E01
LENGTH: 747 words
HEADLINE: Bio brings Bell to life
BYLINE: Judy Stoffman, Toronto Star
BODY:
When biographer Charlotte Gray was writing Reluctant Genius, her majesterial
life of Alexander Graham Bell, she did not anticipate that it would be
controversial.
Yet as she has travelled across Canada and the U.S. promoting her highly
readable book, she was berated by interviewers and callers to phone-in shows
who believe that Italian-American Antonio Meucci, not Bell, was the first to
invent the telephone. (In 2002, the Italian lobby got the U.S. House of
Representatives to pass a resolution to that effect.)
"There is no proof," says Gray smoothly, pointing out that Meucci did not
launch a patent challenge when Bell received his patent for the "speaking
telephone" in 1878. "He claims to have thought of it 10 years earlier, but
did not create a prototype or take out a patent. Invention is not about
having an idea; it is also about making it work and patenting it."
The award-winning, Ottawa-based writer is the only one to present a
biography at the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront this
year. She will speak about Reluctant Genius tonight at at 8 p.m. at the
Premiere Dance Theatre.
It is not a fertile time for biography. The only other notable Canadian
biographies this year have been Private Demons: The Tragic Personal Life of
John A. Macdonald by Patricia Phenix and the Half-Lives of Pat Lowther by
Christine Wiesenthal, the story of the murdered poet that has been nominated
for a Governor General's Award.
"The 1990s was a great period for biography; biographies by Deirdre Bair and
Michael Holroyd were pouring off the press," says Rosemary Sullivan, who has
previously written the lives of three women writers: Elizabeth Smart,
Gwendolyn MacEwen and Margaret Atwood. "Then in early 2000, it was memoirs
and autobiography. I don't think we feel now that by reading the biography
of the great we can get a handle on the anxieties that surround us."
Sullivan read at the festival on Sunday from her new book The Villa Air-Bel:
World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille about a group of remarkable
artists and writers, including Max Ernst and Andre Breton, sharing a house
in Vichy, France, while awaiting rescue by a private American relief
organization headed by classics scholar Varian Fry.
She is now interested in writing about groups of people who affect one
another rather than individuals.
"I wanted to see what happens to artists in a war - who becomes a refugee
and who doesn't see the danger in time? Who finds the courage to become a
rescuer? I would call my book a biographical history," Sullivan says.
"You need a lot of money to do the research, the travel, the archival
resarch and it takes years," says Sullivan, suggesting another reason why
good biographies do not appear more often.
"My advance for the Elizabeth Smart book was $7,500 in 1989 and for Gwen
MacEwen, not much more."
Work on her latest book was supported by the Camargo Foundation in France
and other grants.
Gray worked for five years on Reluctant Genius, though she paused to take on
other projects.
She traced Bell's life from Scotland, where he was born, to Brantford, Ont.,
where he immigrated with his parents as a young man, but left after only
eight months to become a teacher of deaf children in Boston.
It was there that he met and fell deliriously in love with his lively and
intelligent deaf teenage student, Mabel Hubbard. In Reluctant Genius, her
fourth biography, Gray does full justice to their remarkable partnership.
She had initially thought of writing the life of Hubbard, after seeing a
picture of her in the Bell museum at Baddeck, N.S., on a family holiday with
her husband and three sons.
"She reminded me of the women who used to teach me: brainy, intellectual,
untidy, looking as though she had gone through a hedge backwards," recalls
the British-born writer, a graduate of Oxford University.
She called Ainsley MacFarland, director of the museum, which is located near
the Bells' former summer home, and asked if anyone else was working on a
biography (no) and if there were papers available (were there ever).
Because Hubbard was too deaf to use the telephone, the couple wrote each
other hundreds of letters when separated and these had all been preserved.
Other biographies of Bell have appeared, of course, but they have been
mostly written for children or they have had an emphasis on, for example,
his scientific achievements or his life in Scotland.
"The last complete biography was by a scientist Robert Bruce, published in
1973," Gray says.
GRAPHIC: Ron Bull toronto star Charlotte Gray will speak about her biography
of Alexander Graham Bell, Reluctant Genius, at the authors festival.
LOAD-DATE: October 25, 2006
Copyright 2006 Micromedia Limited
All Rights Reserved
Canadian Business and Current Affairs
Copyright 2006 Canadian Jewish News
Canadian Jewish News
October 19, 2006
SECTION: Pg. 44 Vol. 36 No. 42 ISSN: 0008-3941
ACC-NO: 1158490911
LENGTH: 1257 words
HEADLINE: American idealist aided artists, intellectuals in Vichy France
BYLINE: Kirshner, Sheldon
BODY:
American idealist aided artists, intellectuals in Vichy France
Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille by Rosemary
Sullivan, HarperCollins.
Varian Fry, a young American idealist, arrived in Nazi-occupied France on
Aug. 15, 1941, a sum of $3,000 in cash taped to his leg. Clad in a Brooks
Brothers pinstriped suit, he also carried a sleeping bag and an air
mattress, a list of 200 European artists and intellectuals he intended to
help and letters of introduction from the U.S State Department.
So began one of the most intriguing, if little-known, humanitarian missions
of World War II.
A 32-year-old Harvard graduate, Fry went to France as the representative of
the American Emergency Rescue Committee, which had been established to
assist the artistic elite of Europe.
As part of its capitulation to Germany in June 1940, Vichy France agreed to
"surrender on demand" all German nationals and citizens of conquered
countries who had publicly expressed criticism of the Nazi regime and had
fled to France seeking asylum.
The individuals Germany sought to extradite were both Jewish and Christian,
and included novelist Thomas Mann and painter Marc Chagall. Fry's intention
was to whisk them out of France as soon as possible, lest they be interned
and/or murdered by the rapacious Nazis.
As they waited for their exit visas, some found a temporary haven in Villa
Air-Bel, an imposing, three-storey, 18-room mansion on a hill outside the
southern French port of Marseille. It had been expressly rented to
accommodate them.
Rosemary Sullivan, a professor of English at the University of Toronto and
an award-winning biographer, has written a vivid account of this episode.
Villa Air-Bel: World War H, Escape and a House in Marseille is a strong
narrative work that burnishes her reputation as a meticulous researcher and
a fluid writer.
Sullivan, whose biographies of Canadian literary figures Margaret Atwood and
Gwendolyn MacEwen are already classics, has a gift for humanizing history.
And in Villa Air-Bel, this is precisely what she achieves.
The central character, Fry, is a handsome, charismatic man who had a passion
for liberal political causes. A magazine editor until his sojourn in France,
he felt that the United States should jettison its isolationist policy, stop
Adolf Hitler in his tracks and help imperilled progressive Europeans.
Fry's interest in, and commitment to, such causes was cemented by a trip to
swastika-bedecked Berlin in 1935, where he witnessed a random anti-Semitic
attack on an elderly Jewish couple. The ugly incident galvanized him, and in
the years to come, he would extend a helping hand to refugees in France.
With Hitler's accession to power in 1933, many Jews and dissidents fled
Germany, bound for France. At first, they were warmly received, though
right-wing newspapers regarded them as "German invaders who were taking the
bread out of French mouths."
With the fall of Leon Blum's Popular Front government in 1938, during the
depths of the Depression, the refugees found themselves on hard times. The
new prime minister, Edouard Daladier, a supporter of appeasement, declared
that the refugees were no longer worthy of French hospitality and should be
"controlled."
Rightists, meanwhile, called for their internment. Eventually, the refugees
were dispatched to internment camps. Among them were Otto Meyerhoff, the
winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize in medicine, and Thadeus Reichstein, the
discoverer of cortisone and the recipient of the 1950 Nobel Prize for
medicine.
Conditions for the refugees deteriorated after France's defeat in the war.
As Sullivan says, they lived in constant fear of being deported.
When Fry reached Marseille in the summer of 1941, refugees who sought to
escape the hell of Vichy France needed several documents: a safe-conduct
pass to travel within France; an exit permit to leave the country; a transit
visa to travel overland via Spain and Portugal to board a ship in Lisbon; a
visa to a country willing to accept them.
Thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt, President Franklin Roosevelt's humane wife, Fry
had acquired quasi-diplomatic status when he arrived in Marseille. Fry
assumed that he could get the job done within a matter of weeks and return
to New York City by the end of August. But in October, he prolonged his
visit, informing his wife in a cable that he could not "abandon" the
refugees in his care.
Varian Fry
Several days later, the Vichy regime enacted new anti-Semitic regulations,
the statut des juifs, and authorized the internment of "all foreign Jews in
camps" or in "residences in remote villages where they could remain under
the watchful eyes of the local police."
To assist the refugees in distress, Fry and his confreres rented Villa Air-Bel
and established the Centre Americain de secours (CAS).
They also enlisted the services of two German dissidents, Lisa and Hans
Fittko, to guide refugees over the Pyrenees mountains to safety in neutral
Spain. One of their "clients" was the renowned German-Jewish philosopher
Walter Benjamin. Having reached a Spanish border post, he was callously told
that he could not proceed any farther. In despondency, he committed suicide.
A priceless manuscript he had carried in his briefcases disappeared, never
to resurface.
Sullivan's chapters on the Fittkos and on political developments in Europe
that impinged on the lives of refugees are interesting, though slightly
padded. But the beating heart of her book concerns Air-Bel, the rambling
villa where the reftigees while away their days while waiting for their
travel papers to the United States. The villa, she notes, provided "a
respite from harsher realities" just outside its portals. In Marseille, for
example, Jews were being victimized.
Sullivan portrays American diplomats in Marseille as heartless creatures who
curried favour with Vichy and could not care a whit about Fry and his
project. When the U.S. consul there, Hugh Fullerton, called Fry into his
office for a chat, he could only tell him that the Vichy regime was
"uncomfortable" with his "refugee work."
The police inevitably raided Air-Bel and summoned Fry for a grilling. After
he was arrested, Fry was forced to leave France. Vichy could do without
troublemakers like him. With Fry gone, Air-Bel was summarily emptied of its
residents. But by that point, Fry had accomplished a lot.
Over a period of one and a half years, he managed to protect more than 4,000
refugees, facilitated the departure of 1,500 people from France and threw a
financial lifeline to 600 others.
With the Air-Bel interregnum behind him, Fry became a freelance writer and
teacher. Five months before his death on Sept. 12, 1967, just shy of his
60th birthday, France belatedly honoured him for his good deeds. In 1996,
Yad Vashem - the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem - posthumously named Fry as
a righteous gentile.
During his lifetime, the United States never officially recognized his
heroic actions, though Warren Christopher, a U.S. secretary of state,
belatedly conveyed apologies to Fry on behalf of Americans.
At Fry's funeral, the Jewish sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, whom Fry had helped,
said in a eulogy, "He was like a racehorse hitched to a wagonload of
stones." These poetic words spoke volumes.
In closing, Sullivan adds that Villa Air-Bel was torn down in 1970 and
replaced by a faceless apartment complex for new immigrants, mainly North
Africans. One can probably assume that they have never heard of Villa Air-Bel,
which, after Sullivan's book, has taken on a life of its own.
By SHELDON KIRSHNER
Staff Reporter
GRAPHIC: Photographs
LOAD-DATE: November 13, 2006
Copyright 2006 Rodgers Publishing Ltd.
All Rights Reserved
Maclean's
October 16, 2006
SECTION: THE BACK PAGES; books; MACLEAN'S; Pg. 74
LENGTH: 150 words
HEADLINE: BESTSELLERS
BYLINE: COMPILED BY BRIAN BETHUNE
BODY:
LAST WEEK
(WEEKS ON LIST)
Fiction
1. MISSION SONG by John le Carré 3 (3)
2. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BRIDGE (1)
by Mary Lawson
3. THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK 1 (3)
by Alice Munro
4. MORAL DISORDER 2 (4)
by Margaret Atwood
5. THE CUSTODIAN OF PARADISE 4 (3)
by Wayne Johnston
6. KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK AND WHITE
by Jack Whyte 8 (7)
7. SUITE FRANÇAISE 5 (23)
by Irène Némirovsky
8. THE FEARSOME PARTICLES (1)
by Trevor Cole
9. BEFORE I WAKE 7 (5)
by Robert Wiersema
10. THE BIRTH HOUSE by Ami McKay 9 (27)
Non-fiction
1. HEART MATTERS 1 (3)
by Adrienne Clarkson
2. THE WAY IT WORKS (1)
by Eddie Goldenberg
3. THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS
by Alain de Botton (1)
4. NIXON IN CHINA (1)
by Margaret MacMillan
5. RELUCTANT GENIUS 2 (3)
by Charlotte Gray
6. BAY OF SPIRITS 3 (2)
by Farley Mowat
7. THIS IS MY COUNTRY, WHAT'S YOURS?
by Noah Richler 4 (4)
8. CAUSEWAY 5 (2)
by Linden MacIntyre
9. VILLA AIR-BEL by Rosemary Sullivan (1)
10. MURDER IN AMSTERDAM 10 (3)
by Ian Buruma
LOAD-DATE: October 13, 2006
Copyright 2006 Edmonton Journal, a
division of Canwest MediaWorks Publication Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Edmonton Journal (Alberta)
October 15, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition
SECTION: SUNDAY READER - BOOKS & AUTHORS; Pg. D12
LENGTH: 762 words
HEADLINE: Remembering the prince of Air-Bel
BYLINE: Candace Fertile, Freelance
BODY:
VILLA AIR-BEL
Rosemary Sullivan
HarperCollins Canada
426 pp., $34.95
Rosemary Sullivan, a University of Toronto English professor, has several
non-fiction books to her credit, and Villa Air-Bel is a wonderful addition.
She manages to combine solid scholarship with a snappy writing style, and
this makes for a history book that is completely riveting.
Villa Air-Bel was a house on the outskirts of Marseilles that served as a
communal home for workers with the Centre Americain de Secours (CAS), an
agency funded by the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief
organization. The CAS had a mandate to rescue intellectuals from the mess of
Vichy France, and over its short life (1940-41) it enabled almost 2,000
people to escape and gave financial support to many others.
Sullivan launches the history effectively with a brief narrative about the
attempted escape of three stateless people through the Pyrenees to Spain.
They are led by Lisa Fittko, who, with her husband Hans, guided many people
to safety.
But this particular trip demonstrates the perils facing those who try to
escape. The three are stopped at the Spanish border because they don't have
the proper papers. One commits suicide that night in a Spanish hotel. His
name: Walter Benjamin. The celebrated philosopher couldn't bear the idea of
being sent back to France and then, likely, to a German concentration camp.
Although Benjamin had lived in France for seven years, he didn't have French
citizenship. The catch-22 is clear. "No one could leave France without an
exit visa," Sullivan writes. "And Vichy officials weren't about to give a
visa to someone as famous as Benjamin, who was, in any case, probably on the
Nazis' blacklist. Benjamin had to be smuggled out." He was only 48.
This opening immediately grabs the reader's attention, and Sullivan never
releases her grip. Using both personal and public events, beginning in 1929,
she creates a compelling history of the immense bravery of people who strove
to combat unbelievable power structures gone spectacularly awry.
The key figures in this history are wildly varied. Mary Jayne Gold was a
fabulously wealthy American who loved France and used her money to assist
many people. The CAS was run by Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated American who
had witnessed violence against Jews in Berlin in 1935. Fry was aided by
Danny Benedite, a Frenchman, and his wife, Theo, who was British. A young
American named Miriam Davenport, who had been studying art history at the
University of Paris, was quickly taken on by Fry.
The Americans could have left, but they were committed to trying to save
people and so stayed as long as they could. Fry ignored requests to return
to the United States.
The intellectuals who were aided include surrealist Andre Breton and his
wife Jacqueline Lamba, Victor Serge (a survivor of Stalin's purge of the
Bolsheviks), Max Ernst, French poet Benjamin Peret and the Catalan painter
Remedios Varo.
The whole list of people involved is a veritable Who's Who of the early
20th-century cultural milieu. Austrian novelist Joseph Roth drinks himself
to death in Paris in 1939, but not before warning German poet Walter Mehring
and his literary agents, Hertha Pauli and Carli Frucht, to get out of
Europe.
Standing in counterpoint to the brutality of the Nazis and their French
collaborators is the freedom of Paris before the war and occupation. And
then there are the countless brave individuals who fought to save lives,
through legal channels and otherwise.
Danny Benedite was arrested for trying to trade gold on the black market, as
the CAS needed cash to continue its efforts. Sullivan shows the seamy side
of Marseilles and the centre's links with criminals in its quest to save
human beings.
Villa Air-Bel is history at its best: It brings individuals to life and
explains the national and international forces at work. And it shows the
importance of learning history. As Lisa Fittko (a Jew from Berlin) remarked:
"Inhumanity is typical of fascism, not characteristic of a nation, I try to
explain. Only the structures change. One would so like to believe that the
character of the German people was responsible. For then one could also
believe that it could never happen here. Those who so believe have not
learned anything."
Given the current world situation, I can't help but think that the lessons
of history haven't been learned. Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel is a
valiant effort to explore and emphasize those lessons, so necessary to
remind us of people's both good and evil actions.
Candace Fertile is a freelance reviewer
GRAPHIC:
Photo: Varian Fry;
Colour Photo: VILLA AIR-BEL Rosemary Sullivan
LOAD-DATE: October 15, 2006
Copyright 2006 The Seattle Times
Company
The Seattle Times
October 8, 2006 Sunday
Fourth Edition
SECTION: ROP ZONE; Books; Pg. K10
LENGTH: 740 words
HEADLINE: WWII hero liberated 2,000 refugees
BYLINE: David Laskin, Special to The Seattle Times
BODY:
"Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille"
by Rosemary Sullivan
HarperCollins, 476 pp., $26.95
When the German Army rolled into Paris without breaking a sweat in June
1940, some of Europe's leading artists, writers, philosophers and
intellectuals were among the millions of refugees who fled south to the
so-called Zone Libre.
With Paris now an outpost of Hitler's Reich, Marseille became the city of
last resort for the likes of André Breton, Max Ernst, Simone Weil, Hannah
Arendt and Walter Benjamin. "Here is a beggar's alley gathering the remnants
of revolutions, democracies and crushed intellects," wrote the Russian
refugee writer Victor Serge of wartime Marseille.
Though the U.S. government did next to nothing for these gifted "remnants,"
a group in New York hastily organized an Emergency Relief Committee to get
as many of them as possible out of France before it was too late. The
committee chose as its unlikely emissary a young, bespectacled,
Harvard-educated classics scholar named Varian Fry. Fry's astonishing
success in helping high-profile refugees notably the surrealists Breton,
Ernst and their circle escape to Mexico, the U.S. and Switzerland is the
subject of "Villa Air-Bel," Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan's fascinating,
occasionally maddening book.
Fry arrived in Marseille in August 1940, an innocent abroad with $3,000 in
cash taped to his leg and with plans to remain four weeks. Over the next 13
months, in the service of his cause, he learned to bluster, lie, scheme,
coerce, face down the increasingly vicious French authorities and work
around the hostile U.S. consul. By the time French police deported Fry late
in the summer of 1941, he and his colleagues had gotten some 2,000 people
out of the "Fascist hell" of Vichy France.
Like Irène Némirovsky in the recently published novel "Suite Française,"
Sullivan tries to fashion a narrative about the fall of France by tracing
multiple complexly intersecting story lines, though, of course, Sullivan's
"stories" are true. Her protagonists are the individuals some celebrated,
many obscure who holed up with Fry in a grand dilapidated mansion on the
outskirts of Marseille called Villa Air-Bel.
As Europe fell to the Nazi nightmare, the villa's residents Breton, Serge, a
plucky American heiress named Mary Jayne Gold and others shared meager meals
and gossip, played surrealist parlor games, wrote, painted, hid stolen
documents and waited frantically for the money and papers that would allow
them to get out. Sullivan's chapters set at the villa read like a cross
between "Casablanca" and Sherill Tippins' "February House," about the
Brooklyn brownstone that W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and
other assorted Bohemians shared around the same time.
Unfortunately, before she gets to Marseille, Sullivan gives us 100 odd pages
of historical background, from the rise of fascism to the Spanish Civil War
to the folly and blindness that led to the fall of France, all of it
filtered through the eyes of the key characters. Her intent is to make us
smell the smoke and feel the fear, but too often it leads to awkward, forced
passages.
Though the cream of Europe's midcentury intelligentsia crowds the pages of
"Villa Air-Bel," the stubborn, moody, fiercely idealistic Fry is its most
fascinating figure. "He was like a racehorse hitched to a wagon load of
stones," artist Jacques Lipchitz said of Fry at his funeral in 1967.
A hero in France both to the artists he rescued and the loyal staff who
helped him, Fry riled the ERC board for his blunt criticism of the U.S.
State Department. He was fired soon after returning to New York in the fall
of 1941 and spent the rest of the war indeed the rest of his life battling
alienation and depression. Only in 1996 did the State Department officially
recognize Fry's heroism and apologize that the U.S. government had never
given him the support he deserved.
Sullivan would have had a better book had she pared away the padding and let
Fry hold center stage throughout.
David Laskin is the author of "The Children's Blizzard" and "Partisans:
Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals."
Author appearance
Rosemary Sullivan discusses "Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a
House in Marseille," 7 p.m. Oct. 18, presented by University Book Store at
Seattle Public Library, Ballard branch, Seattle; free (206-634-3400 or
www.ubookstore.com; 206-684-4089 or www.spl.org).
LOAD-DATE: October 9, 2006
Copyright 2006 Micromedia Limited
All Rights Reserved
Canadian Business and Current Affairs
Copyright 2006 Canadian Press
Canadian Press NewsWire
October 5, 2006
SECTION: Pg. n/a
ACC-NO: 1144639291
LENGTH: 172 words
HEADLINE: John le Carre's "Mission Song" regains top spot on Maclean's
fiction list
BODY:
TORONTO (CP) - Here are the top 10 hardcover fiction and non-fiction books
in Canada compiled by Maclean's magazine. Bracketed figures indicate
position the previous week.
FICTION
1 (3) Mission Song - John le Carre
2 (_) The Other Side of the Bridge - Mary Lawson
3 (1) The View from Castle Rock - Alice Munro
4 (2) Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood
5 (4) The Custodian of Paradise - Wayne Johnston
6 (8) Knights of the Black and White - Jack Whyte
7 (5) Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky
8 (_) The Fearsome Particles - Trevor Cole
9 (7) Before I Wake - Robert Wiersema
10 (9) The Birth House - Ami McKay
NON-FICTION
1 (1) Heart Matters - Adrienne Clarkson
2 (_) The Way it Works - Eddie Goldenberg
3 (_) The Architecture of Happines - Alain de Botton
4 (_) Nixon in China - Margaret MacMillan
5 (2) Reluctant Genius - Charlotte Gray
6 (3) Bay of Spirits - Farley Mowat
7 (4) This is My Country, What's Yours? - Noah Richler
8 (5) Causeway - Linden MacIntyre
9 (_) Villa Air-Bel - Rosemary Sullivan
10 (10) Murder in Amsterdam - Ian Buruma 08:37ET 05-10-06
LOAD-DATE: October 17, 2006
from Amazon.com
8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Earlier "Crossroads Marseilles 1940" is better,
October 5, 2006
The "book description" above states that this book
"explores the diaries, memoirs, and letters of the
individuals involved." "Explore" may not be the
right word.
One of the main figures in "Villa Air-Bel" is
beautiful heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who initially
rented the villa and spent 1940-41 in Marseille torn
between her participation in the remarkable rescue
effort run by fellow American Varian Fry--and her
affair with a young French gangster. She told it
all, very flavorfully, in her published 1980 memoir,
"Crossroads Marseilles 1940"--on which the new book,
without permission, draws extensively and slavishly.
Check it out!
Copyright 2006 Toronto Star Newspapers,
Ltd.
The Toronto Star
October 1, 2006 Sunday
SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. D06
LENGTH: 901 words
HEADLINE: THE YANK WHO SAVED THE ELITE
BODY:
Americans are in low repute these days. When I mention that I was once one
myself (something I bring up less and less often), the first thing out of
people's mouths are the names of foreign places where Americans are behaving
badly - Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha.
Yet it was not so long ago that foreign places seemed to bring out the best
in Americans. In the '20s and '30s Paris inspired Fitzgerald, Hemingway and
other ex-pats. In the late '30s Spain attracted the young leftists who
joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And for one year, from 1940 to 1941,
Marseilles was the base of operations for an unsung hero named Varian Fry.
Some 4,000 Europeans, most of them artists or writers who had run afoul of
the Nazis, owed their lives to this remarkable man. He is the subject of
Villa Air-Bel by Toronto's Rosemary Sullivan. The title, which takes its
name from the villa Fry used to shelter his more famous refugees, is perhaps
misleading, for this is really a collection of biographies - of Fry, the
people who helped him, and the people he helped.
This approach plays to Sullivan's strengths. She is the author of three
critically acclaimed biographies, each featuring a Canadian woman writer -
Margaret Atwood in The Red Shoes, Elizabeth Smart in By Heart, and Gwendolyn
MacEwen in Shadow Maker. Whether this is the best way to tell a story
involving thousands of people is less clear.
What is clear is that Sullivan has unearthed the perfect story. There is a
ramshackle villa to give it atmosphere, a war to give it a sense of
foreboding. There is a deeply flawed hero (Fry). There are collaborators and
tough-talking Americans, amorous heiresses and starving artists, and, to
complete the analogy to Casablanca, a Vichy police inspector who whisks the
hero to safety.
Fry was the right man at the right time. A Harvard graduate and the husband
of an editor for the Atlantic Monthly, he had the right social connections.
He spoke French and German. Most importantly, he was an idealist with time
on his hands.
In August of 1940, he arrived in Marseilles with $3,000 and a letter of
introduction from the U.S. State Department. He was acting at the behest of
the hastily convened Emergency Rescue Committee, and his mandate was as
ambitious as it was open-ended: to "attempt to locate, and to aid with
counsel and money as directed, certain individuals whom this Committee will
specify, so that they may reach Lisbon or Casablanca."
With the help of several volunteers, he set up shop in the Hotel Splendide,
processing refugee claims by day and throwing loud parties by night. The
American consulate refused to help. The Vichy police harassed him.
When their activities became too conspicuous, one of his American friends
rented a villa just outside Marseilles. There the parties continued as its
nervous occupants waited for the visas that would give them safe passage to
America. (One, the Russian writer Victor Serge, renamed it Villa Espervisa,
short for "hoping for a visa.")
It was the crowning moment of Fry's life. After it, everything disappointed
him - his wife, the people who had sent him to Europe, the State Department
that had done so little to help him. His sponsors in New York disowned him.
So did Eleanor Roosevelt, who had used her influence to help him secure
visas. He had "done things which the government does not feel it can stand
behind," she wrote in a curt letter to Fry's wife.
Recognition came late. In 1967, just six months before his death, he was
made a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. In 1996, when he was posthumously
honoured at Israel's Holocaust Memorial, Secretary of State Warren
Christopher issued a formal apology.
Villa Air-Bel starts as a morally unambiguous tale. On one side there are
the Nazis; on the other, the artists and writers they persecuted. It ends
with shades of grey. Fry was a hero to the people he saved, but a scoundrel
to his wife, divorcing her shortly after returning to the States. For the
4,000 people he helped, there were the 16,000 or more he did not. The famous
were deemed worth saving, but why not the obscure?
There is an even larger and more disturbing question the book raises, one
that Thomas Mann, himself a refugee from Hitler's Germany, famously asked in
1947 in Doctor Faustus: Why were intellectuals and artists so powerless to
save themselves and their civilization?
The answer, I suspect, lies in one of the stories Sullivan tells about Max
Ernst and his lover Leonora Carrington. It is meant to show their joie de
vivre, but I can't help reading something else into it: a failure to
confront evil in a serious and effective way. There they were, in the early
days of the war, staging a surrealist play in the tiny French village of
Saint-Martin d'Ardeche. According to one stunned witness, their hair dyed
blue, Ernst "played a surgeon extracting kilometres of Leonora's intestines
... and she danced the dance of the Hindu cockroach on the cafe tables."
And one wonders why the puppeteers who picket George Bush's appearances are
making so little headway.
Jessica Warner is a scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
and the author of Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason and The
Incendiary: the Misadventures of John the Painter. She is writing a history
of American abstinence movements.
Villa Air-Bel:
World War II, Escape,
and a House in Marseille
by Rosemary Sullivan,
HarperCollins, 476 pages, $34.95
GRAPHIC: FROM 'VILLA BEL-AIR' (HARPERCOLLINS) French Resistance hero Danny
Benedite hangs paintings by Max Ernst on a tree at Villa Air-Bel near
Marseilles.
LOAD-DATE: October 1, 2006
Copyright 2006 The Gazette, a division
of CanWest MediaWorks Publication Inc.
All Rights Reserved
The Gazette (Montreal)
September 30, 2006 Saturday
Final Edition
SECTION: WEEKEND: BOOKS; Pg. J5
LENGTH: 862 words
HEADLINE: Firm resolve, in desperate times: Rosemary Sullivan tells the
story of varian fry
BYLINE: ELAINE KALMAN NAVES, Freelance
BODY:
VILLA AIR-BEL: WORLD WAR II, ESCAPE AND A HOUSE IN MARSEILLE
By Rosemary Sullivan
HarperCollins, 496 pages, $34.95
"Imagine the situation: the borders closed; you're caught in a trap, might
be arrested at any moment; life is as good as over - and suddenly a young
American in shirt sleeves is stuffing your pocket full of money, putting his
arm around your shoulders and whispering in a poor imitation of a
conspirator's manner: 'Oh, there are ways to get you out of here,' while
damn it, the tears were streaming down my face, actual tears ... and that
pleasant fellow ... takes a silk handkerchief from his jacket and says:
'Here, have this. Sorry it isn't cleaner.' "
German-Jewish critic and translator Hans Sahl, in paying homage to the
heroic individual who helped him flee to safety in the United States,
encapsulates the maelstrom in which thousands of persecuted European
refugees found themselves in France during the Second World War.
The man with the money and the handkerchief, variously described as the
"quiet American" (in Andy Marino's biography) and the "Artists' Schindler"
(in David Kerr's 1997 documentary film) was Varian Fry, a young American
classicist, journalist and editor. Fry's story lies at the heart of Rosemary
Sullivan's complex and magisterial historical study Villa Air-Bel: World War
II, Escape and a House in Marseille. In non-fiction format, Villa Air-Bel
neatly complements Irene Nemirovsky's recently discovered exquisite novel,
Suite Francaise.
Both books take as their backdrop the fall of France in June 1940 when,
after six weeks of war, the French government signed an armistice with Nazi
Germany.
In the preceding years, as storm clouds had gathered over Europe, France had
become a haven for refugees of various stripes, including droves of
expatriate artists and intellectuals, who were persecuted in their homelands
because they were Jews and/or actively involved in anti-Fascist activities.
Under Article 19 of the Franco-German armistice, the Vichy government
consented "to surrender on demand" all these exiles who had sought asylum in
France.
"How is it," Sullivan asks, "that a peaceful country, committed to
principles of freedom and democracy, suddenly finds itself not simply
invaded by a foreign army, but ruled by an authoritarian regime with its own
Fascist ideology?" In the blink of an eye, the most pressing threat to the
refugees became not the German enemy, but French collaborators and
bureaucrats willing to play the Nazis' game.
Wrote the Russian emigre Victor Serge: "In our ranks are enough doctors,
psychologists, engineers, educationists, poets, painters, writers,
musicians, economists and public men to vitalize a whole great country. Our
wretchedness contains as much talent and expertise as Paris could in the
days of her prime; and nothing of it is visible, only hunted, terribly tired
men at the limit of their nervous resources."
Recounting the lead-up to the main action, Sullivan sets out how a
staggering number of refugees - nearly 200,000 - teemed to Marseille in the
summer of 1940, overwhelming a city of 650,000. Among the 1,500 whom Fry and
his brave staff at the Centre Americain de Secours - an officially
authorized relief organization - would help escape by legal and illegal
means (forged documents, secret smugglers' routes over the Pyrenees,
black-market funding) were artists Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz
and Wilfredo Lam, and authors Victor Serge, Andre Breton, Walter Mehring and
Hannah Arendt.
Born in 1907, the son of a Wall St. stockbroker, Fry was Harvard-educated,
spoke French and German, had independent political ideas and was fuelled by
moral outrage. On a trip to Berlin in 1935, he had witnessed a particularly
vicious attack upon a Jew. "That scene, scarred on the retina of his eyes
and in his brain, would return to Fry every time he needed to be reminded of
why he was in Fascist France."
He arrived in Marseille Aug. 14, 1940, with a list of 200 names of notables
to save, $3,000 strapped to his leg and a firm resolve. Almost clueless
about the magnitude of the task ahead, he booked his return to the United
States for Aug. 29.
Instead, he stayed 13 months, before being thrown out by the Vichy
government. Shockingly, he was obstructed at every turn by the U.S.
consulate in Marseille and by officials in the United States who viewed his
rescue operations with suspicion and disfavour. On his return home, the FBI
kept him under surveillance.
Nearly 30 years after his death in 1967, Fry was named "Righteous Among the
Nations" by Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, the first American to
be so recognized. At the ceremony, the U.S. Secretary of State apologized
for his government's lack of support for Fry during his lifetime.
Sullivan has brought to this book her experience as the award-winning
biographer of Elizabeth Smart, Gwendolyn MacEwan and Margaret Atwood, and a
flair for vivid language honed by crafting three poetry collections. If at
times her exhaustive research threatens to engulf her tale, she makes amends
with a cast of intensely interesting characters caught in the snare of
desperate times.
Elaine Kalman Naves is a Montreal writer.
GRAPHIC:
Photo: JEWISH MUSEUM, AP; Varian Fry in his office in 1941: Nearly 30 years
after his death in 1967, he was named "Righteous Among the Nations" by
Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.
LOAD-DATE: September 30, 2006
Copyright 2006 The Vancouver Sun, a
division of CanWest MediaWorks Publication Inc.
All Rights Reserved
The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia)
September 30, 2006 Saturday
Final Edition
SECTION: WEEKEND REVIEW; Pg. C10
LENGTH: 1056 words
HEADLINE: The lessons of history: NON-FICTION I Evil is part of human
nature, not a national trait. Combating it in Vichy France were several
brave people determined to rescue intellectuals from the Nazis
BYLINE: Candace Fertile, Special to the Sun
BODY:
VILLA AIR-BEL
World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille
BY ROSEMARY SULLIVAN
HarperCollins Canada, 426 pages ($34.95)
Rosemary Sullivan, a University of Toronto English professor, has several
non-fiction books to her credit, and Villa Air-Bel is a wonderful addition.
She manages to combine solid scholarship with a snappy writing style, and
this makes for a history book that is completely riveting.
Villa Air-Bel was a house on the outskirts of Marseilles that served as a
communal home for workers with the Centre Americain de Secours (CAS), an
agency funded by the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief
organization. The CAS had a mandate to rescue intellectuals from the mess of
Vichy France, and over its short life (1940-41) it enabled almost 2,000
people to escape and gave financial support to many others.
Sullivan launches the history effectively with a brief narrative about the
attempted escape of three stateless people through the Pyrenees to Spain.
They are led by Lisa Fittko, who, with her husband Hans, guided many people
to safety.
But this particular trip demonstrates the perils facing those who try to
escape. The three are stopped at the Spanish border because they don't have
the proper papers. One commits suicide that night in a Spanish hotel. His
name: Walter Benjamin. The celebrated philosopher couldn't bear the idea of
being sent back to France and then, likely, to a German concentration camp.
Although Benjamin had lived in France for seven years, he didn't have French
citizenship. The catch-22 is clear. "No one could leave France without an
exit visa," Sullivan writes. "And Vichy officials weren't about to give a
visa to someone as famous as Benjamin, who was, in any case, probably on the
Nazis' blacklist. Benjamin had to be smuggled out." He was only 48.
This opening immediately grabs the reader's attention, and Sullivan never
releases her grip. Using both personal and public events beginning in 1929,
she creates a compelling history of the immense bravery of people who strove
to combat unbelievable power structures gone spectacularly awry.
The key figures in this history are wildly varied. Mary Jayne Gold was a
fabulously wealthy American who loved France and used her money to assist
many people. The CAS was run by Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated American who
had witnessed violence against Jews in Berlin in 1935. Fry was aided by
Danny Benedite, a Frenchman, and his wife, Theo, who was British. A young
American named Miriam Davenport, who had been studying art history at the
University of Paris, was quickly taken on by Fry.
The Americans could have left, but they were committed to trying to save
people and so stayed as long as they could. Fry ignored requests to return
to the United States.
The intellectuals who were aided include surrealist Andre Breton and his
wife Jacqueline Lamba, Victor Serge (a survivor of Stalin's purge of the
Bolsheviks), Max Ernst, French poet Benjamin Peret and the Catalan painter
Remedios Varo.
The whole list of people involved is a veritable Who's Who of the early
20th-century cultural milieu. Peggy Guggenheim makes an appearance. Austrian
novelist Joseph Roth drinks himself to death in Paris in 1939, but not
before warning German poet Walter Mehring and his literary agents, Hertha
Pauli and Carli Frucht, to get out of Europe.
Artists play a key role in the tragic events as the Nazis use art in their
propaganda. For example, in Munich in 1937, an exhibition of "degenerate
art" was held. Works by Ernst and Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul
Klee, Kathe Kollwitz and Otto Dix were displayed, and they were described as
having "sick minds."
Sullivan does a remarkable job of bringing together the strands of history
and showing how culture can be used and misused. She points out:
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister for public enlightenment and propaganda,
was using modern, experimental art to marshal public hatred. He recognized
that people could easily be made to feel afraid of art, especially art they
didn't understand. He realized the value of a propaganda campaign against
degenerate art. He could locate the enemy, harvest the public's anxiety and
fear of the unfamiliar, and get to be the defender of public morality.
It's not much of a step from attacking art to attacking people. At the
beginning of each chapter, Sullivan includes a quotation or two, and one
from 19th-century poet Heinrich Heine dramatically captures the link between
art and politics: "Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn
human beings." (In 1933, the Nazis burned Heine's works, along with books by
many others, in Berlin's Opernplatz.)
Standing in counterpoint to the brutality of the Nazis and their French
collaborators is the freedom of Paris before the war and occupation. And
then there are the countless brave individuals who fought to save lives,
through legal channels and otherwise.
Danny Benedite was arrested for trying to trade gold on the black market, as
the CAS needed cash to continue its efforts. Sullivan shows the seamy side
of Marseilles and the centre's links with criminals in its quest to save
human beings.
A fascinating side story is Mary Jayne Gold's predilection for danger,
especially dangerous men. She falls in love with Raymond (Killer) Courand, a
gangster, and her naivete about him crosses the border into total stupidity,
jeopardizing the CAS.
Villa Air-Bel is history at its best: It brings individuals to life and
explains the national and international forces at work. And it shows the
importance of learning history. As Lisa Fittko (a Jew from Berlin) remarked,
"Inhumanity is typical of fascism, not characteristic of a nation, I try to
explain. Only the structures change. One would so like to believe that the
character of the German people was responsible. For then one could also
believe that it could never happen here. Those who so believe have not
learned anything."
Given the current world situation, I can't help but think that the lessons
of history haven't been learned. Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel is a
valiant effort to explore and emphasize those lessons, so necessary to
remind us of people's both good and evil actions.
Rosemary Sullivan will appear at next month's Vancouver International
Writers Festival.
Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College in Victoria.
GRAPHIC:
Photo: From Villa Air-Bel, by Rosemary Sullivan; Table talk included Robert
(Beaver) Selmer (left), Miriam Davenport, Mary Jayne Gold, Raymond (KIller)
Courand and Sarge Newman at a restaurant, about 1940, in Vieuxport, France.;
Colour Photo: VILLA AIR-BEL: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille
By Rosemary Sullivan, HarperCollins Canada, 426 pages ($34.95)
LOAD-DATE: September 30, 2006
Copyright 2006 National Post
All Rights Reserved
National Post (f/k/a The Financial Post) (Canada)
September 23, 2006 Saturday
Toronto Edition
SECTION: WEEKEND POST: FALL BOOKS; Pg. WP12
LENGTH: 870 words
HEADLINE: History the house salvation built fall books
BYLINE: Michael Greenstein, Weekend Post
BODY:
VILLA AIR-BEL
By Rosemary Sullivan
HarperCollins Canada
496 pp., $34.95
- - -
Rosemary Sullivan's latest book covers a little-known chapter in the history
of the Second World War: the story of Villa Air-Bel, a dilapidated chateau
on the outskirts of Marseilles that housed refugee artists awaiting visas to
escape from Vichy France -- vicious Vichy, where the Petain government often
outdid the Nazis in their zealous anti-Semitic policies.
Sullivan begins her suspense-filled account on Sept. 25, 1940, "when Lisa
Fittko opened the door of the inn in the seaport town of Banyuls-sur-Mer and
looked apprehensively up avenue Puig del Mas." This would make for great
fiction if it weren't all too true. The door opens into a perilous world in
the south of France near the Spanish border, where in the early-morning
darkness Fittko leads a party of refugees across the mountains. Among them
is Walter Benjamin, the frail 48-year-old philosopher with manuscript in
tow, who manages to cross into Spain only to be told his papers are not in
order and that he must return to France. Knowing he will end up in the hands
of the Nazis, Benjamin takes morphine and dies close to the border and
freedom.
Yet in this twilight world Fittko manages to save numerous artists and
intellectuals by ferrying them to Spain and Portugal, where they board ships
carrying them to safe havens across the Atlantic. The opening chapter, "The
Road Out," points to one of several escape routes, as well as the direction
in which Sullivan is headed in her dramatic account of the artists caught up
in the Nazi occupation of France. Indeed, all of Sullivan's chapter titles
give the reader a sense of historical direction. Frequently the chapters are
studded with epigraphs from some of the leading writers among the refugees,
as well as photographs of the scenes in France, all of which makes for very
satisfying reading.
Sullivan's second chapter, "The Photograph," highlights her interest in
photography in recreating the tragic period. "In the photograph a man and a
woman sit like birds in the branches of a tree and look down on the camera.
Despite the danger of their perch, they look comfortable." That precarious
perch epitomizes the dilemma at Villa Air-Bel: The refugees are surrounded
by the natural beauty of southern France, as well as the menace of the
Gestapo. Many of the artists, such as Andre Breton and Max Ernst, are
surrealists, and the conditions around Marseilles are nothing if not
surreal.
The central character in this story is Varian Fry, a young American who
comes to France in 1940 as the representative of the American Emergency
Rescue Committee. He is helped by some fellow Americans, including heiress
Mary Jayne Gold and Miriam Davenport. To introduce another of her tableaux,
Sullivan again relies on photography: "There is a photograph of the young
Mary Jayne Gold with her girlfriends aboard the S.S. President Harding in
1929 ... Perhaps it's the way the light falls on her face that spotlights
her, picking her out from among others who look dated, lost in the past in a
charming sepia photograph."
Initially Fry and Gold appear as innocent Americans out of a Henry James
novel or bon vivant characters from the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but
soon they are devoting themselves to the highest moral causes: Gold giving
generously from her inheritance, and Fry spending countless hours obtaining
documents for those hunted by the Gestapo. In Paris, Gold befriends Danny
Benedite, whose experience with the police department proves invaluable to
Fry in making black-market contacts and procuring documents. Frequently they
get involved with gangsters who as often as not cheat them.
Bureaucratic blunders help some to escape; occasionally, a local gendarme or
official turns a blind eye. But otherwise the refugees suffer from cold and
hunger, though they fare far better than those who are shipped to
concentration camps.
The dissident socialist Victor Serge, exiled from the Soviet Union, aptly
summarizes their situation: "Here is a beggar's alley gathering the remnants
of revolutions, democracies, and crushed intellects ... In our ranks are
enough doctors, psychologists, engineers, educationists, poets, painters,
writers, musicians, economists and public men to vitalize a whole great
country. Our wretchedness contains so much talent and expertise as Paris
could summon in the days of her prime; and nothing of it is visible, only
hunted, terribly tired men at the limit of their nervous resources." Villa
Air-Bel offered a temporary oasis in a world of tragedy.
Ultimately, though, Fry's efforts were highly successful. Using Lisa and
Hans Fittko as guides, he and his cohorts were able to find safe passage
over the Pyrenees for the likes of Claude Levi-Strauss, Marc Chagall,
Jacques Lipchitz, Peggy Guggenheim and numerous others. In her Afterword,
Sullivan offers snapshots of the fate of her many "characters" after the
war.
Villa Air-Bel is a remarkable achievement. Sullivan has a strong reading
voice: husky, crisp and self-assured; her writing is equally powerful.
- Michael Greenstein is the author of Third Solitudes and the editor of the
anthology Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada. He lives in Toronto.
GRAPHIC:
Colour Photo: BOOK COVER: Villa Air-Bel by Rosemary Sullivan; Black & White
Photo: Varian Fry was an American who helped save the lives of some 1,500
anti-Nazi artists in Vichy France, from 1940 to 1941. He's profiled in
Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel.
LOAD-DATE: September 23, 2006
Copyright 2006 Reed Business
Information, US, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Publishers Weekly Reviews
August 21, 2006
SECTION: REVIEWS; Nonfiction; Pg. 61
LENGTH: 251 words
HEADLINE: Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille
BYLINE: Staff
BODY:
Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille Rosemary
Sullivan. HarperCollins, $26.95 (544p) ISBN 978-0-06-073250-9
The outbreak of WWII took many Europeans by surprise. In France, by the time
the fighting began, the papers people needed to get out of the country were
difficult to come by. It was on this circumstance that three enterprising
Americans concentrated their efforts in the first two years of the war. Ivy
League scholar Varian Fry, sent by the American Emergency Rescue Committee,
heiress Mary Jayne Gold and graduate student Miriam Davenport turned a
Marseille château into a safe haven for dozens of prominent artists and
intellectuals waiting for a chance to emigrate in secrecy, including Hannah
Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, André Breton, Franz Werfel and
perennial exile Victor Serge. Canadian writer Sullivan (her Shadow Maker:
The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen won a Governor General's Award) goes beyond
the confines of Air-Bel to tell a fuller story of France during the tense
years from 1933 to 1941. She intelligently spreads the fractured narrative,
with its huge cast of players constantly coming and going, over 60 brief
chapters. What's palpable is the welter of shock, fear, world-weariness,
cynicism and misplaced idealism evinced by the villa's transient residents
as they apprehensively awaited their fate. The author never gets quite close
enough to her subjects, but this is a moving tale of great sacrifice in
tumultuous times. B&w photos. (Oct. 3)
LOAD-DATE: August 24, 2006
Copyright 2006 Toronto Star Newspapers,
Ltd.
The Toronto Star
August 6, 2006 Sunday
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A14
LENGTH: 829 words
HEADLINE: 'I'm Cuban, I'm sugar, I have flavour!'
BODY:
When my husband and I went to Cuba with the photographer Malcolm Batty in
2003 to write a book called Cuba: Grace Under Pressure, we met a young man
who warned us: "Everyone comes to my country looking for their own version
of Cuba. Revolutionaries find revolutions. Capitalists find dictatorship.
Tourists find the perfect beach. Nobody wants to see Cuba through our eyes."
What I discovered was a dynamic country that was not frozen in time since
the Revolution of 1959, but was evolving and continually changing. There
were debates on every street corner, both strong affirmations and deep
criticisms of the president, Fidel Castro. And yet I found a consensus: like
all citizens, Cubans passionately love their country.
What I most admire about Cuba is how Cubans deal with the complexities of
their lives with humour and dignity. I remember the old woman we visited on
the farm in Pinar del Rio, in the fabled tobacco heartland where the weirdly
beautiful limestone hills look like giant inverted thimbles. She was 85 and
poor; the chairs we sat on in her living room were plastic; she had just had
a quintuple bypass.
"Mi casa es su casa (my house is your house)," she said. And, holding her
hand over her fragile heart, she joked that she had had eight children, but
those were the dark times when there was no electricity.
Or I think of the child in the Boxing Club wearing used gloves that left his
thumbs exposed. As he watched me writing in my notebook, leaving the left
margin empty, he looked at me in puzzlement and asked why I was wasting so
much paper.
On television, we watched young singers with diamonds in their navels
looking like Britney Spears singing: "I'm Cuban, I'm sugar, I have flavour!"
We met alternativos, young artists who specialized in satirical songs like
the one about the explosion of private restaurants opened by gynecologists
who could make more money in the restaurant business than they could in
medicine. And we encountered musicians and painters who travelled regularly
to Europe and brought their money home.
A young man we met had immigrated to Mexico at the age of 14 to join his
father. But he soon returned home: "I missed the self-expression I had in
Cuba. Cuba is a wonderful place for a child," he said. In Mexico he had
discovered a level of racism that had shocked him. Now he wanted to make
films. He had no illusions about the censorship he would incur if he made a
film about the year he spent cutting sugarcane on a collective farm. Though
for him it was a time of camaraderie and escapades, as he and his young
friends subverted the rules, his government, he said, did not accept
criticism. Paradoxically, it was they who had taught him self-expression by
sending him to music school. Still, this was his country and he was sure he
would find a way around the bureaucracies to tell his story.
The oldest person we met was Mary McCarthy, a Newfoundlander who arrived in
Cuba in 1923. At the age of 103, she seemed to incarnate the memory of Cuba.
The wife of a wealthy leather merchant, she had met everyone from Batista to
Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. "The Cubans," she said, "are a cultured
people." She did not regret staying in Cuba when the wealthy fled in 1962.
She assured me her intention was to be buried in Cuba. (But not yet.)
The nightlife in Havana was exciting: jazz clubs, salsa palaces,
transvestites parading on the seawall affectionately called the Malecon.
People set up their domino games on the pavement where they gossiped and
drank their rum. Each time we asked: "How is life in Cuba?" the response was
"No es facil" (it's not easy), but then the verb would come: "resolver."
Cubans have ingenuity, whether it's making a transmission from scraps to
keep a 1959 Buick going, or coming together to reconstruct a tornado-ravaged
city.
"Cuba is the oldest European civilization in the Americas," one woman told
me. "We have a problem with our superiority complex." Havana has the most
impressive collection of Napoleon artifacts outside Paris, housed in the
Museo Napoleonico, an Italian mansion built in the 1920s by a sugar baron.
And Havana is the most beautiful colonial city in the New World.
No one outside Cuba can understand the baroque complexity of Cuban politics,
where politicians span the spectrum from enlightened liberal socialists to
dogged militants. It's as hard as trying to understand what goes on inside
the halls of power in the Bush administration.
One thing is certain - things are not as simple as the black and white
portrait painted from abroad. On this small island, politics often has the
feel of a bitter family quarrel. Still, the majority of Cubans are young and
have their own ideas about what they want to make of their country.
Now that an era is passing, what will become of Cuba? All I say is, "Hands
off." Cubans can decide their own destiny.
Rosemary Sullivan's new book, "Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a
House in Marseille," will be published this September.
GRAPHIC: JAVIER GALEANO AP The next generation: Street performers frolic in
Havana last week.
HEADLINE: Non-fiction writers reveal tricks of trade
BYLINE: Calgary Herald
BODY:
Literary Journalism
Conversations, begins July 10 and runs through July 31 on consecutive
Mondays at 8 p.m. at the Rolston Recital Hall, the Banff Centre. For more
information, call (403) 762-6301 or (800)-413-8368.
- - -
Five leading non-fiction from writers from different points on the globe
will hold will talk about their work and literary journalism at the Banff
Centre as part of the 2006 Banff Summer Arts Festival.
The series of talks, Literary Journalism Conversations, is directed by
Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan, an acclaimed poet and winner of the
Governor General's Award for non-fiction for Shadow Maker, her biography of
Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwan.
Sullivan chairs the centre's Literary Journalism program.
First up in the Conversations on July 10 is John Vaillant.
The Vancouver-based writer won the Governor General's Award in 2005 for his
first book, The Golden Spruce, the story of Grant Hadwin, a disgruntled
logger and forestry expert whose increasing agitation about the
environmental effects of logging in northern British Columbia led him to cut
down a rare, legendary spruce tree in the Queen Charlotte Islands, a tree
that had a deep spiritual significance to the Haida and to most residents of
the islands.
Vaillant, whose work is compared with that of Jon Krakauer and Sebastian
Junger, has written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, National Geographic
Adventure, Outside, and Men's Journal.
Nelofer Pazira, who appeared at the 2005 Wordfest, speaks on July 17.
Born and raised in Afghanistan, she will present Trans(form)ation: the
intersection of personal and political stories from print to the big screen,
a chronicle about how her life story became the basis for the film Kandahar
(2001), in which she starred, and her bestselling memoir and first book, A
Bed of Red Flowers (2005).
Her Conversation will weave together the threads of history, politics, and
personal memoir, cinema and literature, fiction and nonfiction.
On July 24, Sullivan, the author of 10 books including biographies of
Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Smart, will present a take on her work in
progress, Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in France.
The work traces the stories of a remarkable group of artists -- including
Andre Gide, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Henri Matisse -- who gathered in a
house in the south of France waiting for passage out of the country.
Juan Opitz, in collaboration with Sullivan, will present his short film The
Road Out: El Camino al Olvido, which is based on Sullivan's book.
The final presentation, on July 31, will feature Elena Poniatowska Amor,
founder of Mexico's first feminist magazine, Fem, and the newspaper, La
Jornada.
A journalist, biographer, translator, and professor, Amor was the first
woman to win Mexico's National Award for Journalism. She is the author of
several books including an acclaimed chronicle on the life of Italian
photographer and revolutionary Tina Modotti, and Massacre in Mexico, about
the massacre of 325 unarmed students protesting police repression a week
before the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
GRAPHIC:
Photo: Herald Archive, CanWest News Service; John Vaillant will be the first
speaker at the Banff Summer Festival's Literary Journalism Conversations on
July 11.
Comment | Was
this review helpful to you?
A Major Achievement, December 5, 2006
Long book, lazily written, , November 25,
2006
Earlier "Crossroads Marseilles 1940" is better,
October 5, 2006