The Flight Portfolio

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Notable individuals saved under Fry’s brave leadership included Jewish political scientist Hannah Arendt, Jewish artist Marc Chagall, Surrealist pioneers Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. The series closed the 2023 Festival Séries Mania in March [4] ahead of its Netflix premiere on 7 April 2023. Ultimately Orringer crafts a vivid portrait of wartime Marseille, its innate sophistication darkened by Nazi oppression, and of Fry's heroic real-life accomplishments.

I am fine with same-sex romance as well, and the inclusion of a gay romance does add a lot of intrigue to the book. Her writing was masterful, from the power of her descriptions to the carefully crafted intertwinings of plot to the sympathetic and believable characters. Our government must decide which states get emergency funding, what businesses get financial support. Prominent figures from arts institutions, such as Alfred Barr, the director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, also lend helping hands.Then Fry’s associate, Miriam Davenport, trained in art history at the Sorbonne, would look at these sketches and determine whether the artist had talent — whether, in effect, they deserved to be helped, according to the committee’s mandate. A historical novel absolutely relevant to our own time, The Flight Portfolio brings to life a hero as complex and engrossing as the agonizing ethical questions he faces.

In her review of the novel for The New York Times Book Review, Cynthia Ozick devoted significant space to Orringer’s vision of Fry’s sexual life; two weeks later, the Book Review published a full page of letters in response. To add realistic dialogue and intrigue to the limited records that exist of Fry’s life, Orringer focuses on his friendship with a fictional college friend Elliott Grant, who appears in Marseille in the midst of Fry’s valiant attempt to stave off the artistic destruction of Hitler’s regime. I’m humbled by her vocabulary have added words like susurrating, viridesence, dentition, and lenticular to my “shiny-new-words” list. What particularly rankles is Orringer's preoccupation with and dramatic rendering of the love story that drew the focus away from the story of saving refugees.

The seven-part series is created by Winger and Daniel Hendler, and produced by Winger and Camille McCurry.

When his refugees leave his grasp and make it to Lisbon, they are placed in the good hands of the Unitarian Service Committee, led by Robert Dexter. gray-green scrub and toothedwith great molars of limestone; often the ubiquitous lavender and almond gave way to low, hostile cactus, gnarled kermes oak, rusty lentisk, or wind-stunted pistachio. Orringer details in her book how the US consul general, Hugh Fullerton, tried thwarting the mission’s efforts from saving Jews.The first problem: If you read the description of this novel on Goodreads or even Book of the Month club, it will leave you to believe that you are getting a novel about a real historical person who smuggled Jewish artists out of France during the Holocaust. Orringer illustrates this central question over and over throughout the story, effectively twisting the knife at the end. Still, it’s makes one somewhat queasy to see Orringer take such ownership of Fry’s personal story, and with his closeted sexuality, as to shape the entire emotional arc of his adult life around a completely imagined affair.

His closest friends at the time are Miriam Davenport, a Sorbonne student, and Mary Jayne Gold, a rich heir and patron of the arts who had moved to Paris a decade prior. But the collaborationist Vichy regime would just as soon deliver them to their German overlords, and American officialdom, patently anti-Semitic, wants no part of saving anyone.The two biographies I mentioned above are: A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry and A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry. I wasn't sure about whom I was reading but it didn't sound like the same Varian Fry I had come to know while reading biographies about him. Surveying the post-Enlightenment era, this incisive account shows that our concerns with “fake news” have a long history, and that democracy and truth have often pulled in opposite directions. But it also struck me that there were so many apertures in that record, so much that couldn’t be known, or that couldn’t have been recorded at the time. In the end, I had Judy Vichniac to thank for the incredible richness of that experience — for the privilege of working with those powerful creative minds, and for the chance to enjoy a daily practice of collaborative thinking, an all-too-rare experience for novelists.