The Flight Portfolio

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Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. I have only read 20% of this novel but am setting it aside for now. I was so excited to learn months ago that Julie Orringer had written a novel about the the work of Varian Fry, a hero of mine. I started reading it as soon as it was published. To my dismay I find that Orringer fabricated a male lover for Fry and fictionalized the essence of the man himself. 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. 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. For me, that story is thrilling enough without romantic complications. Let me speak to my friend at the consulate,” Varian said. “Ask him to start a file for you, at least. If you do decide to leave, it might take months.”

It’s no small matter to cross an ocean,” Chagall said. “More can be lost than canvas and paint. An artist must bear witness, Monsieur Fry. He cannot turn away, even if he wishes to.” Nearly eighty years on, this plot strand still feels perfectly timely. Varian is married to Eileen and has been passing for straight, yet he doesn’t fit the stereotype of a homosexual hiding behind marriage to a woman. In fact, the novel makes it plain that Varian was bisexual; he truly loved Eileen, but Grant was the love of his life. Can he face the truth and find courage to live as he truly is? The same goes for Grant, who has an additional secret. Orringer’s Author’s Note, at the end of the book, explains how much of this is historical and how much is made up, and what happened next for Varian. I’ll let you discover it for yourself. An incredibly compelling and heart-wrenching historical novel, inspired by a powerful true story, about the extraordinary courage and friendships forged during humanity’s darkest hour. If you loved Schindler’s List, All the Light We Cannot See or The Tattooist of Auschwitz, you’ll adore The Flight Portfolio.

Beyond the Book

In 1940, Varian Fry - a Harvard educated American journalist - traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to rescue within a few weeks. Instead, he ended up staying in France for thirteen months, working under the veil of a legitimate relief organization to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and set up an underground railroad that led over the Pyrenees, into Spain, and finally to Lisbon, where the refugees embarked for safer ports. Among his many clients were Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, André Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall. He tells Eileen that he has a few ( ha- we know it’s much more than a few), projects that he can’t abandon. He feels he must stay longer. He shares with Eileen that he has run into an old friend - Elliott Grant - ( it’s been 12 years since he has seen him). In Lisbon, for example he could be censor-free.... but he also entered Lisbon with clients on an escape. As the reader -I was already so involved with the dialogue- feelings and thoughts that Varian had for Grant ( some envious feelings - some distrust- and complex feelings ).

If you frequent progressive circles, you have likely encountered some form of this refrain: “If you ever wondered what you would have done during the Holocaust, now is the time to find out.” ORRINGER:That was the element of Varian Fry’s experience that I was most fascinated by as a novelist. How does a person make those impossible moral decisions? Given an unlimited number of potential clients and limited time and funds, how do you prioritize? The mandate of Fry’s organization was to save Europe’s most brilliant writers and artists — but how to determine artistic merit among hundreds of refugees, all of them desperate for help? MARSEILLE, 1940.Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated journalistand editor, arrives in France. Recognizing the darkness descendingover Europe, he and a group of like-minded New Yorkers formed theEmergency Rescue Committee, helping artists and writers escapefrom the Nazis and immigrate to the United States. Author Julie Orringer’s “The Flight Portfolio” is rooted in history. The novel tells the story of Harvard graduate Varian Fry ’30, a journalist and editor who was sometimes referred to as the “American Schindler.” While working for the Emergency Rescue Committee in France during World War II, Fry helped save Jewish members of Europe’s cultural elite, including artists, writers, and musicians, from Nazi concentration camps. Orringer worked on the book when she was the Lisa Goldberg Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2013–14. The Gazette spoke with her about the book and how her time on campus helped her shape it. Q&A Julie OrringerWe’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search. See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge, my highlight from last summer’s reading, was the saga of a Hungarian Jewish family’s experiences in the Second World War; while The Flight Portfolio again charts the rise of Nazism and a growing awareness of Jewish extermination, it’s a very different though equally affecting narrative. Its protagonist is a historical figure, Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated journalist who founded the Emergency Rescue Committee to help at-risk artists and writers escape to the United States from France, and many of the supporting characters are also drawn from real life. Gorgeous. . . . Classic storytelling through a transgressive lens. The Flight Portfolio offers a testament to . . . the enduringtransformative power of art, and love, in any form.”— Entertainment Weekly Flam, Charna (8 February 2023). " 'Transatlantic': Netflix Reveals First Images of Upcoming Limited Series (TV News Roundup)". Variety . Retrieved 10 February 2023. The book provides insight into what it was like to be a homosexual in the 1940s. During this period, the Nazis were sending homosexuals to concentration camps! In America, it was also totally unacceptable to be a homosexual. Most lived as hetrosexuals to cover up their real sexual preference. There are many real people interspersed among some fictional characters. All are so well portrayed that at times you don’t know who is real and who is fictional. I actually googled one character, only to find out that he was not a real person. Ha!Varian Fry, a young American journalist, arrives in Marseille armed only with three thousand dollars and a list of writers, thinkers and artists he hopes to rescue – so long as the Nazis don’t get to them first. But what’s curious about “The Flight Portfolio” is the extent to which Orringer has crafted the novel’s narrative and moral arcs around characters, and conflicts, that never existed. Historical fiction is still fiction, and it’s an author’s prerogative to futz with the facts in service of the story. But of the five characters involved in the novel’s ethically torturous climactic storyline, only one, Fry, is real. It’s an unusual choice. “The Flight Portfolio” is, at heart, interested in the moral contingencies of civilian life during war, but Fry’s moral anguish — the force that spurs the book forward — is, at its most determinative, a work of invention. That makes a story that bills itself as a visceral immersion in an unspeakably fraught situation difficult to fully buy. Those circumstances are, after all, constructed. They don’t make for a reimagining of the terrible tensions under which Fry presumably lived and worked. They imagine how he might have responded to different and more intimate tensions, in addition to the extra big one of the Nazis.