Lost family and restituted art are the themes that bind the many layers of this skillfully woven historical novel by Ellen Umansky.
The story begins in Vienna in 1936 with Rose Zimmer, a beloved child born into an haute bourgeois Jewish family that has collected a (fictional but historically credible) painting, The Bellhop, by Chaim Soutine. As events turn dark in Austria, Rose’s parents send her and her brother by Kindertransport to England, where they survive but are bereft of their parents and of the beloved painting that embodies the culture and family they lost. Yet Rose and her brother are “the fortunate ones” in the context of the Holocaust.
Umansky is especially good at evoking the feel of different locations, and she has done her homework on the historical facts of the Kindertransport and of stolen art restitution.
A second strand of the story is set (mostly) in present-day Los Angeles, where Lizzie Goldstein, a hip but deeply alienated lawyer, returns for the funeral of her father. She, too, has memories of The Bellhop, which was once in her father’s possession, but her associations with it arouse guilt and ambivalence. Rose and Lizzie, introduced by a family friend/lawyer, share their obsession with the painting and search for it together. In the process they become close and help heal one another’s wounds.
The plot line skips back and forth over decades of history and over distinctive settings—Vienna, London, Los Angeles, and New York—at a dizzying pace. Umansky is especially good at evoking the feel of different locations, and she has done her homework on the historical facts of the Kindertransport and of stolen art restitution. Like many contemporary novelists, she turns the focus from past to present so frequently as to make both time frames seem interlocked.
The characters are easy to empathize with, but—trigger warning—are distinctly not frum, engaging in eating and sexual behaviors that are not “kosher.” Yet they are very Jewish, shaped by Jewish history and by Jewish art.
This is Ellen Umansky’s first novel, although she has published short stories and nonfiction in various distinguished publications. We hope there will be more novels to come—and if so, we will be the “fortunate ones.”