She also gives us insight into Fry’s humanity and the doubts he sometimes has about many aspects of his mission and about himself. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Anna and Victoria spent a lot of time capturing important facts, transcribing letters, and cataloguing documents online so they would be available to me even when I left Harvard. 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. They compromise by joining with the American branch of the International Relief Association to form the International Relief and Rescue Committee—an institution that still exists today.

Fry, an American journalist who from 1940 to 1941 helped between 1,000 and 4,000 refugees escape Europe, was in 1994 named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. There were other characters in the book based on real people who actually existed, had their own hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. For a period of time in 1940-41, with no ostensibly relevant operational experience but keenly aware of the dire nature of what was unfolding in Europe (based in part on what he’d earlier witnessed and reported from Germany), he represented a privately-organized American “Emergency Rescue Committee” on the ground in France. Julie Orringer’s latest novel, The Flight Portfolio, opens in early September 1940 in southern France, with an American named Varian Fry visiting Marc and Bella Chagall in the Provençal village of Gordes. 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.Julie Orringer took the facts of Varian Fry’s work in Marseilles, France, and created a fiction that felt entirely real.

Varian admits happy to see Grant these 12 years later though (who became a professor of English at Columbia and is now on sabbatical). 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.After being released, Varian and Mary Jayne learn that the Pyrenees route has been compromised because British POWs were caught carrying a map that Mary Jayne provided. The series closed the 2023 Festival Séries Mania in March [4] ahead of its Netflix premiere on 7 April 2023. After discovering the Villa has been bugged, Varian has 24 hours to fill DuBois' ship with refugees. In thisdazzling work of historical fiction—one that illuminates previouslyunexplored elements of Fry’s story, and has, since its publication,brought us new insight into his life.