Love and Treasure

February 3, 2014
This lush, multigenerational tale by Waldman (Bad Mother) of loves lost and found begins at a portentous historical starting point: the so-called Hungarian Gold Train. Waldman traces the path of a single pendant taken from this notorious shipment of Nazi-confiscated treasures, which the U.S. seized at the end of WWII but largely failed to return to the original owners, many of them Hungarian Jews. The pendant’s decoration, an enameled peacock, is a symbol of bad fortune, boding ill for the young U.S. Army lieutenant, Jack Wiseman, who takes it from the Gold Train in 1945. In the present, he passes the pendant on to his unlucky-in-love granddaughter, Natalie, imploring her to return it to its rightful owner. With that request, the narrative leaps back in time, showing Jack’s doomed romance with Ilona, a Holocaust survivor, and the life-changing early-20th-century friendship between pioneering female medical student Nina and dwarf suffragette Gizella Weisz. It also focuses on present-day Syrian-Jewish art dealer Amitai Shasho’s attempts to come to grips with his past. Inventively told from multiple perspectives, Waldman’s latest is a seductive reflection on just how complicated the idea of “home” is­­—and why it is worth more than treasure. Agent: Mary Evans, Mary Evans Inc.

March 15, 2014
A necklace with a peacock pendant raises provocative questions about loss, guilt and recovery in Waldman's intriguing new novel (Red Hook Road, 2010, etc.). The necklace is one of thousands of items confiscated from Hungary's Jews and found on a train seized in Austria by the U.S. Army in 1945. Assigned to guard the train, Lt. Jack Wiseman falls in love with Ilona, a Holocaust survivor. When she leaves him for a new life in Palestine, the devastated Jack takes the necklace as a memento. In 2013, dying of pancreatic cancer, he asks his granddaughter Natalie to return it. But to whom? She learns in Budapest that the necklace was depicted in Portrait of Frau E, a lost painting by a Hungarian Jewish artist who died during World War II. Amitai, an Israeli-born specialist in the recovery of art stolen during the Holocaust, persuades Natalie to join his search for Portrait of Frau E in hopes of identifying the necklace's rightful owner. Painting and necklace both wind up in unexpected hands, and the narrative rolls back to trace the history of "Frau E." Her maiden name is Nina Schillinger, and in 1913 she is a 19-year-old feminist whose desire to study medicine has prompted her appalled parents to send her to a psychoanalyst. (His account of their sessions provides a wickedly funny satire of sexist, sex-obsessed Freudian analysis.) Waldman paints morally complex portraits in her three linked stories. Jack's superiors blithely furnish their quarters with tableware and crystal from the Hungarian train; the appealing Amitai retrieves looted art for profit; Budapest's prewar Jewish bourgeoisie places crippling constraints on its daughters. Yet all three stories also show love prompting people to transcend their limitations and behave with new compassion, though Waldman is too honest not to acknowledge that it's not always easy to do the right thing--or even to know what that is. No big points made here, just strong storytelling combined with thoughtful exploration of difficult issues.

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November 1, 2013

In her latest novel, Waldman (Red Hook Road; Love and Other Impossible Pursuits) draws a sensitive and heartbreaking portrayal of love, politics, and family secrets, set against the alternating landscapes of World War II, Hungarian society in the early 20th century, and modern Budapest and Israel. The story line forges a connection among a roguish young American soldier guarding the Hungarian Gold Train, which carried valuables stolen from Jews; Nina, a young suffragist in 1913; and Natalie, the soldier's granddaughter, in search of the descendants of the owner of a treasured peacock pendant that the soldier had plundered from the train. This necklace, passing from person to person, is as much a harbinger of ill fortune as it is the common link among the characters and a representation of change in their lives. VERDICT Waldman's appealing novel recalls the film The Red Violin in its following of this all-important object through various periods in history and through many owners. Fans of historical fiction will love the compelling characters and the leaps backward and forward in time.--Mariel Pachucki, Seattle

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2014
Classics scholar Jack Wiseman, in the last throes of pancreatic cancer, entrusts an enamel locket to his granddaughter, imploring her to find the rightful owner. It's the only thing he's ever asked of her. During WWII, Jack had been a soldier in charge of storing the possessions found on the gold train, which contained the accumulated wealth of Hungarian Jews who had been shipped off to concentration camps. The contents were all meticulously accounted for. But who was there to receive them? The responsibility weighed heavily on Jack, not least because of his involvement with Ilona, a survivor whose shockingly black sense of humor both upsets and entrances him. As Waldman takes us back to Hungary, first in the aftermath of the war, then to the years preceding it, she evokes what it feels like to have your identity and your community stripped from you and how impossibly foolish it can be to think your personal destiny is within your control. With its complicated politics and moral ambiguity, this provocative novel tells a fascinating story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)