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Villa Air-Bel
the recent book
by Rosemary Sullivan

(HarperCollins, October 2006)

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book review

Escape artists: How the engineers of German culture fled the Nazis - and what happened once they got away
by Jackie Wullschlager

Financial Times art critic
Financial Times, London, U.K., Dec. 16, 2006

review of Villa Air-Bel and

Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America
by Jean-Michel Palmier

The villa, the young American wrote home, was "not far from perfect. We have one of those magnificent views which only the Mediterranean can boast, a view of pine trees and olive branches, dark green and light, of soft red-tiled roofs... and back of it all the rugged grey limestone mountains which surround the Marseille area like a great amphitheatre. The only trouble is the war."

Varian Fry was a Harvard classics graduate and journalist who had been shocked at the treatment of Jews he witnessed in 1935 during a visit to Berlin. In June 1940 he opened The New York Times and read the headline "Nazi Shadow Falls on Half of France." Six weeks later, he arrived in Marseille carrying Dollars 3,000 taped to his leg, a clutch of American visas and a list of 200 artists, writers and musicians to be smuggled out of Vichy territory. He looked a naive, unflappable Yankee prig: tortoiseshell glasses, Brooks Brothers suit, homburg hat, Patek Philippe watch and a "cordial, impersonal smile suggest(ing) his business was above reproach".

Fry moved into the Villa Air-Bel, an 18-room chateau whose rent was paid by a flighty American heiress, Mary Jayne Gold. All the other tenants, and the many desperate visitors, were Jews or artistic or political refugees. They included the artists Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Marc Chagall, the revolutionary Victor Serge, and the novelist Franz Werfel with his wife Alma Mahler, whose trunk contained the scores of her second husband's symphonies. Between 1940 and September 1941, when he was deported back to the US, Fry saved all their lives. But he was haunted until his death by the many he could not rescue.

Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel is a marvellous addition to the surging literature on occupied France. Sullivan writes not as a historian - she has little new material - but as a dramatist. Her scene-by-scene evocation of life at the house reads like an updated Chekhov comedy laced with horror. Leading modernists hang their paintings on trees in the garden, to sell for a few sous. Fry tours Romanesque churches and goes birdwatching. Dinners on the terrace, love affairs, conversations, surrealist games - are all exquisite, the calm shattered by random round-ups and constant surveillance. And still they all wait, for exit visas, travel permits and tickets, passenger boats then cargo ships, as Fry frantically wheels and deals behind the scenes. The distractions sound idyllic - but existed solely, Breton said, "to outwit the anguish of the hour".

It is often asked why those at risk from Nazism delayed their escape so long. Sullivan's book is important because it answers from within, showing what it felt like to move from freedom to occupation, threat, then restraint; how slowly, relentlessly, ordinary existences turned into lives filled with terror.

Fry's cases wound up in New York, Hollywood, Cuba or Martinique. What happened to them there, and to thousands more who fled Germany from 1933-41, is recounted in Weimar in Exile, a pioneering work of scholarship when it appeared in France in 1987, and still pertinent and magisterial on its first English translation today.

In terms of historical detail, Jean-Michel Palmier's book establishes more fully than any other the extent of the emigration of Germany's greatest minds and talents, and that neither the exiles nor Germany ever fully recovered. "Grateful and unhappy" - the Mozart biographer Annette Kolb's response to being in the US - summed up the mood of those who left homes and cultural milieu. "We live our by now deeply habituated waiting room days among our palms and lemon trees," the novelist Thomas Mann wrote from California in 1943. Palmier writes with dry wit on Hollywood dissatisfactions, and with black humour on life-saving deceptions such as the dadaist Tristan Tzara and writer Arthur Koestler in Marseille cafes, too frightened to acknowledge one another. But ultimately this is a tragic epic made vivid, like Sullivan's account, by the diversity and pathos of individual responses to fear and loss.

How indissolubly are we part of our culture? How would we adjust in similar circumstances? These are relevant questions for many people now. "This paper has turned quite yellow - look, the page is crumbling between your fingers," the satirist Kurt Tucholsky addressed an imaginary reader of 1985. "We probably don't have too much to say to each other, we little people. We are lived out, our essence has passed away with us. And now you're off. But let me tell you one more thing: You aren't any better than we were, or those before us. Not in the least, not in the very least... "
Copyright 2006 The Financial Times Limited
 

book review

... all is bright
by James MacGowan
The Ottawa Citizen, Dec. 10, 2006
James MacGowan's Christmas picks
 

A page-turning thriller focusing on the efforts to save and protect some of the biggest cultural figures of the 20th century. The Villa Air-Bell, the house in Marseille the title refers to, was where these figures were housed. It was run by an American named Varian Fry who was on a mission at the behest of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private relief organization based in the U.S., to get as many of these people out of the country as possible. Things, of course, didn't always go according to plan, and Sullivan does a wonderful job of conveying the feeling of everyday terror that permeated that time.

Copyright 2006 Ottawa Citizen, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publication Inc.

This review of Villa Air-Bel comes from Canada, where its author lives; this is the only review that "Mendelsohn" has ever posted on Amazon.com.

from Amazon.com 1 of 3 people found the following review helpful: A Major Achievement, December 5, 2006   Reviewer: Mendelsohn (Canada) - See all my reviews 'Villa Air Bel' is a stunning story of endangered artists and intellectuals in pre-WW2 France. Rosemary Sullivan has masterfully juxtaposed personal histories and historical events to create an urgent and tense book. It is a riveting account of the ordeal suffered by individuals who were being hunted down by the Nazis and of the heroism of young rerscuers willing to endanger their own lives in an effort to help them escape. This book is a compelling page-turner. I couldn't put it down.  Comment | Was this review helpful to you?  (Report this)

book review
Before D-Day, operation arts rescue
by Floyd Skloot
San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 3, 2006
Floyd Skloot received the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction for his memoir "In the Shadow of Memory." His 12th book, the novel "Patient 002," will appear in 2007.

It took Germany only six weeks to defeat France in the spring of 1940. As victorious troops and Gestapo personnel descended from the north, nearly 8 million French people fled south toward Marseille and the Mediterranean ports, seeking escape. Soon, France was divided into two zones: one under direct Nazi supervision, another -- equally Fascist -- administered by a collaborative French government in Vichy.
World War II was still in its first year, Germany seemed invincible and everyone had reason to fear what would happen. But some refugees had more reason than others. Plans to eliminate Jews were already clear, as were similar intentions toward certain artists, intellectuals and political figures. Hitler himself had warned in 1937, after viewing a Munich exhibition of art he deemed degenerate: "We are going to wage a merciless war of destruction against the last remaining elements of cultural disintegration." It was a desperate time. According to Rosemary Sullivan in her gripping new book, "Villa Air-Bel," France had become "a country trapped in the totalitarian vise of irrational hatred," with its own government as terrifying as the Nazis.

Sullivan tells the story of the courageous Emergency Rescue Committee, a small ragtag group supported by a private American relief organization and a few individual sponsors, which saved more than 2,000 of Europe's cultural elite between the summer of 1940 and winter of 1941. Facing almost certain doom, cornered in and around Marseille, unable to leave the country, André Breton, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Victor Serge, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Wilfredo Lam and Leonora Carrington were among those assisted by the committee's efforts. Following Thomas Keneally's "Schindler's List," John Bierman's "Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust" and the many academic studies of Holocaust rescuers, "Villa Air-Bel" covers familiar ground. But its focus on artists and writers is unusual, and it involves a little-known American undertaking from before its entry into the war.

There are many heroes in "Villa Air-Bel." The leading figure is a young New York writer and editor, Varian Fry. As early as 1935, Fry had written presciently about Hitler and the Nazis. When war broke out in 1939, recognizing that "every last dissenting voice would be routinely hunted down by the Gestapo," Fry helped organize the rescue committee, developed "a comprehensive master list of people who needed to be rescued," consulted with the U.S. State Department, solicited the help of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and began fundraising. Soon he was in France, arriving with "three thousand dollars ... taped to his leg," putting together his group and learning the intricacies of clandestine activity as he established contact with those in need of his help.

For the next year, Fry was in constant danger. His group included a 31-year-old heiress from Chicago, Mary Jane Gold; a wandering, romantic 25-year-old student from New York named Miriam Davenport; a daring "militant Socialist of the extreme Left" named Danny Bénédite, who had been working for the Paris Préfecture de Police when the war started; Danny's British wife, Theo; and a resourceful German Jewish refugee, Albert O. Hirschman, who possessed impeccable false French papers, spoke several languages and was a master of survival.

Another hero is the Villa Air-Bel itself, a run-down 18-room mansion in the suburbs of Marseille where Fry and his committee lived for several months, sharing space with various endangered refugees awaiting departure. "Villa Air-Bel sat like a stone interrupting the stream in a handful of lives," Sullivan says. "Multiple trajectories brought individuals who would otherwise never have encountered one another to a villa in the South of France." Her description of the residents' attempts at establishing a normal life there -- the meals, the improvised games, the passionate discussions -- are the heart of this book.

"Villa Air-Bel" is as much about life in Vichy France as about the committee's rescue operations. People were summarily arrested or deported, surveillance intensified, neighborly trust became impossible and "the last country of asylum on the continent seemed to be losing its sanity." Sullivan effectively captures the mood and texture of life there, the sense that -- as refugee writer Serge said -- "this is a shipwreck with too many castaways."

They all had to cope with the malevolent, quicksilver nature of French and German policies geared toward widespread human destruction. They also faced American diplomatic stonewalling and interference as the United States tried to remain isolated from the war.

When Fry is finally forced to leave France, and most of his group has had to flee as well, it seems astonishing that they managed to save as many as they did. Writing to his wife as he traveled home through Spain, Fry modestly summarized his experience: "I have fought a fight, against enormous odds, of which, in spite of the final defeat, I think I can always be proud." Sadly, his work was overlooked by his own government -- which did so much to thwart it -- until 1996, when then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher officially acknowledged Fry's achievement during posthumous ceremonies in Israel honoring the rescue work.

 

Marseille villa was a refuge for artists
Guelph Mercury (Ontario, Canada), Dec. 2, 2006

There have been books and movies about Villa Air-Bel, the Marseille chateau where fleeing artists and intellectuals took refuge after the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. But it remains one of the lesser known stories of the Second World War.

In Villa Air-Bel - World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (Harper Collins, $34.95 hardcover), Toronto writer Rosemary Sullivan looks at the private lives of Varian Fry and other supporters of the private Emergency Rescue Committee -- and of the people they rescued.

Sullivan, who will speak in Kitchener on Wednesday (see Bookmarks), is the author of Shadow Maker, a biography of poet Gwendolyn MacEwan.
Copyright 2006 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.

book review
by Michael Kenney
Boston Globe, Nov. 28, 2006

Between late October 1940 and the following September, Villa Air-Bel, a crumbling hilltop chateau on the outskirts of Marseille, served as a way station for an elite group of refugees from Nazi-occupied France and a dormitory for their equally well-positioned rescuers.

For all the eccentric activities - a pair of copulating praying mantises provided one evening's dinner-table "entertainment" - there was an atmosphere of jittery uncertainty and apprehension that Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan captures to chilling effect in "Villa Air-Bel."

Marseille, which was under the control of the collaborationist Vichy government, had by then become a city of refugees - "the spout of a horrifying human funnel" as Sullivan puts it - "pouring into its clogged quarters," hoping not only to escape the fighting, but to secure the exit permits and entry visas needed to escape to more secure places in the United States and the Americas.

Sullivan, a poet and professor of English at the University of Toronto, centers her moving and richly detailed account of that time of anxiety at the villa, which was, she writes, like "a stone interrupting the stream," a fixed point in a dangerous world.

And it is there that her extraordinary cast of characters comes together. Among the refugees were the surrealist writer Andre Breton and the Soviet exile Victor Serge, and among their risk-taking rescuers, the Harvard graduate Varian Fry and the Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold. Sullivan first heard the story of the villa and its occupants from the English painter Leonora Carrington, whose lover, the surrealist painter Max Ernst, had stayed briefly at the villa.

Sullivan's story is also about the getting away from the villa and "the dark attics all over the Marseille region" where other refugees waited. In that story, Fry is the central figure.

He had been sent to France by a hastily organized American relief agency, the Emergency Rescue Committee, which had drafted a list of "people who needed to be rescued" - artists as well as anti-fascist writers and politicians.

Arriving in Marseille, he learned of the escape routes that had been mapped across the Pyrenees toward Lisbon, and of the fraudulent visas that could be bought at a Chinese agency.

Luck played a large role in many escapes. While Sullivan opens her account with the failed escape of the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide at the Spanish border, there were other cases like that of the German poet Walter Mehring.

Fry had obtained passage to Martinique for Mehring, but when he arrived at the dock, a security officer told him that he was on a list of those "forbidden to leave France." As he "tried lamely to disguise his terror," Sullivan writes, the officer went into a back room. "Incredibly, when he returned, he handed the poet his stamped papers. `Perhaps it's another Walter Mehring,' he said. `Depart."'

By the late summer of 1941, the villa had been emptied of its guests and Fry's operation had wound down. Fry estimated that it had aided some 4,000 people, either to escape, or, as Vichy tightened its controls, by locating safe houses in the surrounding countryside for those who could not get away.

There are powerful, wrenching stories here. One that may stay in many readers' minds is an account by the journalist Eric Sevareid of a police-escorted visit to an internment camp for political refugees outside Paris.

Among the "dirty and bearded men" who crowded around him, some crying, others "red with anxiety and rage," he found journalists who, as his colleagues, had covered the rise of Nazism. As he headed for the gate, one "slipped one arm over my shoulder, and I turned away from him and began to cry. I was filled with shame and self-loathing. But I could not help it; I stood still in the mud, dressed in my fake French uniform, before my officer hosts, and cried into my handkerchief" - and as he reached the gate, handed the man his topcoat.
Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company
 

Ask a Shop Clerk: Holiday Edition
What the experts-in-residence plan to buy from their employers (excerpt)
by Emma Pearse, Denise Penny
New York Magazine, Nov. 27, 2006

Carol Wald Three Lives 154 W. 10th St., at Waverly Pl. 212-741-2069

What gifts are you buying from here? The first is a book by Rosemary Sullivan: Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille [$26.95]. It's history, it's intrigue. It's nonfiction. It's a real page-turner.
Who's that for? I am going to buy it for my husband, who is into this kind of thing.
Copyright 2006 New York Magazine Holdings LLC

from Amazon.com 5 of 8 people found the following review helpful: Long book, lazily written, , November 25, 2006   Reviewer: milkweed beetle (United States) - See all my reviews This book centers on Varian Fry's year in Marseille and is the third such biography to come out in the last decade or so. This author is a Canadian and previous Fry biographies were penned by a Brit (Andy Marino) and an American (Sheila Isenberg). Sullivan's work offers little new information on Varian Fry or on most of his colleagues. If you look at her bibliography you might get the impression that she has done a great amount of research. However, anyone familiar with the story, will find echoes of previous works, and much that borrows from Marino's book, which is superior. The core of her book is transforming four memoirs written by rescuers - Varian Fry, Lisa Fittko, Mary Jayne Gold, and Danny Benedite - from the first person to the third person voice. Her approach for doing this has two misleading results. First, she does not give enough credit to the memoirs of the humanitarians who wrote them (just footnotes at the back). Second, observations presented by the memoirists related to passing events and impressions, she introduces as facts, denying the reader the original context for the various events. Instead of organizing her material skillfully, she presents scores of chapters, making for a choppy narrative. Hopefully, this type of appropriation will not become the standard for "creative non-fiction."  Comment | Was this review helpful to you?  (Report this)

book review

House party refuge from horrors of Hitler's hell;
Critic's choice
by Frances Spalding

Daily Mail, London, U.K., Nov. 24, 2006

Stories of heroism in World War II have become legendary, familiar to many through books and films.

Nevertheless, each time we encounter acts of wartime bravery they never fail to astonish and impress.

There are many heart-stopping moments in Rosemary Sullivan's account of a rescue operation in France. With 60 per cent of the country under the German Reich, and the rest governed from Vichy, in the Massif Central, it soon became apparent that the Vichy regime, led by the octogenarian soldier Marshal Pétain, was prepared to work hand-in-glove with the Nazis.

This book asks us to imagine what it was like to move from freedom to occupation, to be threatened and curtailed.

Under the terms of the armistice, the Vichy government agreed to 'surrender on demand' all refugees considered enemies of the Third Reich. Suddenly, artists, scientists and intellectuals who had fled totalitarian regimes elsewhere, feared for their lives.

It was a shocking capitulation. In August 1939 the rich in Paris had been partying frenziedly. Janet Flanner, the New Yorker columnist, filed a report that described the city undergoing 'a fit of prosperity, gaiety and hospitality'.

This same month Hitler signed the ten-year Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin.

Many understood that the intent was to ensure Russia's neutrality in the coming war.

Hitler's territorial ambitions made this inevitable.

Hence the uneasy brew of camaraderie, hopelessness and panic which Simone de Beauvoir recorded.

Like others of her age, this young writer lived through August 1939 in a mood of agonised anxiety: 'Why had we been landed in this position? We were scarcely over 30, our lives were beginning to take shape, and now, brutally, this existence was snatched from us.

Would we get it back? And if so, at what cost?' She and others had good reason to fear what was coming. In 1937 Picasso had painted Guernica in protest at the destruction which German pilots of the Condor Legion had wrought on the Basque town.

The following year, Hitler cracked down on avant-garde artists.

Inviting others to laugh at their work, he mounted a 'Degenerate Art' exhibition and announced at the opening: 'We are going to wage a merciless war of destruction against the last remaining elements of cultural disintegration, all those cliques of chatterers, dilettantes and art forgers will be picked up and liquidated'.

France itself was not immune from fascist leanings. There had been mutterings in the 1930s about the drain on the economy and the threat to public order posed by refugees, already pouring into France. In 1938 a decree had been passed that made it legal to intern alien residents.

Far worse was to come.

When France fell, an Emergency Rescue Committee was set up in New York. It compiled a list of some 200 people who were thought to be in immediate danger.

A dinner was held which raised over $3,000. But before the guests left, it was pointed out that money alone would not save people.

Someone had to go to France to set up an organisation to help them escape. A young man called Varian Fry volunteered.

At first sight this classical scholar, with his thick spectacles and neat attire, seemed an unlikely hero.

But in 1935, in Berlin, he had witnessed the smashing of Jewish shops in the Kurfurstendamm riots. He had seen an elderly Jew kicked to the ground while his frail wife, protesting, was punched in the face.

Fry took refuge in a café where two stormtroopers spotted a Jew trying to make himself invisible at a corner table. As the man reached nervously for his beer, a knife flashed in the air and pinned his hand to the table. These scenes Fry never forgot.

Soon after he arrived in Marseille, the Vichy regime announced a 'statut des juifs' which barred Jews from all spheres of public influence.

They could no longer teach, join the army or the civil service and were dismissed from positions within the Press, radio, film and theatre.

Though it took a year to implement, it was the beginning of a systematic segregation that later hastened deportation to the camps.

Fry set up the Centre Americain de Secours (CAS). Outwardly it was a legal organisation, giving advice and some financial assistance to those who wanted to emigrate to the neutral United States. But behind closed doors it was forging documents and paying guides to lead those on Hitler's black list to safety over the Pyrenees.

Villa Air-Bel was the elegant, dilapidated house which Fry and his colleagues found in the suburbs of Marseille. It sheltered a lively clientele of artists and writers waiting for American visas, including André Breton, the leading Surrealist.

Sullivan describes the gaiety, the parties, games and relationships which animated this private world, despite the constant threat of police invasions.

It is a crowded tale. Sullivan avoids congestion by dividing her book into short, lively chapters.

Some 2,000 lives were saved by the CAS.

Many thought at the time they were simply escaping the 'Nazi period'. Only in retrospect did they realise they had avoided probable extermination.

The American State Department, not fully realising what Fry was up against, never gave him the recognition he deserved. But in 1997 Yad Vasham, Israel's Holocaust Memorial, posthumously named him 'Righteous Among Nations'.

Copyright 2006 Associated Newspapers Ltd.

All Rights Reserved
 

book review

Joie de Vivre: Take a trip to France without ever leaving your chaise with these memorable reads (excerpt)

by Megan O'Grady
Vogue, Nov. 2006

The eponymous suburban residence in Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (HarperCollins) served as a safe haven for dozens of artists and intellectuals on the Nazi hit list-including Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, and André Breton. With tremendous suspense and emotional pull, Sullivan recounts the little-known story of Varian Fry, the intrepid young American who sheltered them-helping them and hundreds more escape from Vichy France.
Copyright 2006 The Conde Nast Publications Inc.

book review
by Sarah Curtis

Sunday Times, London, U.K., Nov. 19, 2006

Between 1940 and 1941, a grand but ramshackle villa in Marseilles sheltered a group of flamboyant writers, artists and intellectuals that an American charity helped to escape from Vichy, France.

Among them were Andre Breton urging fellow surrealists to defy fascism "by singing, playing and laughing with the greatest joy", Max Ernst hanging his paintings on the trees in the garden, and Victor Serge not admitted to America because of his communist past. Sullivan brilliantly interweaves personal histories with terrifying tales about flight over mountains to Spain or Switzerland and by sea to Casablanca or Martinique, and with stories of forging papers, bribery, love and betrayal. At the centre is Varian Fry, the quiet American, now forgotten, who managed the dangerous operation.
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Limited

book review

Beyond the front lines: Three new books veer from the battlefields to coping on the civilian front
by James MacGowan, The Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa, Canada, Nov. 12, 2006

Yesterday was a day of remembrance, a time to personally and quietly honour those heroic souls who gave their lives on the fields of battle to preserve such a simple thing as freedom. Over the years, some extraordinary books have been written about battle, but lately I've noticed an interesting trend in books about war that has taken the focus away from the guns and grime of the battlefield to the smaller front-line of the civilian world and how they coped or collapsed in the face of the onslaught.

Nowhere was this more evident than in Vichy France (as France's wartime government was known), whose leaders were more than happy to collaborate with the Nazis. For those unwilling to be a part of the killing machine, it was a horrible time to be living in France.

Three recent books deal with this time, two directly with Vichy, while the third begins in France but ends up in Germany. All three are gripping, and have the decided effect of making you feel fortunate you live here and that you live now. A thing to remember around Remembrance Day.

- - -
Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France, by Carmen Callil (Knopf, $40).
- - -

Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille, by Rosemary Sullivan (HarperCollins, $34.95).

In Vichy France, Sullivan writes, "destinies ceased to be a matter of personal control. The life and death of any individual became merely something to be haggled over in bureaucratic ministries. . . . Not chance, not contingency, but someone else, a stranger, arbitrarily decided who lived and who died."

It was, obviously, a horrible time, but Sullivan's book focuses on one gleaming element of it: The Villa Air-Bel, a safe house in Marseille, which housed and protected such artists and intellectuals as French surrealist Andre Breton, German surrealist artist Max Ernst, writer Victor Serge, painter Marc Chagall, French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, writer and painter Consuelo de Saint-Exupery and many others the Nazis viewed as enemies.

The house was rented by an American, Varian Fry, who arrived in France in 1940 with $3,000 strapped to his leg and orders from the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private relief organization based in the U.S., to get as many of these people out of the country as possible.

Fry's organization did have legal status in France, but there was plenty of cajoling, bribing and sweating involved in dealing with the Vichy bureaucracy. Eventually, Fry was thrown out of the country but not before he -- with the considerable help of a French leftist, Daniel Benedite -- had managed to get nearly 2,000 people to safety.

Along with plenty of intrigue, Sullivan's book -- which reads like a novel, and a page-turner at that -- houses some terrific characters: there is the rich hedonist Mary Jayne Gold, who props up Fry's efforts with money, when he runs short; Peggy Guggenheim, who also supplies Fry with money; Benedite, who knew how to work the underbelly of Vichy; and some of the biggest cultural figures of the past century. A book you will read in one sitting.
Copyright 2006 Ottawa Citizen, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publication Inc.
 

book review
The chequebook saviour and his château
Jane Stevenson is captivated by the story of a Harvard classical scholar who rescued Europe's intellectuals from the Nazis
by Jane Stevenson
The Daily Telegraph, London, U.K., Nov. 11, 2006

When catastrophe strikes, most people wring their hands and say: "Something ought to be done.'' It takes a rare spirit to add, "and I ought to do something''. In the first years of the Second World War, an unlikely group of people coalesced in order to carry out the work of the American Emergency Rescue Committee and bring endangered writers and artists to the New World. Hundreds of people - in the end, a couple of thousand - were got out of occupied France, an enterprise that, on the one side, involved human bravery and integrity on a scale seldom surpassed and, on the other, bureaucracy and purblind human stupidity on a level that would make the angels weep.

At the outset of the Second World War, Americans were on the whole anxious to stay at some distance from European conflict. They were certainly not anxious to open their arms to miscellaneous millions of refugees, but they were still concerned about intellectuals and artists whom the Fascists had marked down as specific targets. An argument could be made, and was, that it was desirable to preserve European culture by granting American visas to culturally significant figures. Unfortunately, anti-Fascist intellectuals of the 1930s were, by definition, Leftist. The State Department's ban on letting in "Communists'' excluded, for example, Victor Serge, the Belgian-born writer and fierce critic of Stalin. Thus the AERC might get someone out, only to find there was nowhere for him to go.

The New York committee dropped a buttoned-up Harvard classical scholar called Varian Fry into the human maelstrom of occupied Marseilles with a list, a chequebook and a book of rules. By the time he left a year later, loathed equally by American officialdom on both sides of the Atlantic, he had plumbed the depths of his own personality and that of his culture, and had been personally responsible for saving hundreds of lives. Fry wrecked his marriage and his career, and the only people who ever acknowledged his extraordinary achievements were the Israelis, who cited him as "Righteous among the Nations'' at Yad Vashem.

This is a magnificent, complex narrative of courage, folly and complacency. These were not always readily distinguishable: Mary Jayne Gold, a ditzy American heiress straight out of F Scott Fitzgerald, threw in her lot with the escape committee and spent thousands and thousands of dollars of her own money on its behalf, yet endangered the entire enterprise by her relationship with a professional criminal. Not all of the workers were saints. They were all strong-minded people with a variety of agendas, many of them conflicting.

The book opens with a reminder of what was at stake: the tragic end of Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most important theorist of modern urban life. An elderly, sick man, he was successfully guided over the Pyrenees, resting every 10 minutes, but grimly clutching the briefcase that contained the manuscript of his last book. Once in Spain, he found the rules had just changed. Since he did not have an exit permit, he would be escorted back to the French border, from whence he could expect to be sent to a concentration camp. That night he killed himself with the morphine he kept on him. The briefcase he had carried on that agonising journey vanished without trace, and with it his last book, which he had rated as important as his own life.

As the book unfolds, many of the stories within it are just as dizzy, sad, human and unfortunate. What makes it even worse is that Benjamin was not delusional; he was one of the foremost thinkers of his generation.

At the centre of this narrative is the strangely named Villa Air-Bel; a château outside Marseille, rented for a pittance from an eccentric miser. It was to prove an air-bell indeed for those who were not waving, but drowning. It provided an island of safety for a succession of brilliant people, André Breton and Max Ernst among them. Hitler had branded their art "degenerate'': they had been marked down.

Charismatic and sexy, Breton defiantly continued to play his games with words and images - to oppose not only the war, but the mentality of war. Other individuals refused reality in less defiant modes: fatally, many potential victims believed in the essential civilisation and humanity of France; and ended up herded onto cattle trucks by French soldiers.

Among the many heroes of this beautifully narrated book is Lisa Fittko, a Jew, who guided group after group of unfit, disoriented people across a Pyrenean mountain pass to the relative safety of Spain, turned back, and did it again the next day. Her words are as true now as they were then: "One would so like to believe that the character of the German people was responsible. For then one could also believe that it could never happen here. Those who so believe have not learned anything.''

Copyright 2006 Telegraph Group Limited

A refuge from the Reich
by Carlo Gébler
The Irish Times, Nov. 11, 2006
Carlo Gébler is a writer. His play Silhouette was recently performed at the Tricycle Theatre in London, as part of How Long is Never, an evening of short plays exploring the current situation in Darfur, western Sudan

History: An illuminating account of the French mansion where artists were saved from Nazi harm.

Karl Frank, an Austrian psychoanalyst, fled Germany in 1933, changed his name to Paul Hagen, and thereafter worked tirelessly to mobilise opinion against Hitler.

After the invasion of Holland, in May 1940, Hagen realised something must be done, and soon, for those on the Reich's list of state enemies, the majority of whom were refugee artists living in France. Once the Germans invaded, as everyone was predicting, they were finished.

Within weeks, Hagen established, in New York, the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) to get these artists out. And to oversee the work in France, he hired Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated intellectual of immense probity. In Fry, Hagen knew he had a man who would stand up to fascist functionaries and get those on the Nazi list out of France.

In August 1940, with $3,000 taped to his leg and a list of 200 names, Varian Fry arrived in Marseille, then part of Vichy or unoccupied France. He quickly established the Centre Américain de Secours (CAS) in that port city and recruited staff to run his office, a mix of French, British, Romanian and American nationals.

Fry lasted 15 months before he was deported. During that time 20,000 refugees approached him for help. Stretching his mandate as far as he dared, he took 4,000 into the care of the CAS. He gave financial support to 600, helped 1,500 to leave legally and illegally, and evacuated 300 British soldiers and officers. He also established a dozen communities around Grass and a charcoal business in the Var where refugees could work and hide. From 1942, after Fry's departure, up to the Liberation, the CAS helped a further 300 to escape.

Though these figures are simple, the individual stories of the refugees and those who helped them are not. Sullivan has had to be selective, and her choices are uniformly judicious. Her principal characters are Fry, of course; Fry's English-speaking French assistant, Danny Bénédite; Bénédite's British wife Theo; Mary Jayne Gold, the American heiress who partly bankrolled the CAS; and the most famous of the artists saved by the CAS: Max Ernst, the painter; André Breton, the writer; and, my favourite, Victor Serge, the great anti-communist, anti-Stalinist and anti-fascist author of the penal classic Men in Prison. Finally, there is the thing that allows Sullivan to bring all the strands together and the most important character of all in the story, the Villa Air-Bel, the decrepit mansion outside Marseille that Fry rented and used to shelter many of his refugees - Ernst, Breton and Serge included - while they waited for the papers to come that would allow them to leave France.

As a piece of narrative Villa Air-Bel is considerable. It tells a number of individual stories - about 40 - brilliantly and it places them in context. Furthermore, as one would expect, the style is beautifully clear and concise. It also illuminates a little known but important aspect of the history of the second World War. I knew nothing about the CAS until I opened this book and I am grateful to the author for informing me.

But more important, not to mention timely, is what this book tells us about how things go wrong. The excesses of the Vichy regime, the Drancy interment camp outside Paris, and the voluntary transfer of 75,000 Jews, most of whom were French nationals, by other French nationals, bureaucrats and policemen, to the Germans, who then murdered them, didn't happen by accident. These things happened because of decisions made by politicians, often years before the war started, which in turn created the conditions that made genocide possible. Sullivan shows us, through the stories she tells, exactly what those decisions were, as well as their dire consequences.

Fry did a lot to alleviate human misery, but what he achieved in comparison to the suffering caused by Vichy and her allies was small: it is a melancholy truth but the achievements of good men and women will always be minor while the harm done by malevolent politicians and their states will always be major. That was the way of the world back in the 1940s, and that is the way of the world now. Nothing changes except in one respect: now, arguably, we know more than they did about horror, or we should, because today we have a book like this, which explains in the clearest possible language what happened when politicians forgot it was their duty to leave the world a better place than they found it, and decided instead to leave it in a worse state. In which case, surely, there must be an argument that Sullivan's book should be mandatory reading for contemporary politicians - and I mean all of them, not just the despots. It would certainly do them no harm.

Copyright 2006 The Irish Times

Bio brings Graham Bell to life
The Guardian, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, Oct. 26, 2006

When biographer Charlotte Gray was writing Reluctant Genius, her magisterial life of Alexander Graham Bell, she did not anticipate that it would be controversial.

Yet as she has travelled across Canada and the U.S. promoting her highly readable book, she was berated by interviewers and callers to phone-in shows who believe that Italian-American Antonio Meucci, not Bell, was the first to invent the telephone. (In 2002, the Italian lobby got the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a resolution to that effect.)

"There is no proof," says Gray smoothly, pointing out that Meucci did not launch a patent challenge when Bell received his patent for the "speaking telephone" in 1878. "He claims to have thought of it 10 years earlier, but did not create a prototype or take out a patent. Invention is not about having an idea; it is also about making it work and patenting it."

The award-winning, Ottawa-based writer is the only one to present a biography at this year's International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront, now taking place.

It is not a fertile time for biography. The only other notable Canadian biographies this year have been Private Demons: The Tragic Personal Life of John A. Macdonald by Patricia Phenix and The Half- Lives of Pat Lowther by Christine Wiesenthal, the story of the murdered poet that has been nominated for a Governor General's Award.

"The 1990s was a great period for biography; biographies by Deirdre Bair and Michael Holroyd were pouring off the press," says Rosemary Sullivan, who has previously written the lives of three women writers: Elizabeth Smart, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Margaret Atwood. "Then in early 2000, it was memoirs and autobiography. I don't think we feel now that by reading the biography of the great we can get a handle on the anxieties that surround us."

Sullivan read at the festival on Sunday from her new book "The Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille" about a group of remarkable artists and writers, including Max Ernst and Andre Breton, sharing a house in Vichy, France, while awaiting rescue by a private American relief organization headed by classics scholar Varian Fry.

She is now interested in writing about groups of people who affect one another rather than individuals.

"I wanted to see what happens to artists in a war u who becomes a refugee and who doesn't see the danger in time? Who finds the courage to become a rescuer? I would call my book a biographical history," Sullivan says.

"You need a lot of money to do the research, the travel, the archival research and it takes years," says Sullivan, suggesting another reason why good biographies do not appear more often.

"My advance for the Elizabeth Smart book was $7,500 in 1989 and for Gwen MacEwen, not much more."

Work on her latest book was supported by the Camargo Foundation in France and other grants.
Copyright 2006 The Guardian, a division of Transcontinental Media Group Inc.

Bio brings Bell to life (excerpt)
by Judy Stoffman, Toronto Star
The Toronto Star, Canada, Oct. 25, 2006

(...) It is not a fertile time for biography. The only other notable Canadian biographies this year have been Private Demons: The Tragic Personal Life of John A. Macdonald by Patricia Phenix and The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther by Christine Wiesenthal, the story of the murdered poet that has been nominated for a Governor General's Award.

"The 1990s was a great period for biography; biographies by Deirdre Bair and Michael Holroyd were pouring off the press," says Rosemary Sullivan, who has previously written the lives of three women writers: Elizabeth Smart, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Margaret Atwood. "Then in early 2000, it was memoirs and autobiography. I don't think we feel now that by reading the biography of the great we can get a handle on the anxieties that surround us."

Sullivan read at the festival on Sunday from her new book The Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille about a group of remarkable artists and writers, including Max Ernst and Andre Breton, sharing a house in Vichy, France, while awaiting rescue by a private American relief organization headed by classics scholar Varian Fry.

She is now interested in writing about groups of people who affect one another rather than individuals.

"I wanted to see what happens to artists in a war - who becomes a refugee and who doesn't see the danger in time? Who finds the courage to become a rescuer? I would call my book a biographical history," Sullivan says.

"You need a lot of money to do the research, the travel, the archival resarch and it takes years," says Sullivan, suggesting another reason why good biographies do not appear more often.

"My advance for the Elizabeth Smart book was $7,500 in 1989 and for Gwen MacEwen, not much more."

Work on her latest book was supported by the Camargo Foundation in France and other grants.  (...)
Copyright 2006 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.

book review
American idealist aided artists, intellectuals in Vichy France
by Sheldon Kirshner
Staff reporter, Canadian Jewish News, Oct. 19, 2006
Canadian Jewish News

Varian Fry, a young American idealist, arrived in Nazi-occupied France on Aug. 15, 1941, a sum of $3,000 in cash taped to his leg. Clad in a Brooks Brothers pinstriped suit, he also carried a sleeping bag and an air mattress, a list of 200 European artists and intellectuals he intended to help and letters of introduction from the U.S State Department.

So began one of the most intriguing, if little-known, humanitarian missions of World War II.

A 32-year-old Harvard graduate, Fry went to France as the representative of the American Emergency Rescue Committee, which had been established to assist the artistic elite of Europe.

As part of its capitulation to Germany in June 1940, Vichy France agreed to "surrender on demand" all German nationals and citizens of conquered countries who had publicly expressed criticism of the Nazi regime and had fled to France seeking asylum.

The individuals Germany sought to extradite were both Jewish and Christian, and included novelist Thomas Mann and painter Marc Chagall. Fry's intention was to whisk them out of France as soon as possible, lest they be interned and/or murdered by the rapacious Nazis.

As they waited for their exit visas, some found a temporary haven in Villa Air-Bel, an imposing, three-storey, 18-room mansion on a hill outside the southern French port of Marseille. It had been expressly rented to accommodate them.

Rosemary Sullivan, a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an award-winning biographer, has written a vivid account of this episode. Villa Air-Bel: World War H, Escape and a House in Marseille is a strong narrative work that burnishes her reputation as a meticulous researcher and a fluid writer.

Sullivan, whose biographies of Canadian literary figures Margaret Atwood and Gwendolyn MacEwen are already classics, has a gift for humanizing history. And in Villa Air-Bel, this is precisely what she achieves.

The central character, Fry, is a handsome, charismatic man who had a passion for liberal political causes. A magazine editor until his sojourn in France, he felt that the United States should jettison its isolationist policy, stop Adolf Hitler in his tracks and help imperiled progressive Europeans.

Fry's interest in, and commitment to, such causes was cemented by a trip to swastika-bedecked Berlin in 1935, where he witnessed a random anti-Semitic attack on an elderly Jewish couple. The ugly incident galvanized him, and in the years to come, he would extend a helping hand to refugees in France.

With Hitler's accession to power in 1933, many Jews and dissidents fled Germany, bound for France. At first, they were warmly received, though right-wing newspapers regarded them as "German invaders who were taking the bread out of French mouths."

With the fall of Leon Blum's Popular Front government in 1938, during the depths of the Depression, the refugees found themselves on hard times. The new prime minister, Edouard Daladier, a supporter of appeasement, declared that the refugees were no longer worthy of French hospitality and should be "controlled."

Rightists, meanwhile, called for their internment. Eventually, the refugees were dispatched to internment camps. Among them were Otto Meyerhoff, the winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize in medicine, and Thadeus Reichstein, the discoverer of cortisone and the recipient of the 1950 Nobel Prize for medicine.

Conditions for the refugees deteriorated after France's defeat in the war. As Sullivan says, they lived in constant fear of being deported.

When Fry reached Marseille in the summer of 1941, refugees who sought to escape the hell of Vichy France needed several documents: a safe-conduct pass to travel within France; an exit permit to leave the country; a transit visa to travel overland via Spain and Portugal to board a ship in Lisbon; a visa to a country willing to accept them.

Thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt, President Franklin Roosevelt's humane wife, Fry had acquired quasi-diplomatic status when he arrived in Marseille. Fry assumed that he could get the job done within a matter of weeks and return to New York City by the end of August. But in October, he prolonged his visit, informing his wife in a cable that he could not "abandon" the refugees in his care.

Varian Fry

Several days later, the Vichy regime enacted new anti-Semitic regulations, the statut des juifs, and authorized the internment of "all foreign Jews in camps" or in "residences in remote villages where they could remain under the watchful eyes of the local police."

To assist the refugees in distress, Fry and his confreres rented Villa Air-Bel and established the Centre Americain de secours (CAS).

They also enlisted the services of two German dissidents, Lisa and Hans Fittko, to guide refugees over the Pyrenees mountains to safety in neutral Spain. One of their "clients" was the renowned German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. Having reached a Spanish border post, he was callously told that he could not proceed any farther. In despondency, he committed suicide. A priceless manuscript he had carried in his briefcases disappeared, never to resurface.

Sullivan's chapters on the Fittkos and on political developments in Europe that impinged on the lives of refugees are interesting, though slightly padded. But the beating heart of her book concerns Air-Bel, the rambling villa where the reftigees while away their days while waiting for their travel papers to the United States. The villa, she notes, provided "a respite from harsher realities" just outside its portals. In Marseille, for example, Jews were being victimized.

Sullivan portrays American diplomats in Marseille as heartless creatures who curried favour with Vichy and could not care a whit about Fry and his project. When the U.S. consul there, Hugh Fullerton, called Fry into his office for a chat, he could only tell him that the Vichy regime was "uncomfortable" with his "refugee work."

The police inevitably raided Air-Bel and summoned Fry for a grilling. After he was arrested, Fry was forced to leave France. Vichy could do without troublemakers like him. With Fry gone, Air-Bel was summarily emptied of its residents. But by that point, Fry had accomplished a lot.

Over a period of one and a half years, he managed to protect more than 4,000 refugees, facilitated the departure of 1,500 people from France and threw a financial lifeline to 600 others.

With the Air-Bel interregnum behind him, Fry became a freelance writer and teacher. Five months before his death on Sept. 12, 1967, just shy of his 60th birthday, France belatedly honoured him for his good deeds. In 1996, Yad Vashem - the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem - posthumously named Fry as a righteous gentile.

During his lifetime, the United States never officially recognized his heroic actions, though Warren Christopher, a U.S. secretary of state, belatedly conveyed apologies to Fry on behalf of Americans.

At Fry's funeral, the Jewish sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, whom Fry had helped, said in a eulogy, "He was like a racehorse hitched to a wagonload of stones." These poetic words spoke volumes.

In closing, Sullivan adds that Villa Air-Bel was torn down in 1970 and replaced by a faceless apartment complex for new immigrants, mainly North Africans. One can probably assume that they have never heard of Villa Air-Bel, which, after Sullivan's book, has taken on a life of its own.
Copyright 2006 Canadian Jewish News
Copyright 2006 Micromedia Limited

Bestsellers
compiled by Brian Bethune
Maclean's, Oct. 16, 2006

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)
Non-fiction

1. HEART MATTERS 1 (3)
by Adrienne Clarkson
2. THE WAY IT WORKS (1)
by Eddie Goldenberg
3. THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS
by Alain de Botton (1)
4. NIXON IN CHINA (1)
by Margaret MacMillan
5. RELUCTANT GENIUS 2 (3)
by Charlotte Gray
6. BAY OF SPIRITS 3 (2)
by Farley Mowat
7. THIS IS MY COUNTRY, WHAT'S YOURS?
by Noah Richler 4 (4)
8. CAUSEWAY 5 (2)
by Linden MacIntyre
9. VILLA AIR-BEL by Rosemary Sullivan (1)
10. MURDER IN AMSTERDAM 10 (3)
by Ian Buruma
Copyright 2006 Rodgers Publishing Ltd.

book review
Remembering the prince of Air-Bel
by Candace Fertile
Edmonton Journal, Alberta, Canada, Oct. 15, 2006
Candace Fertile is a freelance reviewer

Rosemary Sullivan, a University of Toronto English professor, has several non-fiction books to her credit, and Villa Air-Bel is a wonderful addition. She manages to combine solid scholarship with a snappy writing style, and this makes for a history book that is completely riveting.

Villa Air-Bel was a house on the outskirts of Marseilles that served as a communal home for workers with the Centre Americain de Secours (CAS), an agency funded by the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization. The CAS had a mandate to rescue intellectuals from the mess of Vichy France, and over its short life (1940-41) it enabled almost 2,000 people to escape and gave financial support to many others.

Sullivan launches the history effectively with a brief narrative about the attempted escape of three stateless people through the Pyrenees to Spain. They are led by Lisa Fittko, who, with her husband Hans, guided many people to safety.

But this particular trip demonstrates the perils facing those who try to escape. The three are stopped at the Spanish border because they don't have the proper papers. One commits suicide that night in a Spanish hotel. His name: Walter Benjamin. The celebrated philosopher couldn't bear the idea of being sent back to France and then, likely, to a German concentration camp.

Although Benjamin had lived in France for seven years, he didn't have French citizenship. The catch-22 is clear. "No one could leave France without an exit visa," Sullivan writes. "And Vichy officials weren't about to give a visa to someone as famous as Benjamin, who was, in any case, probably on the Nazis' blacklist. Benjamin had to be smuggled out." He was only 48.

This opening immediately grabs the reader's attention, and Sullivan never releases her grip. Using both personal and public events, beginning in 1929, she creates a compelling history of the immense bravery of people who strove to combat unbelievable power structures gone spectacularly awry.

The key figures in this history are wildly varied. Mary Jayne Gold was a fabulously wealthy American who loved France and used her money to assist many people. The CAS was run by Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated American who had witnessed violence against Jews in Berlin in 1935. Fry was aided by Danny Benedite, a Frenchman, and his wife, Theo, who was British. A young American named Miriam Davenport, who had been studying art history at the University of Paris, was quickly taken on by Fry.

The Americans could have left, but they were committed to trying to save people and so stayed as long as they could. Fry ignored requests to return to the United States.

The intellectuals who were aided include surrealist Andre Breton and his wife Jacqueline Lamba, Victor Serge (a survivor of Stalin's purge of the Bolsheviks), Max Ernst, French poet Benjamin Peret and the Catalan painter Remedios Varo.

The whole list of people involved is a veritable Who's Who of the early 20th-century cultural milieu. Austrian novelist Joseph Roth drinks himself to death in Paris in 1939, but not before warning German poet Walter Mehring and his literary agents, Hertha Pauli and Carli Frucht, to get out of Europe.

Standing in counterpoint to the brutality of the Nazis and their French collaborators is the freedom of Paris before the war and occupation. And then there are the countless brave individuals who fought to save lives, through legal channels and otherwise.

Danny Benedite was arrested for trying to trade gold on the black market, as the CAS needed cash to continue its efforts. Sullivan shows the seamy side of Marseilles and the centre's links with criminals in its quest to save human beings.

Villa Air-Bel is history at its best: It brings individuals to life and explains the national and international forces at work. And it shows the importance of learning history. As Lisa Fittko (a Jew from Berlin) remarked: "Inhumanity is typical of fascism, not characteristic of a nation, I try to explain. Only the structures change. One would so like to believe that the character of the German people was responsible. For then one could also believe that it could never happen here. Those who so believe have not learned anything."

Given the current world situation, I can't help but think that the lessons of history haven't been learned. Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel is a valiant effort to explore and emphasize those lessons, so necessary to remind us of people's both good and evil actions.
Copyright 2006 Edmonton Journal, a division of Canwest MediaWorks Publication Inc.

book review
WWII hero liberated 2,000 refugees
by David Laskin
The Seattle Times, Oct. 8, 2006
Special to The Seattle Times

When the German Army rolled into Paris without breaking a sweat in June 1940, some of Europe's leading artists, writers, philosophers and intellectuals were among the millions of refugees who fled south to the so-called Zone Libre.

With Paris now an outpost of Hitler's Reich, Marseille became the city of last resort for the likes of André Breton, Max Ernst, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. "Here is a beggar's alley gathering the remnants of revolutions, democracies and crushed intellects," wrote the Russian refugee writer Victor Serge of wartime Marseille.

Though the U.S. government did next to nothing for these gifted "remnants," a group in New York hastily organized an Emergency Relief Committee to get as many of them as possible out of France before it was too late. The committee chose as its unlikely emissary a young, bespectacled, Harvard-educated classics scholar named Varian Fry. Fry's astonishing success in helping high-profile refugees notably the surrealists Breton, Ernst and their circle escape to Mexico, the U.S. and Switzerland is the subject of "Villa Air-Bel," Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan's fascinating, occasionally maddening book.

Fry arrived in Marseille in August 1940, an innocent abroad with $3,000 in cash taped to his leg and with plans to remain four weeks. Over the next 13 months, in the service of his cause, he learned to bluster, lie, scheme, coerce, face down the increasingly vicious French authorities and work around the hostile U.S. consul. By the time French police deported Fry late in the summer of 1941, he and his colleagues had gotten some 2,000 people out of the "Fascist hell" of Vichy France.

Like Irène Némirovsky in the recently published novel "Suite Française," Sullivan tries to fashion a narrative about the fall of France by tracing multiple complexly intersecting story lines, though, of course, Sullivan's "stories" are true. Her protagonists are the individuals some celebrated, many obscure who holed up with Fry in a grand dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of Marseille called Villa Air-Bel.

As Europe fell to the Nazi nightmare, the villa's residents Breton, Serge, a plucky American heiress named Mary Jayne Gold and others shared meager meals and gossip, played surrealist parlor games, wrote, painted, hid stolen documents and waited frantically for the money and papers that would allow them to get out. Sullivan's chapters set at the villa read like a cross between "Casablanca" and Sherill Tippins' "February House," about the Brooklyn brownstone that W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and other assorted Bohemians shared around the same time.

Unfortunately, before she gets to Marseille, Sullivan gives us 100 odd pages of historical background, from the rise of fascism to the Spanish Civil War to the folly and blindness that led to the fall of France, all of it filtered through the eyes of the key characters. Her intent is to make us smell the smoke and feel the fear, but too often it leads to awkward, forced passages.

Though the cream of Europe's midcentury intelligentsia crowds the pages of "Villa Air-Bel," the stubborn, moody, fiercely idealistic Fry is its most fascinating figure. "He was like a racehorse hitched to a wagon load of stones," artist Jacques Lipchitz said of Fry at his funeral in 1967.

A hero in France both to the artists he rescued and the loyal staff who helped him, Fry riled the ERC board for his blunt criticism of the U.S. State Department. He was fired soon after returning to New York in the fall of 1941 and spent the rest of the war indeed the rest of his life battling alienation and depression. Only in 1996 did the State Department officially recognize Fry's heroism and apologize that the U.S. government had never given him the support he deserved.

Sullivan would have had a better book had she pared away the padding and let Fry hold center stage throughout.

David Laskin is the author of "The Children's Blizzard" and "Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals."

Author appearance

Rosemary Sullivan discusses "Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille," 7 p.m. Oct. 18, presented by University Book Store at Seattle Public Library, Ballard branch, Seattle; free (206-634-3400 or www.ubookstore.com; 206-684-4089 or www.spl.org).
Copyright 2006 The Seattle Times Company

John le Carre's "Mission Song" regains top spot on Maclean's fiction list
Canadian Press NewsWire, Oct. 5, 2006

Here are the top 10 hardcover fiction and non-fiction books in Canada compiled by Maclean's magazine. Bracketed figures indicate position the previous week.

NON-FICTION
1 (1) Heart Matters - Adrienne Clarkson
2 (_) The Way it Works - Eddie Goldenberg
3 (_) The Architecture of Happines - Alain de Botton
4 (_) Nixon in China - Margaret MacMillan
5 (2) Reluctant Genius - Charlotte Gray
6 (3) Bay of Spirits - Farley Mowat
7 (4) This is My Country, What's Yours? - Noah Richler
8 (5) Causeway - Linden MacIntyre
9 (_) Villa Air-Bel - Rosemary Sullivan
10 (10) Murder in Amsterdam - Ian Buruma 08:37ET 05-10-06
Copyright 2006 Micromedia Limited
Copyright 2006 Canadian Press

from Amazon.com 8 of 12 people found the following review helpful: Earlier "Crossroads Marseilles 1940" is better, October 5, 2006   Reviewer: Pierre Sauvage - See all my reviews    The "book description" above states that this book "explores the diaries, memoirs, and letters of the individuals involved." "Explore" may not be the right word. One of the main figures in "Villa Air-Bel" is beautiful heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who initially rented the villa and spent 1940-41 in Marseille torn between her participation in the remarkable rescue effort run by fellow American Varian Fry--and her affair with a young French gangster. She told it all, very flavorfully, in her published 1980 memoir, "Crossroads Marseilles 1940"--on which the new book, without permission, draws extensively and slavishly. Check it out!

book review
The Yank Who Saved the Elite
by Jessica Warner
The Toronto Star, Canada, Oct. 1, 2006
Jessica Warner is a scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the author of Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason and The Incendiary: the Misadventures of John the Painter. She is writing a history of American abstinence movements.

Americans are in low repute these days. When I mention that I was once one myself (something I bring up less and less often), the first thing out of people's mouths are the names of foreign places where Americans are behaving badly - Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha.

Yet it was not so long ago that foreign places seemed to bring out the best in Americans. In the '20s and '30s Paris inspired Fitzgerald, Hemingway and other ex-pats. In the late '30s Spain attracted the young leftists who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And for one year, from 1940 to 1941, Marseilles was the base of operations for an unsung hero named Varian Fry.

Some 4,000 Europeans, most of them artists or writers who had run afoul of the Nazis, owed their lives to this remarkable man. He is the subject of Villa Air-Bel by Toronto's Rosemary Sullivan. The title, which takes its name from the villa Fry used to shelter his more famous refugees, is perhaps misleading, for this is really a collection of biographies - of Fry, the people who helped him, and the people he helped.

This approach plays to Sullivan's strengths. She is the author of three critically acclaimed biographies, each featuring a Canadian woman writer - Margaret Atwood in The Red Shoes, Elizabeth Smart in By Heart, and Gwendolyn MacEwen in Shadow Maker. Whether this is the best way to tell a story involving thousands of people is less clear.

What is clear is that Sullivan has unearthed the perfect story. There is a ramshackle villa to give it atmosphere, a war to give it a sense of foreboding. There is a deeply flawed hero (Fry). There are collaborators and tough-talking Americans, amorous heiresses and starving artists, and, to complete the analogy to Casablanca, a Vichy police inspector who whisks the hero to safety.

Fry was the right man at the right time. A Harvard graduate and the husband of an editor for the Atlantic Monthly, he had the right social connections. He spoke French and German. Most importantly, he was an idealist with time on his hands.

In August of 1940, he arrived in Marseilles with $3,000 and a letter of introduction from the U.S. State Department. He was acting at the behest of the hastily convened Emergency Rescue Committee, and his mandate was as ambitious as it was open-ended: to "attempt to locate, and to aid with counsel and money as directed, certain individuals whom this Committee will specify, so that they may reach Lisbon or Casablanca."

With the help of several volunteers, he set up shop in the Hotel Splendide, processing refugee claims by day and throwing loud parties by night. The American consulate refused to help. The Vichy police harassed him.

When their activities became too conspicuous, one of his American friends rented a villa just outside Marseilles. There the parties continued as its nervous occupants waited for the visas that would give them safe passage to America. (One, the Russian writer Victor Serge, renamed it Villa Espervisa, short for "hoping for a visa.")

It was the crowning moment of Fry's life. After it, everything disappointed him - his wife, the people who had sent him to Europe, the State Department that had done so little to help him. His sponsors in New York disowned him. So did Eleanor Roosevelt, who had used her influence to help him secure visas. He had "done things which the government does not feel it can stand behind," she wrote in a curt letter to Fry's wife.

Recognition came late. In 1967, just six months before his death, he was made a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. In 1996, when he was posthumously honoured at Israel's Holocaust Memorial, Secretary of State Warren Christopher issued a formal apology.

Villa Air-Bel starts as a morally unambiguous tale. On one side there are the Nazis; on the other, the artists and writers they persecuted. It ends with shades of grey. Fry was a hero to the people he saved, but a scoundrel to his wife, divorcing her shortly after returning to the States. For the 4,000 people he helped, there were the 16,000 or more he did not. The famous were deemed worth saving, but why not the obscure?

There is an even larger and more disturbing question the book raises, one that Thomas Mann, himself a refugee from Hitler's Germany, famously asked in 1947 in Doctor Faustus: Why were intellectuals and artists so powerless to save themselves and their civilization?

The answer, I suspect, lies in one of the stories Sullivan tells about Max Ernst and his lover Leonora Carrington. It is meant to show their joie de vivre, but I can't help reading something else into it: a failure to confront evil in a serious and effective way. There they were, in the early days of the war, staging a surrealist play in the tiny French village of Saint-Martin d'Ardeche. According to one stunned witness, their hair dyed blue, Ernst "played a surgeon extracting kilometres of Leonora's intestines ... and she danced the dance of the Hindu cockroach on the cafe tables."

And one wonders why the puppeteers who picket George Bush's appearances are making so little headway.
Copyright 2006 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.

book review
Firm resolve, in desperate times: Rosemary Sullivan tells the story of Varian Fry
by Elaine Kalman Naves
The Gazette, Montreal, Canada, Sept. 30, 2006
Elaine Kalman Naves is a Montreal writer.

"Imagine the situation: the borders closed; you're caught in a trap, might be arrested at any moment; life is as good as over - and suddenly a young American in shirt sleeves is stuffing your pocket full of money, putting his arm around your shoulders and whispering in a poor imitation of a conspirator's manner: 'Oh, there are ways to get you out of here,' while damn it, the tears were streaming down my face, actual tears ... and that pleasant fellow ... takes a silk handkerchief from his jacket and says: 'Here, have this. Sorry it isn't cleaner.' "

German-Jewish critic and translator Hans Sahl, in paying homage to the heroic individual who helped him flee to safety in the United States, encapsulates the maelstrom in which thousands of persecuted European refugees found themselves in France during the Second World War.

The man with the money and the handkerchief, variously described as the "quiet American" (in Andy Marino's biography) and the "Artists' Schindler" (in David Kerr's 1997 documentary film) was Varian Fry, a young American classicist, journalist and editor. Fry's story lies at the heart of Rosemary Sullivan's complex and magisterial historical study Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille. In non-fiction format, Villa Air-Bel neatly complements Irene Nemirovsky's recently discovered exquisite novel, Suite Francaise.

Both books take as their backdrop the fall of France in June 1940 when, after six weeks of war, the French government signed an armistice with Nazi Germany.

In the preceding years, as storm clouds had gathered over Europe, France had become a haven for refugees of various stripes, including droves of expatriate artists and intellectuals, who were persecuted in their homelands because they were Jews and/or actively involved in anti-Fascist activities. Under Article 19 of the Franco-German armistice, the Vichy government consented "to surrender on demand" all these exiles who had sought asylum in France.

"How is it," Sullivan asks, "that a peaceful country, committed to principles of freedom and democracy, suddenly finds itself not simply invaded by a foreign army, but ruled by an authoritarian regime with its own Fascist ideology?" In the blink of an eye, the most pressing threat to the refugees became not the German enemy, but French collaborators and bureaucrats willing to play the Nazis' game.

Wrote the Russian emigre Victor Serge: "In our ranks are enough doctors, psychologists, engineers, educationists, poets, painters, writers, musicians, economists and public men to vitalize a whole great country. Our wretchedness contains as much talent and expertise as Paris could in the days of her prime; and nothing of it is visible, only hunted, terribly tired men at the limit of their nervous resources."

Recounting the lead-up to the main action, Sullivan sets out how a staggering number of refugees - nearly 200,000 - teemed to Marseille in the summer of 1940, overwhelming a city of 650,000. Among the 1,500 whom Fry and his brave staff at the Centre Americain de Secours - an officially authorized relief organization - would help escape by legal and illegal means (forged documents, secret smugglers' routes over the Pyrenees, black-market funding) were artists Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz and Wilfredo Lam, and authors Victor Serge, Andre Breton, Walter Mehring and Hannah Arendt.

Born in 1907, the son of a Wall St. stockbroker, Fry was Harvard-educated, spoke French and German, had independent political ideas and was fuelled by moral outrage. On a trip to Berlin in 1935, he had witnessed a particularly vicious attack upon a Jew. "That scene, scarred on the retina of his eyes and in his brain, would return to Fry every time he needed to be reminded of why he was in Fascist France."

He arrived in Marseille Aug. 14, 1940, with a list of 200 names of notables to save, $3,000 strapped to his leg and a firm resolve. Almost clueless about the magnitude of the task ahead, he booked his return to the United States for Aug. 29.

Instead, he stayed 13 months, before being thrown out by the Vichy government. Shockingly, he was obstructed at every turn by the U.S. consulate in Marseille and by officials in the United States who viewed his rescue operations with suspicion and disfavour. On his return home, the FBI kept him under surveillance.

Nearly 30 years after his death in 1967, Fry was named "Righteous Among the Nations" by Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, the first American to be so recognized. At the ceremony, the U.S. Secretary of State apologized for his government's lack of support for Fry during his lifetime.

Sullivan has brought to this book her experience as the award-winning biographer of Elizabeth Smart, Gwendolyn MacEwan and Margaret Atwood, and a flair for vivid language honed by crafting three poetry collections. If at times her exhaustive research threatens to engulf her tale, she makes amends with a cast of intensely interesting characters caught in the snare of desperate times.
Copyright 2006 The Gazette, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publication Inc.

The lessons of history:  Evil is part of human nature, not a national trait.
Combating it in Vichy France were several brave people determined to rescue intellectuals from the Nazis
by Candace Fertile
The Vancouver Sun, British Columbia, Canada, Sept 30, 2006
Special to the Sun
Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College in Victoria.

Rosemary Sullivan, a University of Toronto English professor, has several non-fiction books to her credit, and Villa Air-Bel is a wonderful addition. She manages to combine solid scholarship with a snappy writing style, and this makes for a history book that is completely riveting.

Villa Air-Bel was a house on the outskirts of Marseilles that served as a communal home for workers with the Centre Americain de Secours (CAS), an agency funded by the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization. The CAS had a mandate to rescue intellectuals from the mess of Vichy France, and over its short life (1940-41) it enabled almost 2,000 people to escape and gave financial support to many others.

Sullivan launches the history effectively with a brief narrative about the attempted escape of three stateless people through the Pyrenees to Spain. They are led by Lisa Fittko, who, with her husband Hans, guided many people to safety.

But this particular trip demonstrates the perils facing those who try to escape. The three are stopped at the Spanish border because they don't have the proper papers. One commits suicide that night in a Spanish hotel. His name: Walter Benjamin. The celebrated philosopher couldn't bear the idea of being sent back to France and then, likely, to a German concentration camp.

Although Benjamin had lived in France for seven years, he didn't have French citizenship. The catch-22 is clear. "No one could leave France without an exit visa," Sullivan writes. "And Vichy officials weren't about to give a visa to someone as famous as Benjamin, who was, in any case, probably on the Nazis' blacklist. Benjamin had to be smuggled out." He was only 48.

This opening immediately grabs the reader's attention, and Sullivan never releases her grip. Using both personal and public events beginning in 1929, she creates a compelling history of the immense bravery of people who strove to combat unbelievable power structures gone spectacularly awry.

The key figures in this history are wildly varied. Mary Jayne Gold was a fabulously wealthy American who loved France and used her money to assist many people. The CAS was run by Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated American who had witnessed violence against Jews in Berlin in 1935. Fry was aided by Danny Benedite, a Frenchman, and his wife, Theo, who was British. A young American named Miriam Davenport, who had been studying art history at the University of Paris, was quickly taken on by Fry.

The Americans could have left, but they were committed to trying to save people and so stayed as long as they could. Fry ignored requests to return to the United States.

The intellectuals who were aided include surrealist Andre Breton and his wife Jacqueline Lamba, Victor Serge (a survivor of Stalin's purge of the Bolsheviks), Max Ernst, French poet Benjamin Peret and the Catalan painter Remedios Varo.

The whole list of people involved is a veritable Who's Who of the early 20th-century cultural milieu. Peggy Guggenheim makes an appearance. Austrian novelist Joseph Roth drinks himself to death in Paris in 1939, but not before warning German poet Walter Mehring and his literary agents, Hertha Pauli and Carli Frucht, to get out of Europe.

Artists play a key role in the tragic events as the Nazis use art in their propaganda. For example, in Munich in 1937, an exhibition of "degenerate art" was held. Works by Ernst and Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Kathe Kollwitz and Otto Dix were displayed, and they were described as having "sick minds."

Sullivan does a remarkable job of bringing together the strands of history and showing how culture can be used and misused. She points out:

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, was using modern, experimental art to marshal public hatred. He recognized that people could easily be made to feel afraid of art, especially art they didn't understand. He realized the value of a propaganda campaign against degenerate art. He could locate the enemy, harvest the public's anxiety and fear of the unfamiliar, and get to be the defender of public morality.

It's not much of a step from attacking art to attacking people. At the beginning of each chapter, Sullivan includes a quotation or two, and one from 19th-century poet Heinrich Heine dramatically captures the link between art and politics: "Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." (In 1933, the Nazis burned Heine's works, along with books by many others, in Berlin's Opernplatz.)

Standing in counterpoint to the brutality of the Nazis and their French collaborators is the freedom of Paris before the war and occupation. And then there are the countless brave individuals who fought to save lives, through legal channels and otherwise.

Danny Benedite was arrested for trying to trade gold on the black market, as the CAS needed cash to continue its efforts. Sullivan shows the seamy side of Marseilles and the centre's links with criminals in its quest to save human beings.

A fascinating side story is Mary Jayne Gold's predilection for danger, especially dangerous men. She falls in love with Raymond (Killer) Courand, a gangster, and her naivete about him crosses the border into total stupidity, jeopardizing the CAS.

Villa Air-Bel is history at its best: It brings individuals to life and explains the national and international forces at work. And it shows the importance of learning history. As Lisa Fittko (a Jew from Berlin) remarked, "Inhumanity is typical of fascism, not characteristic of a nation, I try to explain. Only the structures change. One would so like to believe that the character of the German people was responsible. For then one could also believe that it could never happen here. Those who so believe have not learned anything."

Given the current world situation, I can't help but think that the lessons of history haven't been learned. Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel is a valiant effort to explore and emphasize those lessons, so necessary to remind us of people's both good and evil actions.

Rosemary Sullivan will appear at next month's Vancouver International Writers Festival.
Copyright 2006 The Vancouver Sun, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publication Inc.

book review
History the house salvation built fall books
by Michael Greenstein
National Post, Canada, Sept. 23, 2006
Michael Greenstein is the author of Third Solitudes and the editor of the anthology Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada. He lives in Toronto.

Rosemary Sullivan's latest book covers a little-known chapter in the history of the Second World War: the story of Villa Air-Bel, a dilapidated chateau on the outskirts of Marseilles that housed refugee artists awaiting visas to escape from Vichy France -- vicious Vichy, where the Petain government often outdid the Nazis in their zealous anti-Semitic policies.

Sullivan begins her suspense-filled account on Sept. 25, 1940, "when Lisa Fittko opened the door of the inn in the seaport town of Banyuls-sur-Mer and looked apprehensively up avenue Puig del Mas." This would make for great fiction if it weren't all too true. The door opens into a perilous world in the south of France near the Spanish border, where in the early-morning darkness Fittko leads a party of refugees across the mountains. Among them is Walter Benjamin, the frail 48-year-old philosopher with manuscript in tow, who manages to cross into Spain only to be told his papers are not in order and that he must return to France. Knowing he will end up in the hands of the Nazis, Benjamin takes morphine and dies close to the border and freedom.

Yet in this twilight world Fittko manages to save numerous artists and intellectuals by ferrying them to Spain and Portugal, where they board ships carrying them to safe havens across the Atlantic. The opening chapter, "The Road Out," points to one of several escape routes, as well as the direction in which Sullivan is headed in her dramatic account of the artists caught up in the Nazi occupation of France. Indeed, all of Sullivan's chapter titles give the reader a sense of historical direction. Frequently the chapters are studded with epigraphs from some of the leading writers among the refugees, as well as photographs of the scenes in France, all of which makes for very satisfying reading.

Sullivan's second chapter, "The Photograph," highlights her interest in photography in recreating the tragic period. "In the photograph a man and a woman sit like birds in the branches of a tree and look down on the camera. Despite the danger of their perch, they look comfortable." That precarious perch epitomizes the dilemma at Villa Air-Bel: The refugees are surrounded by the natural beauty of southern France, as well as the menace of the Gestapo. Many of the artists, such as Andre Breton and Max Ernst, are surrealists, and the conditions around Marseilles are nothing if not surreal.

The central character in this story is Varian Fry, a young American who comes to France in 1940 as the representative of the American Emergency Rescue Committee. He is helped by some fellow Americans, including heiress Mary Jayne Gold and Miriam Davenport. To introduce another of her tableaux, Sullivan again relies on photography: "There is a photograph of the young Mary Jayne Gold with her girlfriends aboard the S.S. President Harding in 1929 ... Perhaps it's the way the light falls on her face that spotlights her, picking her out from among others who look dated, lost in the past in a charming sepia photograph."

Initially Fry and Gold appear as innocent Americans out of a Henry James novel or bon vivant characters from the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but soon they are devoting themselves to the highest moral causes: Gold giving generously from her inheritance, and Fry spending countless hours obtaining documents for those hunted by the Gestapo. In Paris, Gold befriends Danny Benedite, whose experience with the police department proves invaluable to Fry in making black-market contacts and procuring documents. Frequently they get involved with gangsters who as often as not cheat them.

Bureaucratic blunders help some to escape; occasionally, a local gendarme or official turns a blind eye. But otherwise the refugees suffer from cold and hunger, though they fare far better than those who are shipped to concentration camps.

The dissident socialist Victor Serge, exiled from the Soviet Union, aptly summarizes their situation: "Here is a beggar's alley gathering the remnants of revolutions, democracies, and crushed intellects ... In our ranks are enough doctors, psychologists, engineers, educationists, poets, painters, writers, musicians, economists and public men to vitalize a whole great country. Our wretchedness contains so much talent and expertise as Paris could summon in the days of her prime; and nothing of it is visible, only hunted, terribly tired men at the limit of their nervous resources." Villa Air-Bel offered a temporary oasis in a world of tragedy.

Ultimately, though, Fry's efforts were highly successful. Using Lisa and Hans Fittko as guides, he and his cohorts were able to find safe passage over the Pyrenees for the likes of Claude Levi-Strauss, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Peggy Guggenheim and numerous others. In her Afterword, Sullivan offers snapshots of the fate of her many "characters" after the war.

Villa Air-Bel is a remarkable achievement. Sullivan has a strong reading voice: husky, crisp and self-assured; her writing is equally powerful.
Copyright 2006 National Post

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information, US, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
All Rights Reserved

Publishers Weekly Reviews

August 21, 2006

SECTION: REVIEWS; Nonfiction; Pg. 61

LENGTH: 251 words

HEADLINE: Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille

BYLINE: Staff

BODY:


Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille Rosemary Sullivan. HarperCollins, $26.95 (544p) ISBN 978-0-06-073250-9

The outbreak of WWII took many Europeans by surprise. In France, by the time the fighting began, the papers people needed to get out of the country were difficult to come by. It was on this circumstance that three enterprising Americans concentrated their efforts in the first two years of the war. Ivy League scholar Varian Fry, sent by the American Emergency Rescue Committee, heiress Mary Jayne Gold and graduate student Miriam Davenport turned a Marseille château into a safe haven for dozens of prominent artists and intellectuals waiting for a chance to emigrate in secrecy, including Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, André Breton, Franz Werfel and perennial exile Victor Serge. Canadian writer Sullivan (her Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen won a Governor General's Award) goes beyond the confines of Air-Bel to tell a fuller story of France during the tense years from 1933 to 1941. She intelligently spreads the fractured narrative, with its huge cast of players constantly coming and going, over 60 brief chapters. What's palpable is the welter of shock, fear, world-weariness, cynicism and misplaced idealism evinced by the villa's transient residents as they apprehensively awaited their fate. The author never gets quite close enough to her subjects, but this is a moving tale of great sacrifice in tumultuous times. B&w photos. (Oct. 3)

LOAD-DATE: August 24, 2006
 

'I'm Cuban, I'm sugar, I have flavour!'
by Rosemary Sullivan
The Toronto Star, Canada, Aug. 6, 2006

When my husband and I went to Cuba with the photographer Malcolm Batty in 2003 to write a book called Cuba: Grace Under Pressure, we met a young man who warned us: "Everyone comes to my country looking for their own version of Cuba. Revolutionaries find revolutions. Capitalists find dictatorship. Tourists find the perfect beach. Nobody wants to see Cuba through our eyes."

What I discovered was a dynamic country that was not frozen in time since the Revolution of 1959, but was evolving and continually changing. There were debates on every street corner, both strong affirmations and deep criticisms of the president, Fidel Castro. And yet I found a consensus: like all citizens, Cubans passionately love their country.

What I most admire about Cuba is how Cubans deal with the complexities of their lives with humour and dignity. I remember the old woman we visited on the farm in Pinar del Rio, in the fabled tobacco heartland where the weirdly beautiful limestone hills look like giant inverted thimbles. She was 85 and poor; the chairs we sat on in her living room were plastic; she had just had a quintuple bypass.

"Mi casa es su casa (my house is your house)," she said. And, holding her hand over her fragile heart, she joked that she had had eight children, but those were the dark times when there was no electricity.

Or I think of the child in the Boxing Club wearing used gloves that left his thumbs exposed. As he watched me writing in my notebook, leaving the left margin empty, he looked at me in puzzlement and asked why I was wasting so much paper.

On television, we watched young singers with diamonds in their navels looking like Britney Spears singing: "I'm Cuban, I'm sugar, I have flavour!" We met alternativos, young artists who specialized in satirical songs like the one about the explosion of private restaurants opened by gynecologists who could make more money in the restaurant business than they could in medicine. And we encountered musicians and painters who travelled regularly to Europe and brought their money home.

A young man we met had immigrated to Mexico at the age of 14 to join his father. But he soon returned home: "I missed the self-expression I had in Cuba. Cuba is a wonderful place for a child," he said. In Mexico he had discovered a level of racism that had shocked him. Now he wanted to make films. He had no illusions about the censorship he would incur if he made a film about the year he spent cutting sugarcane on a collective farm. Though for him it was a time of camaraderie and escapades, as he and his young friends subverted the rules, his government, he said, did not accept criticism. Paradoxically, it was they who had taught him self-expression by sending him to music school. Still, this was his country and he was sure he would find a way around the bureaucracies to tell his story.

The oldest person we met was Mary McCarthy, a Newfoundlander who arrived in Cuba in 1923. At the age of 103, she seemed to incarnate the memory of Cuba. The wife of a wealthy leather merchant, she had met everyone from Batista to Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. "The Cubans," she said, "are a cultured people." She did not regret staying in Cuba when the wealthy fled in 1962. She assured me her intention was to be buried in Cuba. (But not yet.)

The nightlife in Havana was exciting: jazz clubs, salsa palaces, transvestites parading on the seawall affectionately called the Malecon. People set up their domino games on the pavement where they gossiped and drank their rum. Each time we asked: "How is life in Cuba?" the response was "No es facil" (it's not easy), but then the verb would come: "resolver." Cubans have ingenuity, whether it's making a transmission from scraps to keep a 1959 Buick going, or coming together to reconstruct a tornado-ravaged city.

"Cuba is the oldest European civilization in the Americas," one woman told me. "We have a problem with our superiority complex." Havana has the most impressive collection of Napoleon artifacts outside Paris, housed in the Museo Napoleonico, an Italian mansion built in the 1920s by a sugar baron. And Havana is the most beautiful colonial city in the New World.

No one outside Cuba can understand the baroque complexity of Cuban politics, where politicians span the spectrum from enlightened liberal socialists to dogged militants. It's as hard as trying to understand what goes on inside the halls of power in the Bush administration.

One thing is certain - things are not as simple as the black and white portrait painted from abroad. On this small island, politics often has the feel of a bitter family quarrel. Still, the majority of Cubans are young and have their own ideas about what they want to make of their country.

Now that an era is passing, what will become of Cuba? All I say is, "Hands off." Cubans can decide their own destiny.

Rosemary Sullivan's new book, "Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille," will be published this September.
Copyright 2006 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.

From Booklist , August 19, 1999
This interesting story has an interesting origin. Thirty-five years ago an editor learned that Fry helped save Marc Chagall from the Nazis and began, but abandoned, a biography.
Copyright© 1999, American Library Association. All rights reserved

Kirkus Reviews, Aug, 2006

As World War II looms, darkens and erupts, a group of artists, writers and other exiles gather in Marseilles, where their escapes are plotted and executed by a doughty group led by American Varian Fry.

If Sullivan's writing seems at times a bit too perky and aimed at readers who know little about the Second World War, her subject matter is of surpassing importance -- and her efforts are ultimately effective. An astonishing array of talent fled to Marseilles in the early 1940s, fleeing the Nazi advance, names recognizable as among the most significant in the 20th-century worlds of art and literature: Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, André Breton, Victor Serge. Sullivan (Labyrinth of Desire, 2002) artfully interweaves their journeys and backstories. The escape narratives of Serge and Breton (told near the end) are as harrowing as any emerging from the War. Sullivan's great contribution here, though, is to bring to life those committed Americans and Europeans who risked all to help others. Fry, who headed the Marseilles activities of the Emergency Rescue Committee (headquartered in New York City), stands out. Although his own government often impeded his work (erecting, rather than removing, barriers), and although the ERC eventually fired him (they found him abrasive), he saved the lives of many hundreds. He found for them difficult trails over the Pyrenees, fetid ships and slow trains -- but in doing so, found them freedom. Sullivan also relates the stories of husband and wife Danny and Theo Bénédite, French nationals who worked tirelessly, even after multiple arrests. Others include Hans and Lisa Fittko (Germans), who guided refugees over the mountains, and American heiress Mary Jayne Gold, whose money kept the operation going in the early days. A number of the principals survived to publish their memoirs. The Marseilles villa, the structure where the fearful waited for visas and rescue, was razed in 1970.

A complex tale showing how hope and courage flourish, even in the toxic soil of totalitarianism.
Copyright 2006 VNU Business Media, Inc.

Kirkus Reviews
The stirring story of an American journalist who, working in Vichy France, helped thousands of artists and intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, and Marc Chagall, rightly dubbed ``America's Oskar Schindler.'' (16 pages b&w photos)
Copyright 2006 VNU Business Media, Inc.

Non-fiction writers reveal tricks of trade (excerpt)
Calgary Herald, Canada, July 8, 2006

Literary Journalism
Conversations, begins July 10 and runs through July 31 on consecutive Mondays at 8 p.m. at the Rolston Recital Hall, the Banff Centre. For more information, call (403) 762-6301 or (800)-413-8368.
- - -
Five leading non-fiction from writers from different points on the globe will hold will talk about their work and literary journalism at the Banff Centre as part of the 2006 Banff Summer Arts Festival.

The series of talks, Literary Journalism Conversations, is directed by Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan, an acclaimed poet and winner of the Governor General's Award for non-fiction for Shadow Maker, her biography of Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwan.

Sullivan chairs the centre's Literary Journalism program.

On July 24, Sullivan, the author of 10 books including biographies of Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Smart, will present a take on her work in progress, Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in France.

The work traces the stories of a remarkable group of artists -- including Andre Gide, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Henri Matisse -- who gathered in a house in the south of France waiting for passage out of the country.

Juan Opitz, in collaboration with Sullivan, will present his short film The Road Out: El Camino al Olvido, which is based on Sullivan's book.
Copyright 2006 The Calgary Herald, a division of Canwest MediaWorks Publication Inc.

book review
by Vanessa Bush
Booklist Magazine, American Library Association

In France of the 1940s, the Nazis were hunting down artists and intellectuals, the elites who threatened the Third Reich. Many of them, including Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, and Marc Chagall, found temporary shelter in a large nineteenth-century house in a suburb of Marseille, waiting for rescue by courageous members of the American Rescue Committee. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, and letters, Sullivan offers a gripping look at the desperate and joyous days--with artists hanging paintings from trees--as musicians, scientists, and intellectuals waited for the visas that would give them safe passage out of Vichy France. Harvard-educated scholar Varian Fry led the effort, eventually saving 2,000 artists and intellectuals. An American heiress and a graduate student were part of Fry's team, coping with the petty and enlightened arguments of their diverse and brilliant charges. Sullivan captures the tense atmosphere of France as the Germans invaded and the fear and anxiety of the intellectuals, some held in detention camps and some who ignored the danger until it was nearly too late.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

HarperCollins: Critical Praise for Villa Air-Bel
 

"a moving tale of great sacrifice in tumultuous times."
— Publishers Weekly
"A complex tale showing how hope and courage flourish, even in the toxic soil of totalitarianism."
— Kirkus Reviews
"Her scene-by-scene evocation of life at the house reads like an updated Chekhov comedy laced with horror."
— Financial Times
"She’s got style."
— Philadelphia Inquirer
"Sullivan has written a book of great detail and complexity, though one that is full of darkness."
— Quill & Quire
"With tremendous suspense and emotional pull, Sullivan recounts the little-known story of Varian Fry"
— Vogue
"[In Villa Air-Bel] stories are told with passion."
— The Advocate
"It’s history, it’s intrigue. It’s nonfiction. It’s a real page-turner."
— New York Magazine: Ask a Shop Clerk: Holiday Edition, Carol Wald
"This is a magnificent, complex narrative of courage, folly, and complacency."
— Telegraph

Reader Reviews from FirstLook

"What an incredible story—almost unbelieveable. To visit Paris and Marseille today, one could not imagine the intrigue, horror and devastation of the occupation of the German army of WWII. The unsung heroes who aided the French resistance in hiding or smuggling out those in peril were incredibly courageous and deserve highest accolades for their roles in saving so many lives. The book, The Villa Air-Bel..., is well-researched and easy to read—I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish!"
— Susan (atlanta, GA)
 

"What an incredible story—almost unbelieveable. To visit Paris and Marseille today, one could not imagine the intrigue, horror and devastation of the occupation of the German army of WWII. The unsung heroes who aided the French resistance in hiding or smuggling out those in peril were incredibly courageous and deserve highest accolades for their roles in saving so many lives. The book, The Villa Air-Bel..., is well-researched and easy to read—I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish!"
— Susan (atlanta, GA)

"I confess. When first I discovered Villa Bel-Air: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille, in my mailbox, I wondered if the book would hold my interest. I know myself and what I know is this...I love stories that move, tales rich with twists and turns, the stuff of mystery, suspense, great romance, and characters who I will surely 'miss' when the story comes to an end. Amazingly, any and all dubious thoughts I may have possessed regarding my ability to remain interested in a work that looked to be more erudite than 'fast-paced thriller' were, by page 13 or so, completely obliterated. Rosemary Sullivan has given readers a nonfictional account that absolutely breathes 'action'. From the very first chapter, one which takes us on a death-defying trek crossing a punishing mountain pass, under the cover of darkness to escape the gestapo's murderous plans, to the intriging intimacies shared by some of the greatest artistic geniuses our world has ever known, this book captured every facet of my attention. Certainly this is a story of raw courage. It is also a fascinating account replete with heroic intention...we learn of the greatness of people who, by necessity behind the scenes, risked life itself for the sake of art and intellectual freedom. At the same time, the book opens to us the very real human frailties that caused day-to-day life together for artists like Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse and writers like Hannah Arendt, to be replete with drama, intensely evocative, the kind of stories that draw us in and refuse to let us go. In the end, this IS a story about the German occupation of France during a terrible World War. It is, however, much more. It is an action-filled page-turner of the highest order."
— Gayle (BEND, OR)

"Villa Air-Bel is a fascinating, true account of the Emergency Rescue Committee's extraordinary efforts following France's capitulation in June of 1940. Privately funded by an American relief agency, the ERC vigorously attempted to assist cultural natives and emigres to escape. Considered enemies of the state, their fate now rested in the hands of Hitler's Wehrmacht. Varian Fry, Mary Jayne Gold, and Miriam Davenport faced life-threatening situations on a daily basis to save the human cultural treasures of the world. They risked all and asked for nothing in return. Sullivan's vivid and painstakingly researched narration of their valiant efforts is a provocative read; this piece of history should not be forgotten."
— Irene (Saratoga Springs, NY)

"Villa Air-Bel gives a different perspective of World War II. Understanding the hardships that transpired throughout France for artists, writers, and German exiles tells a different story than is normally told. Although I found the book enjoyable and readable, it would be a stretch to say it would sell well. The verbiage is lengthy and Rosemary Sullivan uses words not normally found unless the Webster dictionary was used. Although she tells a credible story, unless one really enjoys reading about World War II, it would be a difficult read. I thought the research was extensive and the Afterword was enjoyable reading, as I was interested to see what really happened to the characters."
— Susan (Dover, DE)

"Rosemary Sullivan writes an intriguing account of the elite artists of France who become refugees during its World War II occupation. Sullivan sets the stage of France before and after its occupation and follows the lives of several notable artists and writers including Andre Breton and Victor Serge who become refugees wanted by the Germans for their 'subversive' and 'anti-German' work. Sullivan very successfully depicts a France that has become a frightening shell of its former self. In this France, artists and refugees have no way to support themselves and take care to sit near the back exit of cafes to be able to escape those who would arrest them simply for voicing their opinions through their art, an activity that had at one time been encouraged in France. Sullivan then tells the story of Varian Fry who arrives in France on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee to rescue the many talented artists that have become refugees. In Fry, the refugees find a source of help and someone to trust. Fry assembles a team of a variety of people from all walks of life who willingly risk their lives to help refugees escape France. Their willingness to help is contrasted sharply with the difficulties they face in persuading the United States and other countries to grant the refugees even something so small as a transit visa, let alone a visitor’s visa, both of which would enable them to escape the dangers of France. Surprisingly, the actual Villa Air-Bel makes a relatively short appearance but plays a large role in the book. It is a mansion of considerable proportions purchased by the staff of the Emergency Rescue Committee to house a few of its members as well as a few of its clients. The result is a safe, if temporary, refuge from war-time France. The Villa Air-Bel stands in marked contrast to France outside it. Inside, the inhabitants come to life resuming their art, throwing parties, and enjoying wandering the grounds. It is here, as they pick up some semblance of their past lives, that the reader can really appreciate how vibrant this community of artists was and see how much they had lost in the occupation of France. Sullivan has created a book of history that reads like a novel. She brings to life the historical figures which she focuses on and merely by telling their stories faithfully gives you a reason to hope that the Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee will succeed in saving them from repressive war-time France. This is a remarkable tale of people who put their lives on the line to save others and the effect it had upon them as well as the people who they saved."
— Megan (Bloomsburg, PA)

"I really enjoyed reading this book. It was exciting to read, knowing that these stories were all of real people. I was on the edge of my seat with the suspense of what would happen to the people trying to cross border lines, and for those living in the house knowing others were outside waiting to arrest them."
— Amanda (Brea, CA)

"I could not help recalling the opening scenes of Casablanca while reading the many tales in Villa Air-Bel of those trying desperately to leave France immediately before and during the German occupation of much of that country during World War II. Rosemary Sullivan gives readers numerous tales of escape, successful, failed and tragic, in this very detailed accounting of the many artists, writers and other intellectuals who would be Nazi targets. Villa Air-Bel is almost a 'who's who' of those the Nazis sought, so much so that readers sometimes get overwhelemed by the accounts. While Sullivan focuses on a few dozen of these refugees, Villa Air-Bel would have been livlier had she kept her focus more limited. I was particularly fascinated by the experiences of writer Andre Breton, who, despite or perhaps because of his plight, invented the term black humor and who amused his fellow refugees at Villa Air-Bel with word games. One cannot help but feel that despite their desperation and their meager existence this group of refugees still lived with style and grace. Villa Air-Bel is a stark reminder of how the human spirit strives to survive the tragedy of war and of war's costs in art and literature. As Sullivan tells us, not all escaped. Others were captured by the Nazis or commited suicide when escape proved impossible. The efforts of those Americans and others who worked tiredly to save intellectuals from concentration camps and perhaps death deserve the light shown on them in this account."
— June (Lansdale, PA)

book review
Taking flight from Vichy France
by Anne Bartlett
Bamm.com's BookPage Review:
Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

It's commonplace to read in the biographies of 20th-century artists that so-and-so left Europe in the late 1930s or early 1940s to live in the United States. The moves sound so sensible and easy. Many were Jews, many were leftists, so they got out of a continent being overrun by the Nazis. If only it had really been so simple.

After World War II began, only the very lucky or the very rich avoided horrific escape trips that required strenuous walks over mountain borders or being smuggled under false papers in deathtrap ships. While they waited for the permits to leave, real or fake, thousands clustered in Marseille, the polyglot French port controlled through late 1942 by the collaborationist Vichy government. A handful of idealistic young Americans also came to Marseille to help them get out, in the months before the U.S. entered the war.

This is the subject of Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel, a true tale full of intrigue, danger, crazed love, death and survival. Her main characters, American do-gooders and European artists, washed up for a time in the villa, a dilapidated suburban mansion that provided cheap shared accommodations. The house becomes a focal point for Sullivan to tell us how the housemates and their friends all got there, and how they got away—if they did.

The most famous residents were two surrealists, poet André Breton and painter Max Ernst. But the most important in terms of their eventual escape were two young men who worked for the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee: Varian Fry, an American liberal activist who used any means necessary to help the artists get out of France, and Danny Benedite, a French leftist who had the grit and practical knowledge to make Fry's mission possible. They and an odd conglomeration of aides managed to save 2,000 people before Vichy expelled Fry. Among them were Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Marcel Duchamp, Wilfredo Lam, Victor Serge and Remedios Varo. The debt of modern culture to the motley crowd at the Villa Air-Bel is truly incalculable.

review
Paris Through Expatriate Eyes

Our fascination with France and the Nazis continues with this under reported tale of courage and commitment.

“Although he had lived in France for seven years Walter Benjamin, the brilliant German intellectual and author of the monumental THE ARCADES PROJECT didn’t have French citizenship and under the Nazis couldn’t renew his German passport. “ So when the frail beyond his 48 years Benjamin was stopped by Spanish border guards as he attempted to cross the Pyrenées to freedom he took his own life that night with an overdose of morphine as he waited to be handed back to the Vichy French

For André Breton, Max Ernst, Victor Serge, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, and scores of other cultural elite denounced as enemies of the Third Reich, fear and uncertainty define daily life. One wrong glance, one misplaced confidence, could mean arrest, deportation, and death. Their only salvation was the Villa Air-Bel, a château outside Marseille where a group of young people would go to extraordinary lengths to keep them alive.

At a time when official America turned a blind eye to the plight of Europe’s mostly Jewish intellectuals, meticulously detailed in Arthur Morse’s WHILE SIX MILLION DIED, a private American relief organization, the Emergency Rescue Committee made up of these unlikely heroes—feisty graduate student Miriam Davenport, Harvard educated classical scholar Varian Fry, beautiful and compelling heiress Mary Jayne Gold, and brilliant young Socialist and survivor of the Battle of Dunkerque Danny Bénédite and his British wife, Theo fought the good and noble fight. The château was a vibrant artistic salon, home to lively debates and clandestine affairs, to Sunday art auctions and subversive surrealist games. Relationships within the house were tense and arguments were common, but the will to survive kept the covert operation under wraps. Beyond the château’s luscious façade war raged, yet hope reverberated within its halls. With the aid of their young rescuers, this diverse intelligentsia—intense, brilliant, and utterly terrified—was able to survive one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century.

Rosemary Sullivan explores the diaries, memoirs, and letters of the individuals involved while uncovering their private worlds and the web of relationships they developed.

book review

by Andrew Kett
Quill & Quire Omni, November 2006

On September 3, 1939, at 5 p.m., France officially entered the Second World War. The clubs and theatres shut down. Those who could fled. Civil defence called for a “blue-out” in Paris.

Paris fell in May of the following year. On June 22, the new Vichy government, under the authoritarian leadership of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, signed an armistice to surrender on demand any German nationals (and refugees from German-occupied countries such as Poland and Austria) requested for extradition by the Nazis.

Rosemary Sullivan’s Villa Air-Bel is as much about the anger, confusion, and terror that overcame France under Nazi occupation as about the actual Villa Air-Bel, an “immense three-story, nineteenth-century manse ... somewhat battered but still elegant,” which became a safehouse for artists and intellectuals while they waited for international visas, paperwork, or the optimal circumstances for flight.

The book’s short chapters alternate between the path of fascism through France and stories of men and women making their way through the devastation. The cast is large, led by Max Ernst, André Breton, their peers, and one Varian Fry, a plucky American who came to France as part of the American Emergency Rescue Committee, dedicated to saving European artists from the Third Reich. As Sullivan tells it, Fry arrived in Marseille in a Brooks Brothers suit, with $3,000, a letter of introduction from the U.S. State Department, and a list of 200 people he intended to save.

The anguish of these years – the arrests, the interrogations, the perpetual fear – is striking. The Villa is only so safe, and Fry can save only so many. And though France had little choice but to enter the war, so many terrible choices followed. Sullivan has written a book of great detail and complexity, though one that is full of darkness.

book review

by Sue Tomchin

Jewish Women International Jewish Woman

In Villa Air Bel: World War II, Escape and a House in Marseille (HarperCollins), author and University of Toronto professor Rosemary Sullivan recounts a story that is as compelling as a John le Carré spy yarn, yet grounded in fastidious historical research. When the Nazi blitzkrieg rolled across France, thousands of artists, intellectuals and other refugees, many of them Jewish, fled Paris, seeking refuge in France's unoccupied zone, primarily the port city of Marseille. Such individuals as Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Andre Breton, Alma Mahler, Hannah Arendt, and Heinrich Mann were trapped, struggling to obtain the visas necessary to reach the U.S. or another haven.

Into this city teeming with spies, collaborators and Gestapo agents, arrived the young American classics scholar Varian Fry, sent by the Emergency Rescue Committee in America with $3,000 taped to his leg, letters of recommendation and a list of 200 artists and intellectuals he was charged with saving. Within weeks, Fry formed the Centre Americain de Secours (CAS), a relief agency that would ultimately help 1,500 leave the country, both legally and illegally, in addition to assisting in the evacuation of about 300 British officers and soldiers trapped in France and providing financial support to six hundred refugees. Sullivan brings to life the story of the CAS, but also the artists and intellectuals whom the committee sought to rescue.

Among those whom Fry recruited to help was German Jew Lisa Fittko and her husband Hans. The Fittkos, themselves in grave danger from the Gestapo, nevertheless helped hundreds to leave France via a secret route across the Pyrenees into Spain.
 

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