Excerpt from The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"With respect, Madame Chagall, I don't believe that for a moment. Vichy is subject to the Nazis' whims. And we all know what they're capable of. I've seen it myself. I was in Berlin in '35—sent by the magazine I worked for. My last night in town there was a riot on the Kurfurstendamm. The things I saw—men pulled from their shops and beaten in the streets—an old man stabbed through the hand at a café table—boys dragging a woman by her hair—"

"These things happened in Germany," Chagall said, his tone harder now. "They won't happen here. Not to us."

"Let me speak to my friend at the consulate," Varian said. "Ask him to start a file for you, at least. If you do decide to leave, it might take months."

Chagall shook his head. "My apologies, Monsieur Fry. I'm sorry you had to come all this way in vain. But perhaps you'd like to have a look at the studio before you go—if you've finished, that is."

Varian couldn't speak; he could scarcely believe that a person of Chagall's intelligence, a person of his experience, could fail to see what he himself saw clearly. Chagall rose and crossed the courtyard to a set of ten-foot-high blue doors, and Varian got to his feet. He nodded his thanks to Bella, then followed Chagall across the bro­ken paving stones. Beyond the blue doors was a long, high-ceilinged room with a wall of windows: the former refectory of the girls' school. Canvases lay about everywhere, and for long minutes Varian walked among them in silence. As well as he knew the painter's work, he had never seen it like this: in its pupal state, damp and mutable, smell­ing of turpentine, raw wood, wet clay. From the canvases rose ghost­like images: a grave-eyed Madonna hovering above a shadowed town, serenaded by cows and angels; crucified Christ wrapped in a prayer shawl, his head encircled by grieving sages; a woman kneeling beside a river, pressing a baby to her chest; clusters of red and white flowers rising like flames.

"It's no small matter to cross an ocean," Chagall said. "More can be lost than canvas and paint. An artist must bear witness, Monsieur Fry. He cannot turn away, even if he wishes to."

"An artist can't bear witness if he's dead."

The painter removed his hat and set it on his knee. "The Emer­gency Rescue Committee mustn't concern itself further with our wel­fare," he said. "Save your resources for those who truly need help. Max Ernst, for example—he's rumored to be in a concentration camp at Gurs. Or Jacques Lipchitz, my friend from Montparnasse. Who knows where he's fled to now? Or Lev Zilberman, who painted those massive murals in Berlin."

"Yes, I know Zilberman's work. Alfred Barr fought to get him on our list."

"You're not entirely on the wrong path, then. Help Ernst, help Zil­berman. Not me." And he turned away from Varian, toward his can­vases, toward the brushes and knives, the wooden boxes cluttered with crushed tubes of paint. "I'll mention your name among our circles," he said. "I know plenty who are eager to leave."

_____


Varian stumbled along the road toward Cavaillon, down the hill he'd seen through the courtyard arch. It would take him two hours to reach the station at this rate; another two on the train after that, and then he'd be back in Marseille, having made no progress at all. And what would he report to his colleagues in New York—to Paul Hagen, who directed the Emergency Rescue Committee, or to Frank Kingdon, its chair? That summer, when he and Paul and Ingrid Warburg and Alfred Barr and the others had compiled their list—two hundred art­ists, writers, and intellectuals who'd been blacklisted by the Gestapo and had no way out of France—they hadn't imagined that their clients might resist being helped, nor that they'd consider themselves beyond Vichy's reach. There were so many things they hadn't considered; his life in France had become a process of discovering them, often to his embarrassment. It was a miracle he'd managed to get anyone out at all. There had been only twelve so far, a minuscule fraction of his list.

Excerpted from The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer. Copyright © 2019 by Julie Orringer. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.