Villa Air-Bel
De Tweede Wereldoorlog: hoe Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp en anderen uit handen van de nazi's werden gered
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- 7,49 €
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- 7,49 €
Publisher Description
Wanneer in 1940 de oorlog uitbreekt, komt dat voor de Parijse culturele elite als een totale verrassing: waar iedereen in deze metropool tot voor kort genoot van de eindeloze vrijheid, worden de belangrijkste kunstenaars plotseling uitgeroepen tot staatsvijand van het Derde Rijk en moeten ze vrezen voor hun leven. Voor onder anderen Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Max Ernst en André Masson is de enige redding Villa Air-Bel: een kasteel buiten Marseille, waar een groep jonge mensen hen met gevaar voor eigen leven uit handen van de vijand houdt.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 ch teau 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, Andr 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.
