The Orpheus Clock
the search for my family's art treasures stolen by the Nazis
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £8.49
-
- £8.49
Publisher Description
The passionate, gripping true story of one man's single-minded quest to reclaim what the Nazis stole from his family — their beloved art collection — and to restore their legacy.
Simon Goodman's grandparents came from German-Jewish banking dynasties, and perished in concentration camps. That's almost all he knew about them — his father rarely spoke of their family history or heritage. But when he passed away, and Simon received his father's old papers, a story began to emerge.
The Gutmanns rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany's most powerful banking families. They also amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many others. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives.
Simon grew up in London with little knowledge of his father's efforts to recover their family's prized possessions. It was only after his father's death that Simon began to piece together the clues about the Gutmanns' stolen legacy and the Nazi looting machine. Through painstaking detective work across two continents, Simon has been able to prove that many works belonged to his family, and to successfully secure their return.
Goodman's dramatic story, told with great heart, reveals a rich family history almost obliterated by the Nazis. It is not only the account of a twenty-year long detective hunt for family treasure, but an unforgettable tale of redemption and restoration.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a novelist's narrative gifts, Goodman movingly portrays his family's victimization by the Nazis and the post-war repercussions of those events. Following the death of his father in 1994, Goodman began going through his papers and learned that his grandparents' valuable art collection had been stolen by the Germans. His family's efforts to retrieve the items hit unexpected barriers, and even readers with some familiarity with such struggles are likely to be shocked at the callous and hostile attitudes of Dutch officials who demanded that Goodman buy pieces back and the reputable auction house Sotheby's. The art world proved itself, at least at the outset, more concerned with carrying on "business as usual" than justice. The sections that present the Goodman family's lives before and during WWII are powerful and replete with tragic ironies: a bank they founded played a major part in Germany's becoming a "military and industrial world power," and Auschwitz, where Goodman's grandmother Louise was murdered, was built on land that had once been owned by a company whose board included her uncle. In combining a modern-day detective story with nuanced context for its importance, Goodman produces much more than another Holocaust book.
