Truth-Telling in the World of Fiction

Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio

Marc Chagall’s stained glass windows in the Hadassah Hospital’s synagogue. Chagall is a key figure in The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer: Photo: Shutterstock

The Flight Portfolio and Varian Fry

I just finished Julie Orringer’s novel, The Flight Portfolio, a massive undertaking of scholarship about the efforts of a young American named Varian Fry. Fry, along with other wealthy Americans cognizant of the threat to Jews, form The Emergency Rescue Committee. Together, they create a list of two hundred Jewish writers and artists to get out of German-occupied France while they are still able. Fry goes to Marseilles to head the organization and begins a courageous battle to protect the great Jewish minds of the era by providing any means of escape possible.

This much is true: Varian Fry was a real person who saved almost 2000 lives by getting them out of France. The Emergency Rescue Committee was also a real organization. Many of the characters, Hiram Bingham, Peggy Guggenheim, Hugh Fullerton, and Eleanor Roosevelt are all real-life pivotal characters who lived and affected the events in The Flight Portfolio.

Orringer does not exaggerate the life-saving feats that Fry and his committee were able to perform. They tracked down, entreated — sometimes begged — the artists, writers, and thinkers of the time to flee. In many cases, they had to convince them of the danger. Ultimately…