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Emeth Reads
September 25, 2019 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
September 25th: Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer (discussion led by Wendy Thowdis)
This gripping, tender novel fictionalizes the experiences of Varian Fry, an American journalist who, in Vichy France in 1940, risked his life by smuggling some of Europe’s imperiled artists, writers, and thinkers—including Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt—to safety. Orringer has Fry alternately luxuriate in the thrill of heroism and torture himself by wondering whether he’d “care less about saving human beings if those human beings couldn’t write a perfect novel or make an enduring painting.” His choices become even more fraught when a man he loved in college appears with a request that threatens his mission, throwing into conflict Fry’s long-buried desires and his responsibilities to history and to his wife, back in New York.