ORRINGER: Even my short stories blended fiction and personal history. GAZETTE: Do you find it harder to blend fact and fiction in a novel like “The Flight Portfolio,” or to create a pure work of fiction as you’ve done in your short story collection “How to Breathe Underwater”? What would it have been like to be that artist, forced to produce work that might mean the difference between life or death? And what would it be like to be the person who had to look at those hasty sketches and determine whether their creator should receive life-saving help? Was it right to help certain artists and not others? Was it right to privilege artists at all? That felt to me like an unanswerable question, and I think as novelists we often look for questions like that - the kind that can be argued infinitely from either side. Then Fry’s associate, Miriam Davenport, trained in art history at the Sorbonne, would look at these sketches and determine whether the artist had talent - whether, in effect, they deserved to be helped, according to the committee’s mandate. Sometimes they would send potential clients down to Vieux Port and ask them to make a few sketches.
The question often led Fry and his associates to desperate measures. How does a person make those impossible moral decisions? Given an unlimited number of potential clients and limited time and funds, how do you prioritize? The mandate of Fry’s organization was to save Europe’s most brilliant writers and artists - but how to determine artistic merit among hundreds of refugees, all of them desperate for help? ORRINGER:That was the element of Varian Fry’s experience that I was most fascinated by as a novelist. How did you decide to incorporate this into the story? The characters struggle with their work, which involves choosing whom to save during the Holocaust. GAZETTE: A key theme in the book involves this question of how you can value one person’s life over another’s.
The Gazette spoke with her about the book and how her time on campus helped her shape it. Orringer worked on the book when she was the Lisa Goldberg Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2013–14. The novel tells the story of Harvard graduate Varian Fry ’30, a journalist and editor who was sometimes referred to as the “American Schindler.” While working for the Emergency Rescue Committee in France during World War II, Fry helped save Jewish members of Europe’s cultural elite, including artists, writers, and musicians, from Nazi concentration camps. Author Julie Orringer’s “The Flight Portfolio” is rooted in history.
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