While the Orpheus Clock negotiations were well under way, I discovered an unexpected but vital clue about the whereabouts of our two missing Francesco Guardi landscapes. All of which brought back strange memories of my father. I now realized Bernard had been so close in his pursuit of these beautiful Venetian capriccios. I must have been ten or so when he took me to a secluded palazzo in Venice, belonging to a collector he suspected. What was stranger, though, was that the paintings had, I now realized, been in the collector’s Mayfair apartment in London all along, just a block or so from Shepherd Market, where we lived at the time. I remember Pa laughing strangely when he recalled how he had never been invited to their London home.
Years later I picked up the trail in an art gallery in Zurich, where I posed as a Guardi collector. Now finally I had proof of who had sold them. I contacted the auction house involved, which not surprisingly was rather embarrassed. They wanted to close the case discreetly; accordingly they made me a reasonable offer, even though under Swiss law my family no longer had good title. The alternative was court, and I accepted their offer with a heavy heart. The bitter pill of compromise was always hard to swallow. These two paintings, among the many of Fritz’s collection, I would most dearly have loved to keep. At least I had closed another case and settled an old mystery.
Several other cases, including a major compensation issue with the French government, were calling for my attention. One day I would also have to find time to file an appeal for the money the Dutch government had forced my father and aunt to pay. Furthermore, the legalities of the sale of Bosbeek continued to bother me, and now a question had arisen of property in Berlin that had once belonged to the family. The list seemed endless, but before I immersed myself in the next round of legal battles, I realized I needed time to reflect. I had been so busy, I had barely had time to assess the remarkable events of the past several years, and the enormous changes that had taken place in my life.
• • •
Growing up in London in the fifties and sixties, I indentified with little except for the exciting new music that was springing up all around. The Stones and the Kinks had been favorites. The breaking down of old barriers was exhilarating. The last thing on my mind was the career in banking my parents suggested. The rigidity of life in the financial district represented exactly what I was trying to distance myself from. In contrast, the rebellious spirit of the emerging music business was particularly appealing. The music world offered a welcome haven for England’s misfits, young men such as myself.
When my father died and those boxes arrived, I had for several years been a distributor of rock music in LA—an exciting and challenging enough way to earn a living, but still one that focused on the increasingly trivial whims of pop culture. Suddenly I was to be thrust into the world of Renaissance art, Jewish history, and the horrors of the Second World War. Yet I adapted quickly. I was finally extricating myself from the 1960s and reentering the world of my roots—the world I was probably educated for. Almost overnight, my dormant passion for art and history found a vital focus. I was grateful for this new purpose in life.
At the beginning, some reminded me, “You can’t change the past.” Many friends suggested I should move on, that no good would come from lingering in the past. But what if the past was not over? I found that my family’s history was not pulling me back but pushing me forward. In the middle of the night I would sit bolt upright realizing so much was still to be done.
Even if my father had explicitly told me not to follow in his path, I’m not sure I would have listened. I can be just as stubborn as he was. Besides, I took the arrival of those boxes, combined with his silence, to be an implicit appeal to finish his life’s work.
My brother and I had also inherited Bernard’s determination. I don’t think for a minute I ever thought I was embarking on a fool’s errand. One man can make a difference. Despite our adversaries all being rich and powerful, I always had faith that right would prevail, however long it took.
From the earliest age I had carried with me an unidentified sense of loss. Growing up in a silent void, I only recognized much later in life the invisible “elephant in the room,” the Nazi cataclysm that had almost obliterated my family. Whether unconsciously or not, I had clearly been affected by my forefathers’ suffering, and as a result I found it difficult to rest. Only by addressing their unfinished business, reaching back to change the past however minutely, did I find some solace. As I embarked on this quest to find my family’s lost treasures, a solution to my underlying grief emerged. The more I traced our hidden artworks, the more my family’s buried history resurfaced. As I placed yet one more piece of the shattered jigsaw puzzle back together, the lost lives became tangible once more. With each piece came a little renewed pride. Today I am comforted by knowing my place in all this. I no longer suffer from an isolation of rootlessness. My roots are deep and wide, with ancestors that go back many centuries and relatives on four continents.
• • •
Of course I never actually heard any voices nor saw any visions, but over the last years I have felt profoundly the presence of my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. A French psychologist coined the term psychogenealogy, or “ancestor syndrome”—where some of us are links in an unconscious chain through the generations. Another psychotherapist, in Jerusalem, working with Holocaust survivors and their children, also developed the theory that survivors often designated a particular child as a “memorial candle”: one who took on the mission of preserving the past and connecting to the future. This concept struck a particular chord with me. Many times I felt I had inherited what appeared to be ancestral memories.
More than once during my research, an unknown artwork has stood out as I instinctively recognized something Fritz or Eugen had collected. It dawned on me that at least some of the art my family had lovingly collected might also serve as memorial candles. After all, the art, along with the family, had suffered, too. The Stuck ripped from its frame, the Renoir locked in a dank repository, the Orpheus Clock buried in the sand. The difference, I suppose, was that art had the potential for immortality. Unlike humans with their brief lives, these beautiful objects could reach across the generations, each with a story to tell if only one could unlock its secrets.
I have stared at Lenbach’s portrait of Eugen so many times convinced it might speak to me at any moment. I have studied, endlessly, the Man Ray portraits of Fritz and Louise in my library, certain they had a message to decipher. While Fritz looked off into the distance, almost wistfully, Louise with her deep, aching brown eyes seemed to look straight into my soul.
Each time I recovered any piece of their collection, however small, it felt like a significant vindication for my once-maligned family. Many would tell me how proud Bernard, and Fritz and Louise, and Eugen must be. I have often felt them looking over my shoulder. How often I have wondered if they can see all that has happened. I certainly hope there is a way they know we still care.
