Ron Charles reviews Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure, the writer’s first novel about the Holocaust:
Waldman is a wonderfully imaginative writer, but she’s drawn the central event of her absorbing new novel directly from history. The Hungarian Gold Train, as it came to be called, carried a trove of stolen goods worth millions of dollars. The Allies intercepted the train before it reached Germany and promised through various international agreements to return the property. That pledge to the dead Jews and their families was gradually thwarted by politics, postwar chaos and, yes, the victors’ avarice.
In its geopolitical scope, this crime is so encyclopedic that it could easily overwhelm a novel’s boundaries. But Waldman has devised a multi-part structure that allows her to focus on several distinct moments during a 100-year period. As with the painting in Susan Vreeland’s “Girl in Hyacinth Blue ” and the manuscript in Geraldine Brooks’s “People of the Book,” the link between these separate stories in “Love and Treasure” is a pendant decorated with the picture of a peacock. In Waldman’s exceedingly clever treatment, this piece of jewelry is not intrinsically valuable; it accrues value only as it passes from one unlikely hand to another, demonstrating the curious and tragic ways that history binds us together.
Adam Kirsch reveals more of the novel’s rich detail:
Drawing on what was clearly extensive research, Waldman brings to life the world of the Central European Jewish haute bourgeoisie, reveling in its textures, exposing its hypocrisies, and cheering on the incipient feminism that Nina represents. We enjoy the chance to scoff at Dr. Zobel as he insists that Nina’s menstrual cramps must have a psychological origin and when he blindly follows Freud in insisting that there must be some sexual trauma in her past. In fact, Nina is as healthy as can be—she is the third and best in the series of Waldman’s idealized heroines. This section also makes clear that Waldman’s Jewish ideal is neither hard and calculating, like Israel, nor soft and bland, like America, but excitingly, romantically, idealistically European.
It is easy, of course, to celebrate a paradise that is lost. But it is this third section of Love and Treasure, this fantasia on historical themes, that allows Waldman to write most freely and fully. Perhaps this is because, in 1913, the insoluble moral and political dilemmas raised by the Holocaust are not yet on the horizon. Like a film played backward, the possessions fly off the Gold Train and back into the hands of their owners, who march back home from the death camps and resume their comfortable lives. This is the kind of restitution we dream about, rather than the a partial and compromised kind the courts offer. Naturally, we can only achieve it in a work of the imagination.
Carolyn Kellogg describes how Waldman chose her subject:
She had already set herself the task of writing about visual art, something she knew little about, so researching the novel would allow her to learn something new. And when her friend Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis was named ambassador to Hungary, Waldman wanted to go visit her and make it a business trip. “So I Googled the words ‘Hungary,’ ‘Holocaust’ and ‘art,’ I kid you not, and I found the Hungarian Gold Train. That is how I chose what to write.”
Serendipity aside, a real sense of political engagement runs through “Love and Treasure,” particularly in the form of an Israeli war hero, an American soldier managing the spoils of war found on the Hungarian Gold Train and women in 20th-century Budapest fighting for the right to vote. “I don’t believe in political novels – I think they’re bad,” Waldman says. “But I can’t help myself. That’s the way my mind works. I dig my teeth into an idea, and it’s an idea that inspires me and excites me, and then I find myself writing about it.”
Ilene Prusher adds:
There is something about this multi-period Jewish novel, taking the reader on a journey through time in America, Europe and Israel, that feels imminently familiar. The overall arc of the plot, with its objets trouvés that span generations, feels similar to the blueprint of other contemporary novels by major Jewish American female writers, such as Nicole Krauss’ “History of Love” and “Great House,” and Dara Horn’s “In the Image.”
In each of these, a mysterious found object – a desk, a book, a set of photographic slides – provides a labyrinthine link between past and present. And whether in the foreground or in the backdrop, there is always a Holocaust angle present. The more one unpacks the past, these stories all suggest, the more one understands the present. There is something about this path that feels slightly timeworn.
The Dish 