Book Reviews

Flory: A Miraculous Story Of Survival

Flory A. Van Beek
HarperOne 2008, 242 pages (paperback), $23.95

Raised in a loving Orthodox family as the youngest of four, Flory Cohen has a seemingly idyllic childhood in Amersfoort, Holland. Under the tolerant reign of Queen Wilhelmina, Dutch Jews live in an environment devoid of anti-Semitism.

In 1937, Flory meets her future husband, Felix Van Beek, a recent immigrant from Nazi Germany who is acutely aware of the looming danger. As the war escalates in Europe and a German invasion seems imminent, Felix arranges for a job transfer to Argentina and asks Flory to accompany him.

The couple boards the SS Bolivar but in the North Sea, the ship hits German mines and sinks. Over 104 passengers perish. Flory and Felix manage to cling to life, rescued by a passing British destroyer. They are brought to England to recuperate but after they convalesce, they are denied permanent esidency and are forced to return to Holland just before the German invasion.

As the Nazi’s anti-Jewish deportations escalate, Flory receives a summons to report to a German work camp. A chance meeting with Piet Brandsen, a member of the Resistance, saves Flory from her dire fate.

Flory and Felix go into hiding with Brandsen’s family, who also arranges hiding places for other family members. When Brandsen is arrested by the Gestapo, Henk and Cor Hornsveld, total strangers to Flory and Felix, allow the couple to take refuge in their farmhouse.

Throughout her ordeal, Flory meticulously records her experiences with over 1,000 documents, diaries, newspaper clippings and photographs that she hides in metal boxes and buries in the Brandsen’s yard. After the war, Flory recovers the boxes intact.

These priceless archives, peppered throughout the memoir, enrich the tapestry of Flory’s remarkable story of survival. While Flory’s account of the Holocaust forms another critical piece of survivor testimony, it is also a moving portrait of the courage of Dutch families who risked their lives to protect their fellow countrymen. 

Artists In Exile

Joseph Horowitz
HarperCollins 2008, 458 pages (hardcover), $27.50

Would America’s performing arts have developed or thrived in the first half of the 20th century without the contributions of European artists? Probably, but Joseph Horowitz’s entertaining work, “Artists in Exile,” demonstrates the enormous contributions those artists made, primarily to dance, classical music, movies and theater.

Europe at the time was engulfed in war, revolution and the rise of fascism. But those were not necessarily the factors pushing them toward the United States. Yes, some were forced out by the Nazis. But as Mr. Horowitz points out, others were literally hungry or restless, and still others sought opportunity or new artistic frontiers.

Some of the immigrant artists embraced, and were embraced, by America. Others never adapted. Many never achieved the level of success here that they attained in their native countries.

Mr. Horowitz profiles more than three dozen immigrant artists, examining their work in Europe and here, and their degree of “cultural exchange” with America. As a historian and critic of classical music, he devotes considerable attention to composers and conductors.

The German immigrants often preached the superiority of their own classical music, at times holding back the emergence of American composers. The non-Germans were generally more open to working with American art forms.

In one of the more fascinating examples of cultural exchange, Mr. Horowitz describes the work of an all-Russian creative team — choreographer/director George Balanchine, composer Vernon Duke (nee Vladimir Dukelsky), set designer Boris Aronson — on the African-American musical, “Cabin in the Sky.”

Some of Mr. Horowitz’s subjects will be familiar names, including Balanchine, Igor Stravinsky, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Arturo Toscanini and Billy Wilder. Somewhere among the three dozen profiles, however, you’ll probably discover new names and become intrigued by their creations.

For me, those two figures were Rouben Mamoulian, whose work in America encompassed opera, film and musical theater, including “Porgy and Bess,” and Boris Aronson, whose pioneering work in set design took him all the way from the Lower East Side’s Yiddish Theater to Broadway’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Cabaret” and “Company.”