A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry [Hardcover] Isenberg, Sheila

From Publishers Weekly The only American to be honored at Yad Vashem (Israel's Holocaust Memorial), Fry saved the lives of thousands of refugees from the Nazis. Isenberg, a professor of English at Marist College (Women Who Love Men Who Kill), delivers a moving, workmanlike account of Fry's heroics. During the late '30s Fry, a Harvard-educated editor, journalist and teacher who was radicalized in 1935 when he witnessed Nazi troopers beating Jews in Berlin, wrote New York Times articles concerning the worsening situation in Europe, but didn't manage to increase public awareness. Under the auspices of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an organization of leftist journalists, religious leaders and activists, Fry traveled to Marseilles in August 1940 with $3,000 and a list of refugees, primarily Jewish, stuck in Vichy France, without money or visas. Isenberg details how, under cover of a humanitarian relief center, Fry helped well-known figures such as Marc Chagall, Andr‚ Breton, Hannah Arendt and many lesser-known people sneak across borders and escape. But his evident na‹vet‚ and combative personality sometimes worked against him: mistakenly assuming that most Americans would support his efforts, he alienated officials in the American Embassy who were unsympathetic to the plight of Jews and was forced to return home after a year. Fry's later years were marked by unhappiness in his personal life (he divorced his first wife and had a tempestuous relationship with the second) and destructive political disagreements with former colleagues. Isenberg ably renders prewar and war-time public ignorance and apathy in America and the extraordinary heroism of the sole volunteer for a dangerous rescue mission. Agent, Elizabeth Kaplan. (On sale Oct. 30)Forecast: Fry was brought to public attention by a Showtime movie last April starring William Hurt. Fry remains somewhat elusive here, but he is a dynamic character and this vivid telling of his story, which the author will promote in New York, should sell well if it is widely reviewed.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Product Description In 1940, a young Harvard-educated American named Varian Fry, inexperienced and not at all certain that he possessed any courage, went on a secret mission to Marseille. There, with only three thousand dollars and a list of names, he was to help those who had fled Nazi Germany and were now trapped in southern France.The list he took with him had been prepared by, among others, the Museum of Modern Art and Eleanor Roosevelt. It included most of the premier writers, painters, and scientists of Europe, many of them Jews—people like Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, André Breton, André Masson, and other sur- realists, and hundreds more. When Fry witnessed their plight, he became determined not just to give them immediate aid but to find ways for them to escape. Slowly he built up a group of people who could help, forging passports and finding secret paths across the Pyrenees into Spain and then to Lisbon. Fry himself was constantly in great danger, but he seemed to experience a divine inspiration, achieving greatness and glimpsing immortality by acting as the hero he never thought he could be. His own government tried again and again to stop him and send him home, but he managed to continue his rescue operations for more than a year.Only in the past decade has the world begun to honor Fry, who died in 1967. He is, for instance, the only American honored at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”Using letters and records unavailable to anyone else, as well as interviews with numerous survivors, Sheila Isenberg has given us an inspiring story of how the brave and determined actions of one individual can help change the world. From Library Journal Isenberg's (English, Marist Coll.; Women Who Love Men Who Kill) biography of Varian