Chasing Portraits
A Great-Granddaughter's Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The memoir of one woman’s emotional quest to find the art of her Polish-Jewish great-grandfather, lost during World War II.
Moshe Rynecki’s body of work reached close to eight hundred paintings and sculptures before his life came to a tragic end. It was his great-granddaughter Elizabeth who sought to rediscover his legacy, setting upon a journey to seek out what had been lost but never forgotten…
The everyday lives of the Polish-Jewish community depicted in Moshe Rynecki’s paintings simply blended into the background of Elizabeth Rynecki’s life when she was growing up. But the art transformed from familiar to extraordinary in her eyes after her grandfather, Moshe’s son George, left behind journals detailing the loss her ancestors had endured during World War II, including Moshe’s art. Knowing that her family had only found a small portion of Moshe’s art, and that many more pieces remained to be found, Elizabeth set out to find them.
Before Moshe was deported to the ghetto, he entrusted his work to friends who would keep it safe. After he was killed in the Majdanek concentration camp, the art was dispersed all over the world. With the help of historians, curators, and admirers of Moshe’s work, Elizabeth began the incredible and difficult task of rebuilding his collection.
Spanning three decades of Elizabeth’s life and three generations of her family, this touching memoir is a compelling narrative of the richness of one man’s art, the devastation of war, and one woman’s unexpected path to healing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author's earnest description of her search for her ancestor's lost art lacks the depth to make it speak to a larger audience. In the fall of 1939, with the Luftwaffe bombarding Warsaw, painter Moshe Rynecki (the author's great-grandfather) packed his life's work around 800 images of Jewish life in Poland into a half-dozen bundles to be left with friends, "until things settle down." Six years later, Moshe, the friends, and most of the pictures had disappeared. His widow managed to find one cache in a basement; after many ups and downs, it ended up in Northern California, where it inspired the author's quest. The first quarter of the book is based largely on autobiographical vignettes by Rynecki's grandfather George, previously published in 2005 as Surviving Hitler in Poland. The rest of the book follows her stumbling decades-long pursuit of Moshe's lost works. This is not a story of looted art; Moshe's work was not stolen but deserted, in a city that was almost entirely destroyed. She tries to "bring to life" through the awkward device of recreated dialogue. She clearly feels her loss, weeping at each reminder, but had she dug deeper into Warsaw's language, history, and culture, she could have brought Moshe's world to life and made the destruction of it much more affecting for the reader.