Love and Treasure (49 page)

On that spring morning in Salzburg in 1946, while he had waited for his replacement to show up, Jack had walked the aisles of the warehouse one last time, eventually reaching the stuffy corner where he had stored the most valuable items, the gold watches and jewelry, the small quantity of gems. He noticed the case of watches from Nagyvárad and took it down from where he’d hidden it months before. He opened the case and traced his fingers across the address stamped on the brittle pink silk. He wondered if he would ever again have cause to read the name
“Nagyvárad.” And why would he? The city had vanished even more surely than the woman he loved. It was Oradea now, a Romanian town. Hungarian Nagyvárad and the Jews who inhabited it were gone.

He was about to close the case and return it to the stack, when he noticed the black velvet pouch that contained the purple, green, and white enameled peacock pendant, that harbinger of ill fortune. He unwrapped the pendant and held it, feeling it once again grow warm in his hand, as it had the first time he’d touched it so long ago, when he’d been a different man, with a different idea of what bad luck meant. Without allowing himself to think about what he was doing, he wrapped the pendant in its velvet and placed it in his pocket. Then he walked back up the aisle, laid his keys on the makeshift desk he’d built for himself at the front of the warehouse, scribbled a note for the man who would take over his fruitless job, and bugged out.

Jack had quickly grown ashamed of the lapse of character and judgment that had allowed him to steal the pendant, and had he not left Salzburg that very day, he might have rushed back to the warehouse and returned it to where it belonged. Now, two years and a lifetime later, he listened as the auctioneer settled on a price for the lot of thousands of pieces of enameled jewelry from the Hungarian Gold Train. One dollar and fifty cents per piece.

One dollar and fifty cents.

In the next day’s newspaper, Jack would read that the auction had netted not the hundreds of millions of dollars estimated beforehand but less than two million dollars, enough to feed and house the displaced Jews of Europe for approximately one week. His plan had been to turn the necklace over to the auction house so that it could be sold and the proceeds used for the benefit of the survivors of the camps, the displaced persons, children and men and women like Ilona. But in the end what he had stolen turned out to be all but worthless. One dollar and fifty cents. Enough to feed, what? A single person for a single day?

In the end the real wealth of the Hungarian Jewish community had not been packed in crates and boxes and loaded onto that train. What is the value to a daughter of a single pair of Sabbath candlesticks passed down from her mother and grandmother before her, generation behind generation, for a hundred, even a thousand, years? Beyond price, beyond measure. And what of ten thousand pairs of similar candlesticks, when all the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters are dead? No more than the smelted weight of the silver. The wealth of the Jews of Hungary, of
all of Europe, was to be found not in the laden boxcars of the Gold Train but in the grandmothers and mothers and daughters themselves, in the doctors and lawyers, the grain dealers and psychiatrists, the writers and artists who had created a culture of sophistication, of intellectual and artistic achievement. And that wealth, everything of real value, was all but extinguished.

Jack left the auction house, the pendant still in his pocket. Later that night he would put it in his handkerchief drawer, where it would remain for years, like a bookmark between ironed white pages. Over the decades of his life, he would on occasion open up the small velvet parcel. In the years immediately after the war, holding the pendant would trigger a trace of longing, a remnant of regret. But eventually even that grew faint, its meaning lost in time and the accumulation of other memories and other loves. And then one day—the last day—he would pass the pendant and its complicated legacy of memory and forgetting on to his granddaughter Natalie, in the hope that in her hands it would become an agent of redemption that would allow her to move beyond the myopia of grief, that it would help her transform longing into purpose.

But on that early summer’s day in 1948, standing in his handsome suit on the corner of East Fifty-Seventh Street, Jack took the pendant from his pocket and held it up so that the gems at the tips of the peacock feathers glinted in the sun. His treasure amounted to little more than fool’s gold, worthless in his pocket. And yet he felt curiously untroubled by this depreciation. He had stolen the necklace because, though it had never belonged to anyone she knew, though she herself had rejected it, it reminded him of Ilona. But the thing that glittered now in the New York City sun was not a souvenir of the woman he loved and whom he would never see again. It was nothing more than a talisman of the irrevocable fracture of their relationship and of the incalculable loss of her entire world. A more impulsive man might have flung the pendant into the briny filth of the East River. Jack returned it to his pocket and walked home.

Acknowledgments

WERE IT NOT FOR
the invitation of the lovely and generous Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis to visit her in Budapest, this book would not exist. She provided invaluable assistance, both inspirational and editorial. She’s a marvelously loyal friend.

Others in Hungary eased my way, including Judit Acsady and the indomitable Lena Csóti, without whose research assistance I would have been lost. Thanks, too, to Judith Friedrich, John Cillag, Marsha L. Rozenblit, and András Gerő. I could not have written this novel without the guidance of Ronald Zweig, whose book
The Gold Train
is a phenomenal piece of research. I’m grateful, too, to Gábor Kádár, author along with Zoltán Vági of another helpful volume,
Self-Financing Genocide: The Gold Train, the Becher Case and the Wealth of Hungarian Jews
, and to his generous wife, Christine Schmidt. Anna Kluth provided research assistance in Salzburg. Chris Doyle, Matthew Ritchie, Gwenessa Lam, and Diana Shpungin did their very best to correct my egregious ignorance about art. Dean Schillinger helped with medical facts. Julie Orringer and Andrew Sean Greer gave thorough reads at critical times. Michael Sheahan, with the guidance of Chris Doyle and the help of Tristan Salman, built me the world’s most beautiful studio, where I wrote much of this book. The wonderful editor Lisa Highton gave final and invaluable advice.

I am truly lucky to be in the hands of two of the most generous and supportive women in the publishing business, Mary Evans and Jenny Jackson. Thanks, too, to Rachel Vogel and Sarah Lutyens for their unceasing efforts on the book’s (and my) behalf, to Lydia Buechler and all the terrific people at Knopf, and to Kaela Noel and Jennifer Kurdyla.

I am blessed with the unflinching support and love of my mother, Ricki Waldman, and with her meticulous copy editor’s eye.

Two weeks at the MacDowell Colony is worth six months of creativity and productivity in real life, and I am stunned that such a place exists and lets me visit.

The home-front help of Rachel Lemus, Brandy Muñiz, and Xiomara Batin made my work possible.

Without the unstinting support, calm intelligence, and unending good cheer of Amy Cray, I wouldn’t be able to tie my own shoes, let alone write a novel.

Sophie Chabon, Zeke Chabon, Rosie Chabon, and Abe Chabon tolerated long absences and foul tempers with grace that should not be expected of children, and had Sophie not accompanied me to Dachau, and buoyed me along with her inexhaustible curiosity and wellspring of empathy, I would not have had the courage even to go.

Finally, my husband, Michael Chabon, makes every day, every thought, every word, finer than I have any right to deserve them to be.

A Note About the Author

AYELET WALDMAN
is the author of the novels
Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
, and
Daughter’s Keeper
, as well as of the essay collection
Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
, and the
Mommy-Track Mystery
series. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and four children.

Love and Treasure

Ayelet Waldman

Reading Group Guide

ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of
Love and Treasure
, Ayelet Waldman’s ambitious and mesmerizing novel that weaves love, intrigue, and politics against the true story of the Hungarian Gold Train.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Ambitious in scope yet heartbreakingly intimate in its execution,
Love and Treasure
spans time and geography to lead readers on an unforgettable journey of discovery, truth, and forgiveness. Part historical record, part love story, and part thriller, the novel is set around a beautiful pendant unearthed from the Hungarian Gold Train in post–World War II Austria and the quest to determine its ancestry.

In 1945, in a town just outside of Salzburg, American soldiers have been ordered to watch over a freight train filled with extraordinary riches. There are cases of gold watches, piles of fur coats, and priceless family heirlooms, which, in spite of their tremendous beauty and
worth, share an ugly past: they were confiscated from Hungary’s Jewish citizens. The lieutenant tasked with guarding these treasures, Jack Wiseman, finds himself embroiled in a situation that tests the limits of his morality—a situation that grows even more complicated when Ilona, a beautiful Hungarian woman, enters his life. Seventy years later, Jack gives his granddaughter, Natalie Stein, a pendant with mysterious origins and sends her on a mission to hunt down its rightful owner. Determined to honor her grandfather’s wishes, Natalie embarks on a whirlwind journey through Europe, encountering seedy back-door art dealers and scouring dusty historical archives, coming ever closer to tracking down the elusive owner. As she slowly uncovers truths about forgotten figures of the past, Natalie finds herself having to redefine her own present.

With vivid prose and unforgettable characters,
Love and Treasure
is a masterful examination of grief, memory, legacy, and ultimately, of the strange ways in which love manifests itself, even in the grimmest of times.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1.
Love and Treasure
is a novel that illuminates the shifting nature of identity. In the beginning of the novel, Jack Wiseman is described as a New York Jew whose father’s parents are of “authentic German Jewish stock,” (
this page
) yet he finds it a struggle to connect with both the American soldiers under his command and the European Jews he encounters. How does Jack’s definition of himself change over the course of the novel? How do Jack’s fellow soldiers view him? How is he viewed by the Hungarian civilians he meets? What does this say about the how cultural heritage is assigned or interpreted?

2. On
this page
, Jack admits that for many years the “contents of the pouch had been a kind of obsession” to him. In what ways does his granddaughter internalize this obsession and make it
her own? What drives Natalie’s quest? Did Jack send her on this mission out of duty to the owner or to renew the “glimmer of interest” (
this page
) in his granddaughter that had been destroyed by her divorce? Both?

3. When Jack first meets Ilona, he declares that she is all “wire and sparks” (
this page
). How does her presence help Jack to better understand his identity as a Jew? As an American? How does she challenge his views about the war or its aftermath?

4. Throughout the novel, Jack is caught between his duty to country (in maintaining his position of watching over the train) and his duty to the people of Hungary (in trying to ensure that the goods are returned to their rightful owners). How do these two missions conflict with each other?

5. Chart Jack’s view of the military over the course of the novel, taking into account his interactions with his fellow American soldiers. Does he relate to any of the soldiers? If so, who? Discuss his conversation with Lieutenant Hoyle at the bar after his breakup with Ilona. How did you interpret the violence at the end of this encounter?

6. Jack’s encounters with Aba Yuval give him a more fully realized understanding of the political situation facing the Jews of Europe. What is Jack’s mind-set going into the trip where he helps smuggle the refugees over the border? What are his feelings toward the group’s goal by the end of the mission? How does this encounter challenge his understanding of nationalism?

7. Ilona and Natalie are described as physically similar, with both having fiery red hair. Is the author’s choice to have the two women share this feature purposeful? What else, if anything, do the two women share?

8. On
this page
, Natalie struggles to admit to Amitai that the pendant is stolen, instead saying her grandfather “found” it during the occupation. Why does she stumble over these
words? What does her hesitation say about the definition of discovery? Of ownership? How are these problems echoed throughout the novel? How are they reflected in the world of stolen paintings that Amitai deals in?

9. Compare and contrast the failed marriages of Amitai and Natalie. How do their failed marriages prepare them for meeting each other? Discuss the symbolism of Natalie wearing the pendant to her wedding to Daniel.

10. Why is Amitai hesitant to share his military past with Natalie? What other sins of omission occur throughout the novel? (
this page
)

11. Amitai is Israeli but he craves “the anonymity of the immigrant, to be a man with a vague accent in a city of vague accents” (
this page
). How does this desire for erasure contrast with Natalie’s desire to understand her cultural heritage? How do their respective homelands encourage or complicate those desires?