My Love and Treasure

A spellbinding new novel of contraband masterpieces, tragic love, and the unexpected legacies of forgotten crimes, Ayelet Waldman's Love and Treasure.
Table of contents

How do the personal and the political intertwine in the wake of historical tragedy? The primary looters are Americans. As a Jewish American soldier, Wiseman wants to preserve the possibility that some goods might be returned to the owners or their heirs.

Love and Treasure

As she sleuths through records and libraries, she meets a gray market art dealer named Amitai who specializes in selling valuables of dubious origins. The necklace interests him because he thinks it could help locate a lost painting by a Hungarian artist. The final and strongest section animates the world of Jewish Budapest in , offering portraits of some of the people whose possessions would eventually fill the train.

The narrator is a Jewish psychoanalyst who presents a case study of an unusual patient, a young suffragette who wants to study medicine. Her parents regard this as proof of insanity and demand that she submit to therapy.

Waldman creates a charming critique of psychoanalysis. Eventually the analyst himself becomes the object of scrutiny as he wavers between the misogynist orthodoxies of his day and a creeping suspicion that his patient might be sane after all.

See a Problem?

The comic tone of the last section gently suggests the inadequacy of simple moral reckonings; The misogyny of many Jews before the Second World War challenges idealized images of Holocaust victims as flawless martyrs. Showing the failings of the characters imbues them with a fuller and more complex humanity.

At points, however, such nuance disappears; one evil Nazi is beaten in a bar, while an evil and dumb Nazi is robbed and tricked. All writers are asked some version of this, and most writers dread it. Stephen King is famous for answering the question with a single word: As in Utica, New York, land of brilliant ideas.

The Story Behind 'Love and Treasure' — Ayelet Waldman

In all seriousness, though, the reason we hate this question is because the answer is often so lame. I googled three words and found my story. Holocaust, Hungary and Art. Though that is, I know, a very lame answer, the story behind each of those search terms is a little more interesting perhaps. I knew when I finished Red Hook Road that it was time for me to attack a topic that has inter-ested me since I was a kid - the Holocaust.

The Sims Freeplay- Love and Treasure Quest

There was a time in my life when I was truly obsessed with the topic. When it was time for Scholastic Book ordering, other kids filled their forms with requests for Nancy Drew or biographies of famous Americans. Mine was just one long slog through Poland circa Escape from Warsaw, Night with the occasional brief forays into the home front Summer of my German Soldier.

It feels voyeuristic and ghoulish. But when a writer is obsessed, they really have no choice but to try to write their way out of it.


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Angel at the Fence , anyone? Though I could never approach his skill and profundity, I wanted to be W. I love dark humor, but clowning your way through Auschwitz? You know the old adage, write what you know?