Bøger af Anne Sinclair

"My Grandfather's Gallery tells Paul Rosenberg's story in bits and pieces that construct a life and a legend through association . . . A detailed and important record of twentieth century art."-The Boston GlobeOn September 20, 1940, one of the most famous European art dealers disembarked in New York, one of hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Vichy France. Leaving behind his beloved Paris gallery, Paul Rosenberg had managed to save his family, but his paintings--modern masterpieces by the likes of Cézanne, Monet, and Sisley--were not so fortunate. As he fled, dozens of works were seized by Nazi forces, and the art dealer's own legacy was eradicated.More than half a century later, Anne Sinclair uncovered a box filled with letters. "Curious in spite of myself," she writes, "I plunged into these archives, in search of the story of my family. To find out who my mother's father really was." Drawing on Rosenberg's intimate correspondence with Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and others, My Grandfather's Gallery takes us through the life of a legendary member of the Parisian art scene. Rosenberg's story is emblematic of millions of Jews, rich and poor, whose lives were indelibly altered by World War II, and Sinclair's journey to reclaim it paints a picture that reframes the history of twentieth-century art.

I år er det 80 år siden, at forløberen til et af de mørkeste kapitler i Frankrigs historie fandt sted. I 1942 samlede nazisterne, med hjælp fra fransk politi, op mod 15.000 jøder på en gammel cykelbane, Vel d'Hiv, for senere at deportere dem til den visse død i udryddelseslejrene øst på.I slutningen af 1941 besluttede den franske stat i samarbejde med nazisterne at starte pågribelsen af de franske jøder ved at samle knap 1000 jødiske intellektuelle, kunstnere, advokater og andre notabiliteter i en lejr i Compiègne. La rafle des notables. I dag næsten glemt.Anne Sinclairs bedstefar var en af notabiliteterne og hun genfortæller gribende hans historie i den større ramme. Sinclair er en kendt fransk journalist og forfatter og tidligere gift med Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

"This story has haunted me since I was a child," begins Anne Sinclair in a personal journey to find answers about her own life and about her grandfather's, Léonce Schwartz. What her tribute reveals is part memoir, part historical documentation of a lesser known chapter of the Holocaust: the Nazi's mass arrest, in French the word for this is rafle and there is no equivalent in English that captures the horror, on December 12, 1941 of influential Jews-the doctors, professors, artists and others at the upper levels of French society-who were then imprisoned just fifty miles from Paris in the Compiègne-Royallieu concentration camp. Those who did not perish there, were taken by the infamous one-way trains to Auschwitz; except for the few to escape that fate. Léonce Schwartz was among them.