Love and Treasure

By: Ayelet Waldman

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Paul Hecht

Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

The Hungarian Gold Train, loaded with Jewish treasure. A dazzling jeweled pendant in the form of a stylized peacock. And three men who find their carefully-wrought lives turned upside-down by three amazing and fierce women, each locked in a struggle against her own history and the history or our times...

Maine, 2012. An old man is dying with the weight of a plundered necklace on his conscience. As an US Army Captain in 1946 Salburg, guarding the 'Hungarian Gold Train' full of looted Jewish treasure, he fell in love with camp survivor and helped her escape to Israel. Now, as his granddaughter sets out to repatriate the necklace, secrets buried in the past are uncovered, stories of love and deceit linked to that beautiful, peacock-shaped pendant and to a priceless, long-lost painting. Spanning a century of European and Jewish history, from 1913 Budapest to contemporary Israel, and filled with a vivid supporting cast of art dealers, freedom fighters, psychoanalysts and suffragette dwarfs, Love and Treasure is a thrilling, moving and haunting novel, one that bears an ever elusive question at its core, nested like a photograph hidden in a locket: Where does the worth of a people and its treasure truly lie?

©2014 Ayelet Waldman (P)2014 Recorded Books

A Haunting Story

The facts: In 2005, the settlement of a notorious case of postwar liability took place in a federal court in Florida. Sixty years previously, the Hungarian Gold Train consisting of 40 box cars had arrived in Salzburg, Austria bearing property requisitioned by the Nazis from Hungary’s 800,000 Jewish citizens. Making its way to Germany the train is intercepted by the Americans. Some of its cargo was commandeered by the generals working on the Marshall plan, to furnish their headquarters. It would take a half a century for Hungarian survivors of the holocaust to settle a lawsuit that granted $21 million as compensation. The money was awarded to a number of Jewish social service agencies.

The story: The book is a multigenerational tale largely set in Salzburg in 1945 and in Budapest both in the present and in 1913. Crucial to the plot is an enameled pendant, intricately worked in a peacock design.

Jack Wiseman an American Jew and retired classic professor is dying of Cancer, his granddaughter Natalie, is spending time with him and listening to his reminiscences of World War II. He tells of falling in love with Ilana Jakob, a Hungarian refuge and survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, while he was stationed in Salzburg immediately after the war. His memoires are shadowed by his guilt at the illegal removal of an item of jewelry, the only tangible trace of his lost lover. His granddaughter Natalie promises to return the pendant to the family.

The book is divided into three main sections, Jack’s story during the war, his granddaughter Natalie’s search for the peacock pendant’s owner and three the true story of the pendant's owners in 1913 Budapest. Waldman weaves a great story through history of lost holocaust treasure. The author sustains her multiple plot lines with confidence and descriptive panache, fashioning complex personalities caught up in a series of events. My only complaint is I would have like to know what happened to Ilana Jakob and her fellow travelers to Israel. Did they make it, what was their life like since 1946? The story is somewhat in the vein of the movie “The monuments men.” If you enjoy historical novels about World War II or stories of the Holocaust this is a book you will enjoy. Jonathan Davis and Paul Hecht narrated the book.

three stories

there are really three loosely related stories. a closer connection between then would have improved it.

Not Just Another War Story!

Where does Love and Treasure rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

That's a hard question as there have been so many excellent "listens"....In this "WWI genre" I would rate it second only to "City of Women"....

Who was your favorite character and why?

The character of Jack. He was the kind hearted American G.I. but did not forget his Jewish heritage.

Which character – as performed by Jonathan Davis and Paul Hecht – was your favorite?

Believe it or not, the Freudian analyst in Part II....

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

My reaction came in Part II which I thought was going to end in a different way and then a twist in plot going back in time which I loved....That time period of 1919 was shockingly restrictive towards women as compared to today.

Any additional comments?

I await Ms. Waldman's next book!

Powerful Start Loses Focus

Any additional comments?

I had high hopes for this one through almost the halfway point. It’s a story that traces the path of a particular necklace over a century from pre-World War I Budapest through the Holocaust, and up to the 21st century world of reparations and provenance.

Waldman is ambitious throughout, using a different voice and tone in each of her three major parts. And she does so with an impressive purpose: to weigh the ways we 21st century Jews ought to regard the difficult burden of the Holocaust’s legacy.

The first part works well, chronicling the way Jewish Army lieutenant Jack Wiseman falls in love with Ilona, the lone survivor of her Hungarian family. It’s tense and moving as Jack tries to understand an experience from which he was insulated by virtue of his American status. That straightforward fact – he didn’t go through the camps and he didn’t lose his beloved sister to unthinkable depredations – gets complicated. Jack has been through something of his own hell. He’s seen combat, had friends die in his arms, and lost the innocence of his youth. That’s not shoah-level trauma, but it is real.

Even more strikingly, it’s Jack who gets charged with taking care of a train full of possessions looted from Hungarian Jews. Ilona begins increasingly to turn her attention to Israel, to abandon (understandably) the world she knew. Jack tries to be true to that burden. Even as it becomes increasingly clear that there is no feasible way to return the property to its rightful owners or heirs, he holds to a scrupulous sense of what others have lost.

That part is the longest and much the most effective. It gives us a compelling, if impossible, love story, and it makes literal the question of how to “own” the staggering loss of the Holocaust. Like the novel overall, the answer to that question is larger than any one person, larger than any straightforward story.

The second deals with Jack’s granddaughter as she tries to return the necklace to one of its heirs and the third with the necklace’s origin in the complicated story of a Hungarian Jewish suffragette. Each is notably weaker than the one before it, less for the way the novel goes than for the unnecessary detail and digression. Waldman badly needed an editor here, someone who could cut out as much as a quarter of the second part and maybe even two-thirds of the third. (Her decision to use Nina’s analyst as her narrator is both labored and tendentious. It pulls us away from questions of the Holocaust itself, which might have justification in giving later victims rich stories beyond their victimhood, but then it often pulls away from Nina herself. We simply don’t need to follow the analyst’s story since it doesn’t come back to inform any other part of the book.)

The architecture of the novel does carry a lot of effect, and I found myself struck by the degree to which Waldman refuses any easy answer. No one can be the genuine heir of a victim murdered alongside her entire family, yet no Jew is quite free to stop thinking of her or himself as some sort of heir. Amitai is, in many ways, an opportunist who tries to make money off of returning lost wealth to distant relatives of those who once held it. As such, though, Waldman, casts him neither as scoundrel nor hero. When he decides to ensure that the painting goes to Hungary rather than Israel, he demonstrates a real ambivalence about who “owns” the history. That’s a striking statement, although it might carry more weight if it didn’t come to us as a seemingly sudden inspiration, one that goes against everything he’s done to that point.

In such a light, Waldman’s failings in the second and, especially, third parts are frustrating because it feels as if this had a shot to be a genuinely great novel. To be blunt, there are a handful of key questions that she might have answered if she’d been more economical earlier. If she’d been able to sustain the focus with which she examined her ideas in the first part, she could have extended this to a more satisfying conclusion.

[SPOILER ALERT] In the epilogue, as we see Jack in 1948, a still recently returned soldier feeling guilty that he has stolen the necklace from the material he was charged with guarding, that guilt gets undermined. He learns from attending an auction that his piece would have brought back only $1.50. In many ways, his valuing the necklace, his honoring the idea that someone with a real and passionate life owned and then had it stolen, is a more impressive tribute than any trivial amount of money would have been. He seems to become its rightful “owner” because he recognizes it, because he cares where others are indifferent or forgetful.

Years later, then, in what we experience as the prologue, it would have been nice to get a sense of how Jack comes to feel otherwise. Why does he think giving the necklace to a relative of its owner will make a difference? His granddaughter comes to suspect he might simply be giving her a space for her grief over the end of her marriage – and that feels partly true – so is it finally just a narrative dodge? Is Jack giving Natalie a romantic quest (that conveniently ends in romance for her) or is he making a statement? I’m OK with either of those answers – and I think Waldman’s inquiries can accommodate either one – but I’d like more to go on than guesses. There seems to be a powerful point here, but it gets lost along with the focus of the later parts of the novel.

And, finally, I am somewhat frustrated at the way Ilona simply falls out of the story. It makes sense that Jack would never see her again, but it doesn’t feel right that we never learn her outcome. She’s suffered the burden of the Holocaust and then left Europe and its painful memories behind. Has she learned anything? Does she figure in some distant way into what becomes of the necklace? Did she figure in some obscure way with the story of how it came to belong to Natalie? (That answer seems to be no, but maybe other readers can set me straight.)

Nicole Krauss’s much stronger History of Love makes its only misstep, a small one as I see it, in overdetermining the ways in which a Holocaust survivor’s book comes to shape the life of a girl one world and two generations away from him. We get all the loose ends tied up, perhaps too tightly.

In this case, we have the opposite. The powerful question that Waldman weaves throughout the narrative – what obligation does each of us have to own the history of the Holocaust – gets looser and looser before unraveling almost all the way. Promising as this novel is, it still needs a couple of knots to make it whole.

First two parts great, last part awful

My guess is that the last part of the book was written first, and then as Ayelet Waldman got going, she created the first part. The beginning of the audiobook is interesting relating the story of the Hungarian gold train, something I did not know about since it was kept a secret until 1998. The fictional story in both the first and second parts of the book are well written and captured my interest throughout. The last section, imagining characters lives that were introduced in the beginning of the book is amateurist.

Finally gave up on it

What disappointed you about Love and Treasure?

The narration was very dry. Almost no drama to his voice. The subject matter seemed interesting at first -- anti-semitism just after World War II. Something the other World War II genre books hadn't covered. I finally decided it was too political, too heavy-handed. I gave up at chapter 14, disappointed.