Chasing Portraits

August 22, 2016
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 workâaround 800 images of Jewish life in Polandâinto 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.