The Fortunate Ones

When New York lawyer Lizzie Goldstein’s father dies in a car accident, she arrives in Los Angeles to go through his house—the house where, 20 years earlier, she hosted a party as a teenager and a priceless painting by Chaim Soutine, The Bellhop, was stolen. Lizzie has been carrying the guilt around for decades, and at the funeral she meets the original owner of the painting: Rose Downes. In 1939, Rose and her brother had been two of many Jewish children on the kindertransports during World War II who were evacuated from Vienna to England, leaving behind their parents, their home, and in Rose’s case, Soutine’s bellhop. The story unfolds in alternating chapters of Lizzie’s slow recovery from grief in L.A. and Rose’s coming-of-age as a refugee in London. The two stories meet in 2008 when the women, both settled in L.A., become friends, united by the missing painting. For both women, the painting comes to represent what might have been and the complex past. Umansky’s vivid telling of the scenes in Vienna and life in wartime London are lovingly juxtaposed against the modern angst of Southern California. [em](Feb.) [/em]