Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille [Hardcover]

Rosemary Sullivan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2006

The Franco-German armistice, signed in June 1940 following the German invasion of France, called on the Vichy government to surrender on demand all refugees considered enemies of the Third Reich. Suddenly, thousands of artists, scientists and other intellectuals feared for their lives. The Emergency Rescue Committee, based in New York, compiled a list of two hundred people it considered the most endangered, including artists and writers Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Benjamin Peret. The committee sent Varian Fry to set up its headquarters in Marseilles, with the aim of helping these artists to escape. A number of them were sheltered at the Villa Air-Bel. Amidst the chaos and terror of wartime France, the villa became an oasis of calm, and a centre of creativity. Rosemary Sullivan explores the diaries, memoirs and letters of the individuals involved as she uncovers their private worlds and the web of relationships they developed. Central to her task is to understand what it must feel like to move from freedom to occupation: to feel threatened, administered, restrained. Villa Air-Bel brilliantly dramatizes the slow, relentless process by which ordinary lives were turned into lives lived in terror. In the end every artist in the house, as well as two thousand others, found asylum outside of France through the courageous intervention of Fry and his committee.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The outbreak of WWII took many Europeans by surprise. In France, by the time the fighting began, the papers people needed to get out of the country were difficult to come by. It was on this circumstance that three enterprising Americans concentrated their efforts in the first two years of the war. Ivy League scholar Varian Fry, sent by the American Emergency Rescue Committee, heiress Mary Jayne Gold and graduate student Miriam Davenport turned a Marseille château into a safe haven for dozens of prominent artists and intellectuals waiting for a chance to emigrate in secrecy, including Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, André Breton, Franz Werfel and perennial exile Victor Serge. Canadian writer Sullivan (her Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen won a Governor General's Award) goes beyond the confines of Air-Bel to tell a fuller story of France during the tense years from 1933 to 1941. She intelligently spreads the fractured narrative, with its huge cast of players constantly coming and going, over 60 brief chapters. What's palpable is the welter of shock, fear, world-weariness, cynicism and misplaced idealism evinced by the villa's transient residents as they apprehensively awaited their fate. The author never gets quite close enough to her subjects, but this is a moving tale of great sacrifice in tumultuous times. B&w photos. (Oct. 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In France of the 1940s, the Nazis were hunting down artists and intellectuals, the elites who threatened the Third Reich. Many of them, including Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, and Marc Chagall, found temporary shelter in a large nineteenth-century house in a suburb of Marseille, waiting for rescue by courageous members of the American Rescue Committee. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, and letters, Sullivan offers a gripping look at the desperate and joyous days--with artists hanging paintings from trees--as musicians, scientists, and intellectuals waited for the visas that would give them safe passage out of Vichy France. Harvard-educated scholar Varian Fry led the effort, eventually saving 2,000 artists and intellectuals. An American heiress and a graduate student were part of Fry's team, coping with the petty and enlightened arguments of their diverse and brilliant charges. Sullivan captures the tense atmosphere of France as the Germans invaded and the fear and anxiety of the intellectuals, some held in detention camps and some who ignored the danger until it was nearly too late. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1ST edition (October 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060732504
• ISBN-13: 978-0060732509
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,602,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Earlier "Crossroads Marseilles 1940" is better, October 5, 2006

By 

Pierre Sauvage - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (Hardcover)

The "book description" above states that this book "explores the diaries, memoirs, and letters of the individuals involved." "Explore" may not be the right word.

One of the main figures in "Villa Air-Bel" is beautiful heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who initially rented the villa and spent 1940-41 in Marseille torn between her participation in the remarkable rescue effort run by fellow American Varian Fry--and her affair with a young French gangster. She told it all, very flavorfully, in her published 1980 memoir, "Crossroads Marseilles 1940"--on which the new book, without permission, draws extensively and slavishly. Check it out!

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Long book, lazily written,, November 25, 2006

By 

milkweed beetle (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (Hardcover)

This book centers on Varian Fry's year in Marseille and is the third such biography to come out in the last decade or so. This author is a Canadian and previous Fry biographies were penned by a Brit (Andy Marino) and an American (Sheila Isenberg). Sullivan's work offers little new information on Varian Fry or on most of his colleagues. If you look at her bibliography you might get the impression that she has done a great amount of research. However, anyone familiar with the story, will find echoes of previous works, and much that borrows from Marino's book, which is superior.

The core of her book is transforming four memoirs written by rescuers - Varian Fry, Lisa Fittko, Mary Jayne Gold, and Danny Benedite - from the first person to the third person voice. Her approach for doing this has two misleading results. First, she does not give enough credit to the memoirs of the humanitarians who wrote them (just footnotes at the back). Second, observations presented by the memoirists related to passing events and impressions, she introduces as facts, denying the reader the original context for the various events. Instead of organizing her material skillfully, she presents scores of chapters, making for a choppy narrative. Hopefully, this type of appropriation will not become the standard for "creative non-fiction."

4.0 out of 5 stars Informative, May 9, 2011

By 

Stuart Pearson (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (Hardcover)

To be honest, I picked this up as part of a research project I'm doing on Max Ernst, so I've only read the parts that concern his time at Air-Bel and his relationship with Leonora Carrington. Those chapters are well-written and at some point I'll give the rest of the book its deserved reading. This is an important story to tell and although other books are out there about Air-Bel, I wouldn't overlook this one based on other reviews here.