Simon Goodman’s efforts to reclaim the art collection – including works by Botticelli, Degas and Renoir – which had been stolen from his family by the Nazis only got started when he learned of its existence after his father’s death. Goodman, who grew up in London, writes here of how he painstakingly pieced together the story of what had happened to all those paintings, which were by then spread across Europe and America. The Orpheus Clock is partly the saga of an immensely successful Jewish banking family, the high society lives they led and the fate that awaited them in the concentration camps. But it also documents Goodman’s struggle with the art establishment to locate their stolen treasures and have them returned, and facing scepticism, stubbornness and contempt for daring to upset the applecart. It’s a fascinating but grim tale, replete with such ironies as one of the family’s banks helping to finance German military expansion in the first place.
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