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

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)