The Orpheus Clock

Starred review from June 8, 2015
With a novelist’s narrative gifts, Goodman movingly portrays his family’s victimization by the Nazis and the post-war repercussions of those events. Following the death of his father in 1994, Goodman began going through his papers and learned that his grandparents’ valuable art collection had been stolen by the Germans. His family’s efforts to retrieve the items hit unexpected barriers, and even readers with some familiarity with such struggles are likely to be shocked at the callous and hostile attitudes of Dutch officials—who demanded that Goodman buy pieces back—and the reputable auction house Sotheby’s. The art world proved itself, at least at the outset, more concerned with carrying on “business as usual” than justice. The sections that present the Goodman family’s lives before and during WWII are powerful and replete with tragic ironies: a bank they founded played a major part in Germany’s becoming a “military and industrial world power,” and Auschwitz, where Goodman’s grandmother Louise was murdered, was built on land that had once been owned by a company whose board included her uncle. In combining a modern-day detective story with nuanced context for its importance, Goodman produces much more than another Holocaust book.