Back in May on this blog I forecasted the publication of THE NICE LITTLE BLONDE GIRL for August. A variety of factors ranging from editing to travel to Mirah and her parents visiting Milwaukee and then more editing and travel (including a trip to China to visit Mirah and her parents) and more editing and more autumn travel…and lo and behold the book finally went on sale November 8.

Meanwhile, marketing-wise, I’ve picked up a little boost from an unlikely source: POTUS, aka President Donald Trump. Why? Because the plot of THE NICE LITTLE BLONDE GIRL is set mostly in Ukraine. Yes, the same country that’s in the news daily as the setting for the impeachment intrigue. 

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Mirah’s parents chose Berlin as a new—for them–European city destination. Eli and I had been there before, but only briefly as a shore trip off a Baltic cruise in 2012 with friends from San Francisco. We knew then we’d only seen a tiny fraction of a place we’d be happy to return to. Germany is a country with history evoking pain and trauma in the minds and hearts of Jews.

I know people who travel extensively but still refuse to go there. My own parents were in that category, yet visited Vienna, Austria, an early hotbed of Naziism. Eli and I never thought not to go, and we were glad to go back.

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This is my sixteenth trip to China since 1995, when I met Jonathan for his spring break during the semester abroad that apparently sealed his future. This is my first trip as a Nainai, grandma on the dad’s side! Not only have Eli (aka, Yeye, whose fourteenth visit it is) and I done all of the conventional Beijing tourist sites, we’ve delved deeper into arts developments, have explored museums, kept up on new shopping malls, visited embassies, attended Jewish services, taken the subway. There’s usually somewhere new to go, but this time we have our new granddaughter here, and that’s all the new we need.

It’s likely that, when we get home, people will ask us about what the Chinese think of Trump, how the air is, and other generic China questions. But let me say that our focus has been elsewhere. Like Mirah’s first “swimming lesson.”

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I thought my previous blogging absence was long, but two and a half years–ridiculous. Obviously, no new book out in that time. (See future posts.) It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say in that period of time–God knows! Most likely, Facebook has taken over as the forum for this lazy blogger’s opinions and publicizable life events. As I’ve posted, the opportunity to get away from Facebook, an opportunity readily available in Beijing, is both the good news and the bad. Why do I say this?

For one thing, Facebook can occupy a lot of time and function as a major distraction and procrastinating factor for writing and other activities. Second, it’s begun to creep me out when I run into or hear from people who know so much about my life from FB posts. Some are what I call “Facebook voyeurs” who never post themselves but only observe the posts of others. Still others have expressed anger that we have visited their cities and not seen them, unmindful of the fact that Facebook friendship is not necessarily anything like the real thing. Which leads to the question: can FB damage friendships and/or elicit and reveal latent damage?  A recent exchange with a longtime–real (we thought), not just Facebook–friend aired his disapproval of my kids’ Beijing residence for environmental reasons. When Eli and I cut it off as politely as we could, he defriended us.  Should we have just ignored the comments? Was the exchange just an excuse to end a relationship that, unbeknownst to us, was already frayed? And, finally, on a global scale, Facebook has earned a bad rap as the enabler of the Russian interference with Election 2016.

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It borders on the scandalous that I haven’t written a blog post since announcing the publication of The Lost Torah of Shanghai. In today’s world I should be banned from calling myself any kind of an author. It’s not for lack of anything to say. Never my problem.

The past few months have been…well, busy. We moved from San Francisco back to, part-time and possibly temporarily, our hometown of Milwaukee. The move was quick, as real estate transactions in the Bay Area don’t give the seller, in August, the luxury of giving occupancy in December. Which would have been the next most convenient time, given the travel plans we knew were ahead. In fact, even when we learned the contract was confirmed, Eli and I were in Poland. We arrived home September 4 and moved out September 21. Between HIPPY travel in my last two months as HIPPY USA national chair and a long-planned weekend in Chicago, I was away from our rented home in Milwaukee 14 nights out of the first month, and then we left for a month in Israel, returning to the US in time for Thanksgiving.

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I met Elizabeth Rynecki a few years ago at a lecture at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, here in San Francisco, during its exhibit “Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker.” That exhibit focused on the Goudstikker family’s efforts to reclaim highly valuable masterpieces Jacques, a prominent Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, left behind when escaping the Netherlands in 1940, just after its invasion by the Germans. In the process of escaping, Mr. Goudstikker died accidentally on the ferry taking him across the English Channel. He had in his pocket a notebook detailing every painting in his abandoned collection, which, of course, soon fell into Nazi hands, especially those of Hitler’s greedy and art-loving deputy, Hermann Goering. After World War II, Allied art procedures repatriated the Goudstikker collection to the Netherlands, but the family began a longterm effort to regain some of the paintings, and were ultimately successful with a portion of the holdings.

Elizabeth introduced herself as the member of a family also searching for its lost art, though the paintings she sought weren’t masterpieces of famous Dutch Old Masters or celebrated Italians. Elizabeth’s search focuses on the work of her great-grandfather, Moshe Rynecki, a Polish-Jewish painter somewhat known in local circles before the war, who depicted Jewish life in Poland in more than 800 works that were often well-reviewed but not commercially profitable. Before going into the Warsaw Ghetto, he deposited groups of his paintings with trusted friends in locations in and around the city and left notes with his wife. Although Rynecki perished in the Majdanek concentration camp, she and their son survived the war but could not retrieve most of the hidden paintings before immigrating to the United States.    

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