Trains, Planes, Automobiles–and Lots of Swabs

Before leaving home we had booked a COVID test at a Worksite Labs outlet in the International Terminal at San Francisco International Airport (SFO). This was required just to get on the plane to Hong Kong and had to be within 24 hours of our Cathay Pacific nonstop flight, which was to leave SFO at 10:55 pm. Our test appointment was for 9:30 the morning after we arrived in San Francisco. We were staying at the Grand Hyatt SFO located right on the Air Train route around the airport that took us to the International Terminal. And again, after late checkout at 7pm, as we tested negative and good to go to Hong Kong. The MD name stamped on our results: Christopher Reeve. 

As previously reported, we got tested again upon arrival in Hong Kong to get the AMBER code that changed to the BLUE CODE after testing on Day 2 (arrival day being Day Zero) and getting the results and release on Day 3. Got that? 

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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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My friends and readers (and I hope you’re all both!) may reasonably think: what is Linda doing running around the world when she’s supposedly working on another book? Where is book news among the travel adventures?

Well, travel is broadening (believe me, as my lifelong struggle with weight persists!) not just in body but in mind and now in mine as a relatively nouveau fiction writer. While the month+ in India might have looked like all fun and games, it made a huge impact on me as I AM trying to finish The Lost Torah of Shanghai, the next book. Really! Not only have I become personally even more invested in issues that have engaged me for years, but my writer’s voice will reflect that as the new story unfolds.

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