Books, Author
From concerned emails I’ve received since my last post went out, I realize that the perception of testing positive for COVID here remains a frightening prospect, given all the media about lockdowns, enforced quarantines, children being separated from parents… We really appreciate your thoughtfulness in reaching out to ask.
After our sojourn at the “pedestrian” (with credit to my friend Leila for just the right word) Holiday Inn, we improved our living conditions considerably. Our apartment for however long we stay in Beijing (still TBD) is on the eighth floor of the St. Regis Residences adjacent to the St. Regis Hotel. This central Beijing location is about a half-block from our family, and the health club here, including its fabulous indoor pool, is their gym. We’re renting a furnished unit with two bedrooms, two sumptuous baths, large open living and dining room, kitchen, in-unit laundry facilities, and great storage space. It’s what is called a service apartment. This means that weekly maid service, towels, linens, etc., are included. I could easily live like this forever (preferably not in Beijing).
“New Rules” (with apologies to Bill Maher):We are fortunate that our hotel quarantine stay was only five days, with the next three in the apartment we have for the duration. If no apartment, hotel quarantine would have been eight. This is the most recent regulation for quarantine when traveling to Beijing. I think! Right now, the situation is changing daily. But we are done.
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?
Only a Nainai (Chinese for grandma on children’s dad’s side) and Yeye (Chinese for grandpa, ditto). Our granddaughters Mirah (just 5) and Rivah (2.5+) and their parents, Jonathan and Amy, live in Beijing. The pandemic deprived us of seeing them for two years. They did finally visit in Milwaukee this summer, a taste of being back together that only whetted the appetite for more. Before COVID, when Mirah was a baby and toddler, we made a point of seeing them a lot, between their trips to the US, ours to China, and a few vacations elsewhere. Rivah was a 2020 COVID-era baby, so we missed her progression from four months to over two.
Well, the birth of this baby sure took a long time, but it’s now available in print and eBook formats at all the usual suspects, including this website. I hope you like it. It doesn’t exactly follow the “formula” of After the Auction, but it’s definitely a sequel–branding Lily as the “Jewish Miss Marple.”
The route she takes on this caper starts in New York City, moves to San Francisco, thence to Shanghai, and ends again in Israel. And there’s a back story section in letter form that begins in Bombay (before it was called Mumbai) and progresses to Shanghai and finally to Hong Kong. Baghdad and Iraq are shadowy references throughout.
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. 
Sooner or later, it’s all about IRAQ!
It’s been a few months since ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq) became a household word and the debate about what the US should do about Iraq began—again. Then war between Israel and Hamas and the crash in Ukraine of Malaysia Flight #17 pushed Iraq off the front page for a while. But it’s back! With President Obama’s decision on air strikes, Iraq again became the crisis du jour. Or should I say the ISIS du jour?
Ok, Iraq is back in the news, but what makes it a Ripped From the Headlines topic for this blog?
