Growing up, journalist Michael Visontay knew that his Hungarian-born father had survived Auschwitz (while losing his own mother there), and that the family had ultimately emigrated to Australia after the war, escaping a quickly-descending Iron Curtain.
But it wasn’t until his parents died and he had to look through the records left behind that he learned of the financial windfall that had allowed their new life to unfold halfway around the world. A legal document Visontay discovered mentioned his grandfather’s second wife, “a woman called Olga,” he says, who had been “erased from the family history.” It turned out that Olga, through an American uncle named Gabriel Wells, had inherited enough money to help the family survive and thrive in the years following the Holocaust.
“I first came to learn about Wells when I was going through these strongboxes,” says Visontay, an Australian journalist. “I read that he was a very high-profile rare book dealer in the ′20s, in the golden age of book collecting.”
Wells’s main claim to fame, Visontay continues, was that he bought a Gutenberg Bible in 1920 and then broke it up into sections, which he packaged and sold as “Noble Fragments.” The proceeds contributed to Olga’s inheritance and Visontay’s family’s escape from Eastern Europe just as the Soviet Union was beginning its reign of oppression there.
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In “Noble Fragments” (Scribe US), Visontay delves into his own family’s history, the story of Gabriel Wells, and the hundreds of fragments, which ended up all over the world. Even after the book had been sent off to the publisher, he says, they keep turning up: “Last week, they found one in an attic in Yorkshire.”
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In the world of rare books, cutting out leaves for individual sale is considered practically a sin, Visontay points out, but Wells’s act “gave my family a new lease on life.”
The book pushed Visontay into deeper historical research and more personal territory than he had ever attempted before. It was rewarding. “I’ve found that if you just dig a little bit beneath the surface, you’ll always be shocked by what sort of richness lies below. And if you just keep digging, you can join some dots,” he says, and adds that the project taught him another lesson: “Life can turn on very small moments, and you can choose to recognize them, or you can choose to ignore them.”
Michael Visontay will read at 6 p.m. on Monday, April 7, at the Boston Athenaeum.
And now for some recommendations . . .
In “My Documents” (One World), Kevin Nguyen invents a dystopian alternative future that hews increasingly close to the actual present. In the novel, a quartet of Vietnamese Americans find themselves snatched and imprisoned in camps following a national crisis of unclear origins. Family, loyalty, and survival are in play here, as is the terrifying fragility of our modern lives.
“The Float Test” (Mariner) is Lynn Streger Strong’s fourth novel, and it’s as sharp as a scalpel as it carves through the lies and myths a family tells about itself. As adult siblings gather in grief, their bonds are tested and questioned, all against the backdrop of a sweltering, nearly chaotic Florida landscape.
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Jon Hickey’s debut novel “Big Chief” (Simon & Schuster) is one of the year’s most anticipated new novels, in part because of its setting — the intimate political and financial doings at a tribal casino. Hickey, an enrolled member of Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, renders both family and casino conflicts with intensity, humor, and sensitivity — a great American novel for our time.
Murray Kempton was a man of the 20th century, and his dispatches provide an excellent guide to American concerns of the time (many of them are even bigger concerns now). As “Going Around” (Seven Stories Press, edited by Andrew Holter) demonstrates, Kempton’s columns and reporting still have a lot to tell us, and Darryl Pinckney’s stirring foreword reminds us that journalism can be art, particularly when performed by a man whose moral imagination was matched by his thoughtful prose.
Kate Tuttle edits the Globe’s Books section.