The Hungarian Gold Train, loaded with Jewish treasure. A dazzling jewelled pendant in the form of a stylized peacock. And three men who find their carefully-wrought lives turned upside-down by three amazing and fierce women,each locked in a struggle against her own history and the history or our times... Maine, 2012. An old man id dying with the weight of a plundered necklace on his conscience. As an US Army Captain in 1946 Salburg, guarding the 'Hungarian Gold Train' full of looted Jewish treasure, he fell in love with camp survivor and helped her escape to Israel. Now, as his granddaughter sets out to repatriate the necklace, secrets buried in the past are uncoverd,stories of love and deceit linked to that beautiful, peacock-shaped pendant and to a priceless,long-lost painting. spanning a century of European and Jewish history, from 1913 Budapest to comtemporary Israel, and filled with a vivid supporting cast of art dealers,freedom fighters,psychoanalysts and suffragette dwarfs, LOVE AND TREASURE is a thrilling, moving and haunting novel, one that bears an ever elusive question at its core, nested like a photograph hidden in a locket: where does the worth of a people and its treasure truly lie?
Download and start listening now!
“Love and Treasure is something of a treasure trove of a novel.
Its beautifully integrated parts fit inside one another like the
talismanic pendant/locket at the heart of several love stories. Where
the opening chapters evoke the nightmare of Europe in the aftermath of
World War II with the hallucinatory vividness of Anselm Kiefer’s
disturbing canvases, the concluding chapters, set decades before, in a
more seemingly innocent time in the early twentieth century, are a
bittersweet evocation, in miniature, of thwarted personal destinies that
yet yield to something like cultural triumph. Ayelet Waldman is not
afraid to create characters for whom we feel an urgency of emotion, and
she does not resolve what is unresolvable in this ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving work of fiction.”
—
Joyce Carol Oates, multi-award winning author