Woman in Gold, Jerusalem Post.

By DOROTHEA SHEFER-VANSON

When I heard that Anne-Marie O’Connor would be speaking at the Tower of David 
Museum in a dialogue with fellow-author Ora Ahimeir I jumped at the opportunity to see and hear the author of the monumental book ‘Woman in Gold’ in person. 

(Anne-Marie O’Connor, A longtime journalist in Latin America, O'Connor covered the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador as a Central America bureau chief for Reuters. She was also a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, UPI (United Press International. ), and the Cox Newspaper chain, and has written for Esquire, the Christian Science Monitor, and The Nation. She is a speaker on the subject of the Nazi plunder of art and restitution)

( Ora Ahimeir was born in Jerusalem in 1941. She studied Hebrew literature and history and has a diploma in business administration from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After working at the Israeli embassy in London and later as attaché for women’s affairs at the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, she was the coordinator of the Prime Minister’s Commission on the status of women in Israel.)

As readers of this site are doubtless aware, the book relates the saga of Maria Altman’s battle to reclaim the painting by Gustav Klimt of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, which was expropriated from the family in Vienna by the Nazis and since then retained by the Austrians.

The evening began with a brief personal account by Anne-Marie O’Connor, who has been living in Jerusalem for the last four years, of the almost accidental way she came to write her book. In her work as a journalist she became interested in the character and history of Maria Altman who, like her, was living in California. One thing led to another, and she ended up travelling all over California to interview other former residents of Vienna. Thus, she gradually built up a picture of what happened then and later, what became of the families and individuals who had once formed part of Vienna’s intellectual, professional and social elite when the Nazis took over and instituted a regime of persecution, terror, plunder (to steal, especially during a war) and murder. As the material she was collecting assumed ever-greater proportions, O’Connor realized that she would not be able to compress it into one or two articles, and so the book, to which she ended up devoting five years of her life, came into being.

The dialogue between the two writers (Ora Ahimeir published her first novel, ‘Bride,’ in 2012 and is currently working on another), took the form of questions addressed by each one to the other. The two women were located on a dais (a raised surface at one end of a meeting room that someone can stand on when speaking to a group) at one end of the large room in the ancient building, with a table between the two chairs on which they were sitting. When O’Connor was asked how, as an Irish woman living in the US, she had come to interest herself in that very Jewish subject, she replied that as a journalist in America she was used to investigating all kinds of topics and interviewing diverse people. She added that having had a Jewish step-mother from an early age, she had read a great deal of Jewish-oriented literature.

When it was time for questions from the audience someone asked O’Connor what it felt like to have become a best-selling author. In her reply the author explained that she was glad to be able to share that story with so many people, and that she was particularly delighted that the book had done well in Israel, where so many of the people who had undergone similar experiences lived. She noted that the whole episode of encountering the former Viennese residents had been a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ experience which had enriched her spiritually and given her the opportunity to write about a variety of subjects.

O’Connor also stated that the success of her book had triggered several cases in which refugees and Holocaust survivors claimed restitution of sequestered ( requisitioned or confiscated) property, and that in many instances these had been successful. The book had opened up hearts and minds to what had become of the property and possessions of survivors, and the groundswell (growth of strong feeling among a large group of people) of public opinion had played a major role in obtaining justice for a large number of individuals.

As the evening concluded, Ora Ahimeir told the audience that Zuckerkandel, the name of a family which is mentioned several times in O’Connor’s book, was the maiden name of her late (having died, esp recently) mother. There had been two branches of the family, one wealthy and educated living in Vienna and one poor and orthodox living in Poland. There had been very little contact between the two branches before the war, but both ended up in the same concentration camp, where they met their deaths together. I foresee another fascinating book about to be written.