by Amy Meyerson
When they arrive at the theater, they can’t find Jake. Helen Jr. is in LA with Kristi, which reaffirms Ashley’s decision not to bring her children. The Millers must do this alone.
“I guess he’s doing some sort of interview,” Ashley says, reading a text. “He says he’ll find us after.”
As the Millers file into a row in the middle of theater, Beck whispers to Ashley, “You know he’s not doing an interview.”
“Let him have this,” Ashley whispers back.
The film begins at night in a taxi on the way to Westbahnhof Station. It’s 1939. Helen is the first to speak, begging her mother in German, Please don’t make me go. Flora does her best to remain upbeat, reminding her daughter that she will have a good life in America, that she is one of the lucky ones. They drive through the rain, Helen muffling her sobs, Flora stroking the hair of a doll in her lap, staring out the window as she tries not to cry. Neither character mentions the doll, but the camera focuses on it momentarily.
Ashley finds a travel pack of tissues at the bottom of her purse, takes one to dab her eyes, and passes the package to her mother and sister.
When Helen and Flora arrive at the station, many of the other children and their families are already waiting. Around them, dogs sniff their bags, ready to attack at the Storm Troopers’ sign. When the Goldsteins arrive, the families follow the Americans to the platform. Flora pulls Helen aside as the others continue to walk ahead.
I need you to listen very carefully, Flora whispers, eyeing the guards that circle. Take this. She presses the doll into Helen’s chest. Once you’re in America and you know it’s safe, you can look inside the body of the doll. Do you remember how to cut open a seam? Helen nods. Until then, do not let this doll out of your sight. When you sleep, it’s with you. Anywhere you go, it goes, too. Don’t let anyone touch it. It is your favorite doll. Your papa gave it to you. You cannot be without it.
A guard approaches them, and Flora motions her daughter to catch up with the others. Flora turns to look at him. He’s too young for the uniform he wears, for the hate that hardens his boyish features.
The Goldsteins count the children to make sure they’re all there. Once they’ve reached fifty, they begin to board their car. The goodbyes are restrained. Only the youngest, who cannot help themselves, wail, and their parents rush them aboard the train before they cause a scene.
Flora gives her daughter one last hug and says, I will see you soon. Until then, be good.
She steps back to join the other parents, watching Helen climb onto the train. The children lean out the windows of their car. They do not blow kisses. They know better than to wave goodbye, to make any gesture that looks like a salute. Helen continues to watch her mother as the train pulls away.
Deborah reaches for her daughters. They cling to each other for the duration of the movie.
After the opening scenes, The Women’s Empire splits into two storylines, one that flashes back to 1918, the other that moves forward from the train station, following Helen to America.
In 1918, Flora’s narrative begins as a romance between a young nurse and the chauffeur who accompanies her to Hungary with the emperor’s children. In the early scenes, the camera lingers on Flora and Istvan, a clandestine graze of hands, a stolen kiss. He teaches her to drive. She teaches him the nursery rhymes she sings to the children. The lighting is moody. Classical music plays in the background. They are so young, so beautiful, but quickly their love grows complicated when Flora discovers she’s pregnant and they must rush to marry. Before they have a plan in place, revolutionaries storm the palace. Istvan instructs Flora to take the children to the car as he fends off the mob. Flora pleads that she won’t leave him, but he insists. As she runs with the children, gunshots echo around them. She puts the car into gear like he’s taught her, and pulls away from the palace, her vision blurry from tears.
Her return to the summer palace in Vienna is short-lived, not as welcomed as one might expect, given she’s just saved the heirs to the empire. Pregnant and unwed, Flora is banished from her post and must return to Vienna where she has no one. But she’s not entirely alone. Before the emperor ships her off, he gives her a parting gift, a precious hatpin, as a thank-you for saving his children.
Flashing forward to 1939, Helen’s story is tonally distinct from Flora’s, with darker lighting and marked silence. The boat makes her seasick. She fights with the Goldsteins, who find her ungrateful. Privately, they argue whether bringing her was a mistake. There are several shots of Helen staring out to sea, clutching the doll. She disobeys her mother and slices it open to find the hatpin with the Florentine Diamond. When she arrives in Philadelphia, she boards with a family who also finds her sullen. At first, she makes few friends. Each night, she removes the hatpin from its hiding place in her dresser and stares at it before going to bed.
The film leaps to Helen’s twentieth birthday, when she’s old enough to leave the boardinghouse. In order to rent an apartment on Broad Street, she sells a few of the smaller diamonds from the hatpin to a jeweler, Joseph, an Austrian widower who runs a tiny shop on Jewelers’ Row. In Vienna, Joseph made watches and jewelry for the emperor. He didn’t know Flora, but he knew life in the empire, the crown jewels, the Florentine Diamond. The connection between him and Helen is instantaneous, passionate.
As Helen learns to love, so, too, does Flora. In the 1920s, when Vienna is a liberal paradise, Flora meets Leib, the second love of her life, at the street market while she and her son, Martin, are buying vegetables. Martin is a naughty child, endearingly so, and Flora scolds him for trying to steal a piece of candy. Not watching where she’s going, she bumps into a handsome stranger, scattering the flowers he’s carrying. She helps him pick them up, and when he asks her name and she says Flora, he looks at the flowers and thinks she’s lying. Leib is so different from Istvan. Muscular where her former lover was lean, playful rather than serious. Like Helen, she’s initially resistant to love, and the film cuts between the women learning to let down their guard and embrace the happiness they don’t think they deserve.
From there, the film quickly progresses through Vienna in the ’30s as the republic becomes a fascist state, then is annexed into Nazi Germany. Again, Flora’s life comes crashing down around her. Her husband and son are taken away. She and Helen are relocated to a small, dingy apartment. Meanwhile, in the future, postwar, Joseph wines and dines Helen. As a wedding present, Joseph sets the Florentine in a flower brooch to honor Flora.
The film ends where it begins, at the station in Vienna. Flora watches the train disappear down the tracks, her daughter vanishing into a new life. The camera zooms in on Flora’s resolute face, fraught with everything the audience knows that she doesn’t. When the screen turns black, there isn’t a dry eye in the theater.
Once the applause dies down and everyone shuffles into the lobby, the Miller women remain seated, unable to put their feelings into words.
When Jake returns, bounding down the aisle to collect his family, he startles. He doesn’t know how to interpret his mother and sisters, frozen in their seats watching the dark screen. A familiar dread rises in him as he approaches. He’d checked with Kristi, Ashley. This film honors Helen and Flora. Yet his family sits as quietly as they did after My Summer of Women.
Jake inches toward them, bracing himself for another Miller-style blowout. When his family turns to face him, they aren’t angry like he fears but overcome with pride.
“Oh, Jake,” Ashley says, running up to hug him.
Beck and Deborah follow Ashley and form a huddle around Jake. His body relaxes. He inhales their scents, the patchouli of his mother, the lavender of Beck’s shampoo, the piquancy of Ashley’s designer perfume. A bouquet of Millers, enveloping him.
As they walk out of the theater, Beck asks him, “Why’d you decide not to include Zita?”
“I thought about it, but I didn’t want to vilify her.”
>
Beck nods. “And Ravensbrück?”
“I didn’t want it to become another sadistic Nazi film, either. That wasn’t the point.” Despite himself, Jake asks his sister, “So, you liked it?”
Beck nudges her brother with her shoulder. “It was perfect.”
She hasn’t said she’s sorry, and Jake knows they won’t talk about their fight in the vault, Viktor, the Florentine Diamond. This is what an apology looks like from Beck, from all of them, Jake included. A Miller-style apology, and as Jake walks into the lobby, flanked by his sisters and mother, off to celebrate Helen and Flora, they all know this is enough.
* * *
Author’s Note
This novel came together somewhat serendipitously. For years, I’d had a vague idea for a novel about a diamond. I love gemstones and how they are a harmony of geological history, personal history, and, in the case of a stone like the Florentine Diamond, international history, too. When I initially set out to tell a story about a diamond, I’d never heard of the Florentine and wasn’t planning on writing about the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I just knew I wanted to craft a story centering on a diamond that had gone missing and followed the bread crumbs of research until they landed at the Florentine.
This began, as most modern searches do, with Google. On lists of missing jewels the Florentine Diamond kept popping up. There are other famous missing stones—the Irish crown jewels, the Great Mogul Diamond, and the Eagle Diamond, to name a few—but what intrigued me about the Florentine was that every account of its disappearance was slightly different. The articles I read contradicted each other on how the diamond arrived in Italy with the Medicis. They conflicted on who had stolen it in 1918 and the likely whereabouts of the diamond today. Many experts think it was recut into a brilliant round diamond that was sold in Geneva in 1981, but that theory cannot be substantiated and the current whereabouts of that stone are unknown. While such uncertainty isn’t promising for relocating the diamond, it’s good for a writer of fiction. It afforded me the freedom to create an alternate history for the Florentine that was entirely of my making.
Still, I wanted to tie my narrative as closely to history as I could. I’ve done my best to be faithful to the past where it’s known. This starts with the Medicis. The first confirmed documentation of the diamond was in 1657—although I’ve seen that date contested, too—by John Baptiste Tavernier when he toured the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s collection. From there, after the Medicis stopped producing male heirs and Francis of Lorraine took over Tuscany, he renamed the diamond the Florentine and brought it to Austria upon his marriage to Maria Theresa of Austria in 1736. It remained with the Habsburgs until the fall of the empire in 1918.
From these confirmable facts about the diamond I had the starting date for my novel: 1918. After reading Danubia by Simon Winder to gain a general appreciation for the massive scope of the Habsburg Empire, I focused my research on the last emperor and empress, Karl and Zita. They were the last proprietors of the diamond, the ones to send the crown jewels ahead to Switzerland when they fled Vienna, those at least tangentially responsible for the disappearance of the Florentine. Despite their legacy, little has been written about them in English. After all, they were in power for only two years. I was quickly drawn to the writings of journalist Gordon Brook-Shepherd, whose biographies on Karl, Zita, and their eldest son, Otto, established the bulk of my knowledge on the royal family. Brook-Shepherd was friendly with Otto, which provided him access to the family’s personal archives. It also loaded his writings about the family with bias, as his praise of Karl and Zita contradicted other less flattering descriptions I read of the royal couple. Again, this allowed me to take liberties, particularly when it came to Zita, whose character I largely fabricated on the page. From all accounts I’ve read, Zita was a strong-willed, deeply religious, and devoted woman, determined to modernize Schönbrunn Palace before the empire so quickly fell. After her husband died, she was equally committed to beatifying him and to having the crown restored to her son Otto. What she was not, was the downfall of Flora Auerbach.
Flora Auerbach is a work of fiction that started with a footnote. In Brook-Shepherd’s The Last Habsburg, he details the royal couple’s decision to leave their children in Gödöllö, Hungary, when they returned to Vienna in October 1918. Beneath a brief description of the revolution in Hungary, Shepherd had written a one-sentence footnote about the mission to rescue the children. It said nothing about who saved them, only that they had a lively drive back to Vienna by way of Pressburg. And that was it. All mention of the harrowing affair.
From my conversations with art lawyer Sarah Odenkirk, I knew that if I wanted to craft a backstory that would convince a court the diamond was lawfully the Millers’, I needed a courageous act that might warrant the emperor voluntarily gifting such a valuable stone. In this brief footnote I’d found it. It led me to a series of important questions: Whom would the royal couple have trusted with their children? Who might have snuck the royal children to safety? In turn, why would the emperor have felt compelled to give away such a prized diamond? Thus, Flora the nursemaid was born.
Like my vague instincts of wanting to write about a diamond, I also knew I wanted to set my second novel in Philadelphia. I was feeling a tad homesick when I began this project, and setting the story in Philadelphia enabled me to feel a little closer to home. Then, when I began doing events for my debut novel, The Bookshop of Yesterdays, and several of them were in the Philadelphia area, Philly readers were so excited when I told them my next book was set around the city. This committed me to my setting, but once I began researching Helen’s past, I realized that Philadelphia was the perfect setting for more significant historical reasons.
As quickly as I decided to set the novel in Philadelphia, I also knew that I wanted the Millers to be Jewish. Much of the community I grew up in outside Philadelphia was comprised of Reform Jews, and I’ve always been interested in the question of what it means to be Jewish when you aren’t religious. At the time, I hadn’t planned on writing about the Holocaust. In fact, I was pretty desperate to avoid it. My Jewish ancestors had all immigrated to the US by the early twentieth century, so I wasn’t sure it was my history to tell. Plus, so many authors have written so eloquently about the Holocaust that I didn’t know what I could contribute. But when I began to think about the link between Austria after WWI and modern-day United States, it felt like I was circumventing a giant hole by trying to write around the Holocaust. Then I discovered the fifty children and that changed everything.
As I began plotting Helen’s path to the US, I decided pretty quickly that she emigrated alone. At the time, I didn’t know much about Jewish refugee children during WWII, but as soon as I began researching, the scholarship was overwhelming. Judith Tydor Baumel has written extensively about the children who immigrated to Britain and the US. In Unfulfilled Promise, she briefly mentions a scheme by a Jewish organization in Philadelphia to bring fifty children to the US from Germany. And as research so often goes, from those two paragraphs, I did some digging in ship records on Ancestry.com and in newspapers only to discover that the children were brought over from Vienna—part of Nazi Germany at the time—by Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, who personally traveled to Austria to rescue the children. From there, the Goldsteins and Helen’s journey to the US started to take shape.
I’d be remiss not to mention both the HBO documentary 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus, directed by Steven Pressman, and his subsequent book, 50 Children, which together offer an exhaustive overview of the Kraus’s heroic journey to Nazi-controlled Vienna and the American lives of the children they saved. While my characters are a work of fiction and Helen’s guilt over leaving her mother behind is uniquely her own, these works were instrumental in helping me understand the scope of such a mission.
The main thing I’ve learned from writing this book is to follow the research. It can lead you to unexpected corners of
history you’d otherwise never know. When I started writing this novel, I had no idea what it would become. Somehow, through inquisitiveness and discovery, it evolved more into the book I wanted to write than I ever could have anticipated.
Further Reading
The Habsburgs
Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. The Last Empress: The Life and Times of Zita of Austria-Hungary, 1892−1989. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.
Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. The Last Habsburg. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968.
Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Uncrowned Emperor: The Life and Times of Otto von Habsburg. London: Hambledon and London, 2003.
Winder, Simon. Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
Diamonds
Balfour, Ian. Famous Diamonds. London: William Collins Sons and Co, 1987.
Everitt, Sally, and David Lancaster. Christie’s Twentieth-Century Jewelry. New York: Watson-Guptill, 2002.
Falls, Susan. Clarity, Cut, and Culture: The Many Meanings of Diamonds. New York: New York University Press, 2014.
Raulet, Sylvie. Jewelry of the 1940s and 1950s. New York: Rizzoli, 1988.
Cultural Property and the Law
Donovan, Jim, ed. “Cultural Property Law.” United States Attorneys’ Bulletin 64, no.2 (March 2016), www.justice.gov/usao/resources/journal-of-federal-law-and-practice.