Audiobook10 hours
Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter's Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy
Written by Elizabeth Rynecki
Narrated by Randye Kaye
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
The everyday lives of the Polish-Jewish community depicted in Moshe Rynecki's paintings simply blended into the background of Elizabeth Rynecki's life when she was growing up. But the art transformed from familiar to extraordinary in her eyes after her grandfather, Moshe's son George, left behind journals detailing the loss her ancestors had endured during World War II, including Moshe's art. Knowing that her family had only found a small portion of Moshe's art, and that many more pieces remained to be found, Elizabeth set out to find them.
Before Moshe was deported to the ghetto, he entrusted his work to friends who would keep it safe. After he was killed in the Majdanek concentration camp, the art was dispersed all over the world. With the help of historians, curators, and admirers of Moshe's work, Elizabeth began the incredible and difficult task of rebuilding his collection.
Spanning three decades of Elizabeth's life and three generations of her family, this touching memoir is a compelling narrative of the richness of one man's art, the devastation of war, and one woman's unexpected path to healing.
Before Moshe was deported to the ghetto, he entrusted his work to friends who would keep it safe. After he was killed in the Majdanek concentration camp, the art was dispersed all over the world. With the help of historians, curators, and admirers of Moshe's work, Elizabeth began the incredible and difficult task of rebuilding his collection.
Spanning three decades of Elizabeth's life and three generations of her family, this touching memoir is a compelling narrative of the richness of one man's art, the devastation of war, and one woman's unexpected path to healing.
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Reviews for Chasing Portraits
Rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
5 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Moshe Rynecki was a painter and sculptor who created over 800 paintings and sculptures in pre-war Warsaw. When the Nazis came, he entrusted his art to friends who hid it for him, but when he was killed in the Majdanek concentration camp, his works scattered.Inspired by Moshe's son's journal describing the art, Elizabeth Rynecki, Moshe's great-granddaughter, worked with art curators, historians, and other supporters to find and catalog Moshe's body of work. The book is a compelling mix of memoir, family history, art catalog, and detective story. It is also an important testimony to an artist who depicted the everyday lives of the Polish-Jewish community before that way of life, and his own, was destroyed.