MY GRANDFATHER’S GALLERY, by Anne Sinclair, translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this memoir, the French television journalist and former wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn recalls her grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, a renowned Jewish art dealer who fled Nazi-occupied France for New York. Among the first to champion the works of Matisse, Picasso, and Braque, he left behind a collection that was seized by the Nazis, and spent much of his postwar life trying to recover it. Sinclair highlights her grandfather’s close relationships with the artists, but also focusses on matters of family history—the unearthing of old letters, her own complicated relationship to France. She uses this “improvised portrait” of her grandfather as a lens through which to view the country’s recent history and current politics.
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, Oct-06-14