Books
The Girl in Blue
Renoir's Portrait of a Dynasty Erased
In 1941, a specialized German looting unit raided the Chambord castle in the Loire Valley of France and plundered one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s most haunting masterworks: La Petite Irène. The portrait would enchant or curse nearly everyone who coveted it, but the girl it depicted slipped from view. This is her story.
She was Irène Cahen d’Anvers, born into Belle Époque privilege and a wealthy Jewish dynasty. Defiant by nature, she abandoned her religion and her arranged marriage, becoming a figure at once scandalous, elusive and resilient. As the Occupation gripped Paris, her family was targeted, persecuted and deported―punished for demanding the return of what had been stolen. Irène survived by hiding in plain sight, while questions lingered decades later about how and why.
Drawing on newly uncovered documents, newspaper accounts, and archival records, Doreen Carvajal reconstructs the intertwined journeys of a woman and a painting that was seized by the Nazis, traded through a shadowy art market, and pursued by a powerful collector. Their paths converge in a story of beauty and betrayal―the painting of a silent witness that history tried to erase.
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The Forgetting River
A Modern Tale of Survival, Identity, and the Inquisition
The unexpected and moving story of an American journalist who works to uncover her family’s long-buried Jewish ancestry in Spain.
Raised a Catholic in California, New York Times journalist Doreen Carvajal is shocked when she discovers that her background may actually be connected to conversos in Inquisition-era Spain , Jews who were forced to renounce their faith and convert to Christianity or face torture and death. With vivid childhood memories of Sunday sermons, catechism, and the rosary, Carvajal travels to the south of Spain, to the centuries-old Andalucian town of Arcos de la Frontera, to investigate her lineage and recover her family’s original religious heritage.
In Arcos, Carvajal is struck by the white pueblo's ancient beauty and the difficulty she encounters in probing the town's own secret history of the Inquisition. She comes to realize that fear remains a legacy of the Inquisition along with the cryptic messages left by its victims. Back at her childhood home in California, Carvajal uncovers papers documenting a family of Carvajals who were burned at the stake in the 16th-century territory of Mexico. Could the author’s family history be linked to the hidden history of Arcos? And could the unfortunate Carvajals have been her ancestors?
As she strives to find proof that her family had been forced to convert to Christianity six-hundred years ago, Carvajal comes to understand that the past flows like a river through time –and that while the truth might be submerged, it is never truly lost.
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