On the Stories Hidden in a Painting
Doreen Carvajal’s Five Books:
1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani
3. Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano
4. Sido by Colette
5. The Girl in Blue by Doreen Carvajal
The Five Books is a podcast that celebrates the role of books in Jewish culture. Through author interviews, we delve into Jewish identity and discover each author’s favorite novels. Join us every week for new Jewish book recommendations! Some of our episodes have included conversations with Rabbi Sharon Brous, Sam Sussman, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl and Allegra Goodman.
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Doreen Carvajal speaks with us about how her family forged a secret relationship with Judaism over 600 years, after they were forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition. Her latest book, The Girl in Blue, is an account of the Cahen d’Anvers, an aristocratic Jewish family whose portraits were painted by Renoir and whose lives were upended by the Holocaust. We discuss how she sees telling the story of the The Cahen d’Anvers family as honoring her own family’s legacy, the illusion that wealth and status can protect against persecution, and her childhood’s similarities to Scout’s in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Doreen Carvajal is a journalist and author who worked for more than twenty years at the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, reporting from Europe on culture, media, and international affairs. Her first book, The Forgetting River, traced her search for her Catholic family’s hidden Sephardic Jewish roots in southern Spain. Doreen lives outside Paris in impressionist country in a stone farmhouse.
The Girl in Blue is a work of narrative nonfiction about one of France’s wealthiest Jewish dynasties: The Cahen d’Anvers family. Drawing on newly uncovered documents, newspaper accounts, and archival records, Doreen Carvajal brings to life the intertwined journeys of this woman and a painting.
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