Biography
UPI made his position permanent and moved him to Washington, DC. After 2 years, he was appointed their Middle East correspondent and moved to Cairo, Egypt.
He returned to Washington to work with CNN as producer of several programs, including Crossfire and Capital Gang.
He had met Jamie Gangel while they were both correspondents in the Middle East. When they married, he converted to Judaism.
Biography
According to his website, "Silva burst onto the scene in 1997 with his electrifying bestselling debut, The Unlikely Spy, a novel of love and deception set around the Allied invasion of France in World War II.
His second and third novels, The Mark of the Assassin and The Marching Season, were also instant New York Times bestsellers and starred two of Silva’s most memorable characters: CIA officer Michael Osbourne and international hit man Jean-Paul Delaroche.
But it was Silva’s fourth novel, The Kill Artist, which would alter the course of his career. The novel featured a character described as one of the most memorable and compelling in contemporary fiction, the art restorer and sometime Israeli secret agent Gabriel Allon."
Silva intended The Unlikely Spy as a standalone World War II spy thriller, but he continued, and currently has 22 novels to his credit, basically one a year.
Publications
The first Gabriel Allon novel was The Kill Artist, published in 2000. In an interview, Silva said that Gabriel Allon was initially to be a "one off" character because he was "too melancholy and withdrawn." He was also concerned about Gabriel's nationality and religion.
Gabriel Allon series:
The English Assassin (2002) is #2—Nazi art theft in WWII
The Confessor (2003) is #3—the Catholic Church and the Holocaust
A Death in Vienna (2004), #4
Prince of Fire, #5
The Messenger, #6 (won Barry Award)--al-Qaeda
The Secret Servant, #7
Moscow Rules, #8
The Defector, #9
The Rembrandt Affair, #10
Publications
Gabriel Allon Series
Portrait of a Spy, #11
The Fallen Angel, #12 (won Barry Award)
The English Girl, #13
The Heist, #14—theft of Caravaggio masterpiece
The English Spy, #15
The Black Widow, #16
House of Spies, #17
The Other Woman, #18
The New Girl, #19
The Order, #20
The Cellist, #21 (rich Russian opposed to Kremlin)
Portrait of an Unknown Woman, #22
Spy genre (Toledo library)
Novels featuring espionage or spies emerged in the nineteenth century with The Spy published in 1821 by James Fenimore Cooper, based on the exploits of Harvey Birch, an American secret agent.
Kim by Rudyard Kipling was initially published in McClure’s Magazine in 1900, then as a book one year later. The story is set after the Second Afghan War in the late 1890s in British controlled India with the story centering around an orphan of Irish descent who is pulled into the espionage game at a young age. Both novels are still in print over 100 years later.
The Riddle of the Sands by Robert Erskine Childers, published in 1903, was immensely popular in the years leading up to World War I and helped to define and influence the spy novel genre for years to come.
And The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, published in 1907, was inspired by the Greenwich Bomb Outrage of 1894.
Spy genre (Toledo library)
While the spy fiction genre emerged in the 1800s, it didn’t really take off until World War I with the publication of The Thirty Nine Steps in 1915, later adapted into a movie by Hitchcock.
Popular spy stories between the wars include Meet the Tiger written by Leslie Charteris, published in 1928. That novel introduced Simon Templar, better known as the Saint, later adapted into a popular TV series in the 1960s.
During World War II, the spy fiction genre became popular once again. Above Suspicion written by Helen MacInnes was published in 1941 and later adapted into a movie starring Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray. It’s a typical World War II spy saga involving a married couple asked to undertake a complicated secret mission. Ultimately, things go south as they typically do in these stories. While on paper it doesn’t sound like much, it's brimming with intrigue and suspense.
Spy genre (Toledo library)
Another favorite from the same time period includes Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear published in 1943, also made into a movie, starring Ray Miland, directed by Fritz Lang, a quintessential film noir that also falls under the psychological thriller and war spy film genres. The story centers around an innocent man recently released from an asylum who gets caught up in web of espionage after accidentally receiving an item meant for a Nazi spy.
James Bond and George Smiley
The infamous James Bond first appeared in the 1952 novel Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, who by the way was also a former naval intelligence officer. Fleming went on to pen twelve novels and two short story collections featuring the charismatic Bond. The popularity of the series paved the way for future spy novels, television programs and movies in the decades to follow. Ultimately, the popularity of Bond has lived on well beyond what Fleming wrote in the fifties and sixties.
Notable authors who have contributed to the James Bond canon include John Gardner, Raymond Benson and most recently Anthony Horowitz with Trigger Mortis in 2015 and Forever and a Day in 2018, which is a prequel to Casino Royale.
Spy fiction genre (Toledo library)
True spy fiction fans will tell you that John Le Carré is one of the best spy novelists of all-time. Like Fleming, Le Carré is a former spy himself, so he knows his stuff. He created the George Smiley series in 1961 with the publication of Call for the Dead, but the third novel in the series, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, really launched his career. He also wrote Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a fairly well-known spy novel published in 1974 and recently brought back the Smiley character in A Legacy of Spies published in 2017.
Beyond Bond and Smiley
Len Deighton is another well-known spy novelist, most famous for The Ipcress File published in 1962. It features a British Army sergeant turned reluctant spy, Harry Palmer, who gets caught up in a complicated plot involving Cold War brainwashing and bureaucracy.
The most well-known spy novel of the 1970s, The Day of the Jackal written by Frederick Forsyth (1971), centers around a stealthy assassin who’s identity is unknown to even those who hired him. It’s the ultimate spy thriller.
Additional notable spy novels of the 1970s include The Defection of A. J. Lewinter by Robert Littell (1973) and Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett (1978).
Spy fiction genre (Toledo library)
In 1980, we’re introduced to The Bourne Identity written by Robert Ludlum, which centers around an amnesiac with incredible survival skills.
And in 1984, The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy introduced the Jack Ryan character. The novels are still going strong with Power and Empire appearing at the end of 2017.
In 1990, Ian McEwan brings us The Innocent set during the Cold War in 1950s Berlin, which delves into the surveillance tactics employed by both the British and American governments to spy on the Russians.
The Gabriel Allon series created by Daniel Silva began with The Kill Artist in 2000. It’s a long running popular spy thriller series that’s still active today.
Zero Sum is the latest book in the John Rain series written by Barry Eisler, which centers around a skilled Japanese American assassin specializing in natural causes killings.
Alex Berenson‘s John Wells series began with The Faithful Spy in 2006, about an undercover operative who attempts to resolve complex political and terrorist threats.
Spy fiction genre (Toledo library)
With so many great spy novels, it’s no surprise the spy fiction genre has remained fairly popular for over 100 years. The stories are typically action-packed, involve intricately plotted storylines and revolve around incredibly interesting characters.
This brief history of spy novels barely scratches the surface of the ever popular genre. It leaves out quite a bit – including a number of women spies and spy novelists.
Hard-boiled detective fiction
From Britannica:
Hard-boiled fiction is a tough, unsentimental style of American crime writing that brought a new tone of earthy realism or naturalism to the field of detective fiction. It included graphic sex and violence, vivid but often sordid urban backgrounds, and fast-paced, slangy dialogue.
Credit for the invention of the genre belongs to Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective and contributor to the pulp magazines, whose first truly hard-boiled story, “Fly Paper,” appeared in Black Mask magazine in 1929. Combining his own experiences with the realistic influence of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, Hammett created a definitely American type of detective fiction that was separate and distinct from the English mystery story usually set in a country house populated by cooks, butlers, and relatives, a pattern that had been slavishly followed by American writers for generations.
The first of Hammett’s detective novels was Red Harvest (1929). His masterpiece is generally believed to be The Maltese Falcon (1930), which introduced Sam Spade, his most famous sleuth. His most successful story, The Thin Man (1934), was the last of an extraordinary quintet of novels.
Hard-boiled detective fiction
From Britannica
Hammett’s innovations were incorporated in the hard-boiled melodramas of James M. Cain, particularly in such early works as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936).
Another successor was Raymond Chandler, whose novels, such as The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The Little Sister (1949), deal with corruption and racketeering in Southern California.
Other important writers of the hard-boiled school are George Harmon Coxe, author of such thrillers as Murder with Pictures (1935) and Eye Witness (1950), and W.R. Burnett, who wrote Little Caesar (1929) and The Asphalt Jungle (1949).
Hard-boiled fiction ultimately degenerated into the extreme sensationalism and undisguised sadism of what Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine called the “guts-gore-and-gals-school,” as found in the works of Mickey Spillane, writer of such phenomenal best-sellers as I, the Jury (1947).
Interview
Interview on SALT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrEKJSuGOLw&t=251s\
Character biography—Gabriel Allon
Gabriel Allon is an art restorer, ex-Israeli agent, and part-time employee of "The Office," the literal translation of Mossad. Allon's career began in 1972 when he, Eli Lavon, and several others were plucked from civilian life by Ari Shamron to participate in Operation Wrath of God to hunt down and eliminate those responsible for killing the Israeli athletes in Munich. Wrath of God is referenced in the books throughout the course of his life.
Allon was raised Jewish, but in a secular home. His parents, specifically his mother Irene, were Holocaust survivors (from Berlin)--a thread throughout the series—as is her unwillingness to discuss her Holocaust experience. Not much is known of Allon's father beyond his death in the Six-Day War and that he was born and raised in Munich.
His mother named him Gabriel because, although Michael is the highest angel, Gabriel is the mightiest, the one who defends Israel against its accusers. "You're the angel of judgment—the Prince of Fire." (Quote from that novel, #5)
Character biography—Gabriel Allon
Although he speaks several languages, including fluent English, French, German, Hebrew, and Italian as well passable Arabic and Spanish, his first language is German, which he speaks with the Berlin accent of his mother.
Allon's grandfather was a well-known Berlin-based German Expressionist painter who passed his talents on to his daughter (Gabriel's mother) before he was killed at Auschwitz in 1943. She, in turn, passed these talents to Gabriel. Allon served in the army and attended the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.
Shamron approached him in 1972 to join "The Office" and take part in the campaign against the Black September terrorists responsible for the murder of 11 Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics. One of the primary assassins in the operation, which lasted 3 years, it derailed his likely future career as a painter.
In the aftermath, he left The Office and went under cover as an Italian art restorer, Mario Delvecchio, who lived in Cornwall while working for London-based art dealer Julian Isherwood.
Character biography—Gabriel Allon
However, he was convinced to return reluctantly to The Office while continuing to work as Delvecchio in England and Italy as his primary unofficial cover; this role continues throughout Allon's life until he retires. After long efforts to resist the move, Gabriel eventually becomes head of The Office.
In January 1991, while on assignment in Vienna, Allon's car was bombed; as a result, his son Daniel died and his wife Leah was seriously injured. She survived, but lives in a psychiatric hospital as a result of her injuries and PTSD.
Allon felt he had to make peace with Leah's situation before he could propose to or marry Chiara, the Italian-born Office field operative who later becomes his second wife.
His son's ghost frequently haunts Allon, especially after Chiara's miscarriage following her kidnapping and their ensuing inability to conceive. After many years, Chiara gets pregnant again and delivers twins–a girl Irene, named in memory of Gabriel’s mother, and a boy, Raphael. (P.S. Daniel Silva has twins, a boy and a girl, Nicholas and Lily)
Character biography—Chiara
Chiara Allon (née Zolli) is Gabriel's wife, the beautiful and intelligent daughter of Venice's chief rabbi, and now retired Office agent whom he meets in The Confessor. When they first meet at her father's office in Venice during his investigation into a Brenzone abbey (in the third book), he does not realize Chiara is a member of the Office, assigned to follow him while he was in Rome.
When he escapes while under fire (and wounded) from the Carabinieri who have been sent to apprehend him at a Rome hotel (albeit on a false tip), she saves his life when he is cornered in an Rome alleyway by an assassin in pursuit. She appears at the last moment on a motorcycle, takes him to a safehouse, bandages his wounds, and sits at his bedside with a pistol in her lap, standing guard over him while he sleeps.
After the bombing in Vienna that killed his son and maimed his wife, Gabriel isn't sure he could let himself fall in love again, and it took several years for him to marry Chiara.
She holds a master's degree in history from the University of Padua; her background and understanding of art and history as someone who grew up in the Jewish ghetto in Venice is a nice complement to Allon's art restoring work.
Recurring characters—Sarah Bancroft
Sarah Bancroft, a former CIA covert operation officer who worked with Gabriel and his team on several assignments; is the daughter of a wealthy Citibank executive who spent her early years being educated at the finest boarding schools throughout western Europe.
She returned to the States to attend university and holds a bachelor's in art history from Dartmouth; studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London before receiving a Ph.D. from Harvard, where she authored an acclaimed doctoral dissertation on the German Expressionists.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks (in which her fiancée was killed), she applied to the CIA, but was dismissed. When Carter arranges for Gabriel to meet her during The Messenger as a prospective candidate for an assignment in a joint US-Israeli operation, she was working as a curator at the Phillips Collection in Washington.
Recurring characters—Sarah Bancroft
When Gabriel and Sarah meet Somerset, and he asks why they've come:
Her answer was precise and lawyerly. “Isherwood Fine Arts has retained Mr. Allon to conduct a discreet inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the rediscovery of Portrait of an Unknown Woman and its sale to Masterpiece Art Ventures.”
“Late last week, the gallery received a letter expressing concerns over the transaction. The woman who sent it was killed in an auto accident near Bordeaux a few days later.”
“Her late husband purchased several paintings from the same gallery in Paris where Julian and Sarah acquired Portrait of an Unknown Woman. When I paid a visit to the gallery on Friday, I noticed three paintings that appeared to be forgeries. I purchased one of them and turned it over to Equus Analytics.”
“Aiden Gallagher is the best in the business. I use him myself.”
Although the painting looks like a Van Dyke, the “craquelure pattern is different.”
"That's because the forger is using a chemical hardening agent to artificially age the painting. It produces four centuries’ worth of craquelure in a matter of days. But it’s not the right kind of craquelure.”
Recurring characters—Christopher Keller
Christopher Keller — The London-born son of Harley Street physicians, Keller enlisted in the British Army against the wishes of his parents, was accepted into the Special Air Service, and became known as one of its most talented operatives, specializing in desert warfare.
He served undercover in Belfast in the mid-1980s, until caught by the IRA and tortured. He managed to escape and kill his captors in the process. In 1991, he was deployed to Iraq with his SAS squadron, and was thought to have been killed as a result of a friendly fire incident. He survived, and made his way to Corsica, where Don Orsati employed him as a professional assassin.
Christopher Keller (Sarah's husband) had once worked for "a certain Don Anton Orsati, patriarch of one of the island’s most notorious families" (island is Corsica). Although a hit man, his cover was “director of northern European sales for the Orsati Olive Oil Company.”
Recurring characters—Christopher Keller
He was the antagonist in The English Assassin but returned in The English Girl, The Heist and The English Spy to work with Gabriel Allon. At the end of The English Spy, he returned to service with the UK. At the end of The New Girl, Keller is romantically linked to Sarah Bancroft.
Basically, Christopher is a paid assassin.
Don Orsati looked at Christopher and exhaled heavily. “As for the former British commando, his fair hair, blue eyes, perfect English, and elite military training allowed him to fulfill contracts that were far beyond the skill level of my Corsican-born taddunaghiu."
Orsati tapped the cover of his leather-bound ledger of death. “And my profits have fallen sharply as a result. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I still get plenty of criminal and vengeance work. But my higher-profile clients have gone elsewhere.”
“An exclusive new organization that offers white-glove concierge service to the sort of men who travel in private aircraft and dress like Christopher.”
Recurring characters—Julian Isherwood
Julian Isherwood, born Isakowitz, is the son of a Jewish Parisian art dealer, smuggled out of France before the Nazis killed his father. He owns Isherwood Fine Arts, a London-based art gallery specializing in Old Masters. He was recruited in the mid-1970s for one specific purpose: to facilitate and maintain the identity of Mario Delvecchio, a Cornwall-based Italian expatriate art restorer of Old Masters paintings, the cover identity of Gabriel Allon.
Cast of characters—this novel
Magdalena Navarro, born and raised in the Andalusian city of Seville, her father was a dealer of Spanish Old Master paintings and antique furniture.
"She revered Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya, but Picasso was her obsession. She imitated his drawings as a young child and at the age of twelve produced a near-perfect copy of Two Girls Reading. She began her formal training soon after, at a private art school in Seville, and upon completing her secondary education she entered the Barcelona Academy of Art. Much to the dismay of her classmates, she sold her first canvases while still a student."
But she had no desire to become "the greatest female artist in Spain," so she went to New York, painted for a year, but nothing sold; then she started taking cocaine, and became a dealer, which introduced her to wealthy art connoisseurs. She traded one of her paintings to a dealer for cocaine, who sold it at substantial profit.
An anonymous buyer became her patron and she stopped dealing cocaine. This anonymous buyer invited her to dinner, with an early stopover at Bergdorf's for clothes, and met her at Le Cirque. It was Phillip Somerset, and she began a new career.
Cast of characters—this novel
Aiden Gallagher "was the founder of Equus Analytics, a high-tech art research firm that specialized in detecting forgeries. He sold his services to museums, dealers, collectors, auction houses, and, on occasion, to the Art Crime Team of the FBI. It was Aiden Gallagher, a decade earlier, who had proved that one of New York’s most successful contemporary art galleries had sold nearly $80 million worth of fake paintings to unsuspecting buyers."
Phillip Somerset, former bond trader at Lehman Brothers, he is founder and chief executive officer of Masterpiece Art Ventures, an art-based hedge fund that routinely returned profits of 25 percent to its investors. His wife is Lindsay
Leonard Silk, Somerset's "fixer," a gray man in a gray suit
Evelyn Buchanan—journalist who writes the article on Masterpiece Art Ventures for Vanity Fair
Yuval Gershon—Israeli intelligence service, a "hacker" who installs and monitors software on a person's phone or computer to retrieve information, phone calls, GPS locator
Cast of characters—this novel
Oliver Digby—London art dealer whom Magdalena deals with
Valerie Berrangar—woman murdered in a fake car accident because she challenged the authenticity of Portrait of an Unknown Woman.
Jacques Menard, French police, specifically commander of the Central Office for the Fight against Cultural Goods Trafficking.
Georges Fleury Gallery, sold fakes, including Portrait of an Unknown Woman which he sold to Julian Isherwood, the gallery was then bombed and he was killed as well as his assistant.
Questions for discussion
Not only does Daniel Silva have a page on Wikipedia, but so does Gabriel Allon. In fact, Gabriel's is longer, much longer.
What's the attraction of Gabriel Allon?
Questions for discussion
How would you describe the relationships among characters in this novel? What are they based on?
Are there personal relationships in this novel? How would you describe those?
Silva's style and structure
How would you describe Daniel Silva's style?
Questions about Silva's style and structure
In this novel of 438 pages (Kindle), Silva writes 75 chapters, that's just 5-6 pages per chapter on average. And most chapters are "scenes," characters engaging in action, or conversation, that reveals information crucial to the development of the plot.
But he does not pick up that thread until a couple of chapters later. With each new chapter, he moves to new characters and events, before returning to the plot thread previously revealed.
What's the effect of this structural strategy?
Questions about Silva's style and structure
He's also a "name dropper," occasionally referring to actual, real people, but more often he names specific hotels, specific clubs or bars, exact street addresses, expensive brands like Rolex or BMW.
Some readers feel an annotation would be helpful, like maps, or definitions.
What's the effect of this descriptive strategy?
Breakout room question
He also provides some descriptive facts about the characters in this novel, perhaps with a bias. All of his "good" characters are "beautiful" people, tall, handsome, or pretty, well dressed, noticeable.
Why all this exact detail? What's the effect on the reader? And what elements are missing?
NOTE: the writers of spy or espionage novels are said to have been strongly influenced by Ernest Hemingway's style. What does this tell you?
Questions for discussion
Espionage novels traditionally mirror world events. War, impending war, international crises, shifting perceptions of world power and influence, real-life episodes of espionage—all have inspired the durable and popular genre of espionage fiction.
They focus on secrets, plots, sophisticated surveillance applications, technology gizmos like James Bond's cars, guns, pens, etc.
But Daniel Silva focuses on art, particularly in this novel: art fraud. Why this subject? What's the similarity between the espionage world and the art world?
Questions for discussion
Clearly this is a mystery novel, more specifically it is crime fiction, and most of Daniel Silva's novels are classified as "spy thrillers."
But he's also been called an historical novelist, writing about current or recent events, fictionalizing them, although most readers recognize their reference to the "real world." In his Author's Note, he says that it's all fiction.
According to one academic, people who write novels in this genre tend to engage in "conjectural history"; that is, they write "the otherwise unrecorded history . . . of the large movements of historical time."
How does Silva treat historical events? Does that explain their popularity?
Are Silva's books more of "a man's novel"?
Questions for discussion
There are a lot of characters in this novel, as in all of Silva's novels. Some re-appear throughout the books in this series, but some are "once and done," created for the plot of this novel alone.
Like many novelists who write a series, these recurring characters seem to take on a life of their own.
Is Silva like other series novelists, or is he somehow different?
Silva's style and structure
Many of the more successful novels within this genre have been made into movies, from their earliest publications.
More recently, novels in this genre has become the ever so popular "action" movies of today's cinema.
Interview, from Jewish Insider (7-14-2022)
Israel’s leading spy doesn’t make it to the top of the Mossad without making a few enemies. The same could be said for Daniel Silva, the New York Times bestselling author whose iconic protagonist is Israeli spy chief Gabriel Allon.
Portrait of an Unknown Woman, features a recently retired Allon―for real this time, or so he says. . . . In the series’ latest installment, Allon leans into his spy cover as an art restorer, traversing Europe to investigate and expose an art forgery ring. This time, he’s a freelancer, not an Israeli agent.
The latest release comes a year after Silva’s previous novel, which featured a not-so-subtle Jan. 6-like attack on the U.S. Capitol and other similarities to American current events, sparking a wave of vicious online reviews from some political conservatives. But Silva said the vitriol comes with the territory.
“If your character is an Israeli intelligence officer, from the get-go you’re controversial, and your character’s controversial. His very existence offends a subset of readers,” Silva told Jewish Insider. “To be honest with you, I thought it was going to be worse than it actually was.”
Interview, from Jewish Insider (7-14-2022)
The original Gabriel Allon novel, The Kill Artist, published in 2000, also delved into current events. In that book, Allon was going after a Palestinian terrorist radicalized by the Oslo peace process.
“The series has moved roughly in sync with real time, and real-world events formed the backdrop upon which these stories are set. And that includes changes in administration in Washington,” said Silva, who lived in the nation’s capital for decades. “For better or worse, the Gabriel Allon series has really chronicled these tumultuous first two decades of this century, of this millennium. It’s been 9/11, the rise of jihadism, the rise and fall of ISIS, the rise of Putin and Putinism. It’s been a tumultuous, chaotic period.”
Earlier in his life, Silva documented some of these trends as a Cairo-based journalist who covered the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. He met his wife, Jamie Gangel, a CNN special correspondent who has lately been a fixture of the network’s recent coverage of the congressional Jan. 6 hearings, while they were covering the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Interview, from Jewish Insider (7-14-2022)
He mostly covered Arab countries during his reporting days: “It was hard to go back and forth in those days,” he said of why his Mideast coverage rarely took him to Israel. But, he added, “I was issued a second passport by the State Department that I could use to travel to Israel to keep the stamps out of the passport that I used in the Arab world, because if you had any Israeli entrance visas, you could get off a plane at a place and be turned around.”
Silva, 62, was born in Michigan and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The high-stakes, often violent politics of the 1960s made an impression on him when he was young. “I remember as a child, waking up one morning and Martin Luther King was dead. And then a few weeks later, waking up and Robert Kennedy was dead and the city centers were burning, and the war in Vietnam,” Silva said. “I just grew up in a house that was in tune with what was going on.”
He grew up Catholic, but converted to Judaism after meeting Gangel. Being Jewish “is an important part of our life,” Silva said, though he declined to share more; he said his connection to religion is private.
Interview, from Jewish Insider (7-14-2022)
Religion, and Judaism in particular, is also a huge part of the Gabriel Allon novels. The long shadow of the Holocaust hangs over the spy and every mission he completes, as well as the work of the Mossad and Allon’s Israeli colleagues.
“I write about it with great sensitivity, and with great passion and with purpose, and I take it incredibly seriously,” Silva said of his approach to the Holocaust.
“Gabriel Allon stands at the intersection of a lot of my things that I’m passionate about: the Holocaust, the Second World War, the formation of the State of Israel, Middle East politics.”
Former President George W. Bush appointed Silva to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s governing body, a position he held for five years.
Interview, from Jewish Insider (7-14-2022)
The research process for Silva is meticulous, and usually involves schlepping his kids--less so during the pandemic and now that his twins are out of the house—to far-flung destinations like Morocco or Russia. Like his protagonist, Silva doesn’t do downtime well. “I don’t sleep much,” he said. “Four hours is a biggie for me.”
Portrait of an Unknown Woman features a newly relaxed Allon enjoying semi-retirement in Venice. Perhaps similarly, Silva and Gangel recently decamped from Washington to South Florida. But he doesn’t plan to be a snowbird: Retirement is not on the horizon for Silva, and probably not for Allon, either. He never expected the Israeli spy he introduced in 2000 to be with him more than two decades later.
“As I get older, each decision about what to write next is a little more prolonged,” he noted. “But as I said, I settle on something and then I never look back. Never ever.”
Silva is already a few pages into his next book.
Knoedler gallery—Vanity Fair, April 23, 2012
Ann Freedman had come to Knoedler one last time. On a mid-February day, she approached the mansion at 19 East 70th Street, where New York's most venerable art gallery used to be, before its sudden, shocking closing last fall amid forgery allegations. “It’s amazing to think that this institution never stopped for 165 years,” she said. “It didn’t stop during the Civil War, World War I, World War II . . . I kept it open on 9/11.”
Now the doors were locked, the building cleaned out. The new owner was about to take possession. Knoedler’s former director had wangled a walk-through: a chance, as she put it, to be the last one in and the last one out of this gallery that had once sold Raphaels and Vermeers to Mellons and Fricks. She seemed not to wonder whether she was part of the reason these rooms were now empty.
Freedman is . . . genial but somehow remote, the sort who seems to talk mostly to control the airspace. “The significance of this institution,” she declared, “will not rest on the David Herbert collection.” But it will.
Knoedler gallery—Vanity Fair, April 23, 2012
The e-mail that brought the art world’s latest scandal to light came to Knoedler last November 29. It disclosed the results of forensic tests done to a Jackson Pollock painting, Untitled 1950, that the gallery had sold in 2007 for $17 million to Pierre Lagrange, a London hedge-fund multi-millionaire.
Done in the painter’s classic drip-and-splash style and signed “J. Pollock,” the modest-size painting was found to contain yellow paint pigments not commercially available until about 1970. This was discouraging, since the painter’s fateful car crash had occurred in 1956.
Lagrange . . . was furious. . . . He had startled London society in 2011 by leaving his wife and three children. . . . Selling the painting had been part of his effort to divide assets in connection with a divorce settlement. Now he was giving Knoedler 48 hours to reimburse him or face a lawsuit. To the art world’s astonishment, the venerable gallery simply pulled its brass doors shut.
The Pollock turns out to be just one of roughly 20 paintings with the same sketchy backstory, sold for tens of millions by Knoedler on Freedman’s watch: the so-called David Herbert collection. All are purportedly by the giants of 20th-century Abstract Expressionist painting: de Kooning, Rothko, in addition to Pollock.
Knoedler gallery—Vanity Fair, April 23, 2012
According to Freedman, all came from Glafira Rosales, a Long Island woman virtually unknown in the art world. She claimed to represent an anonymous owner Freedman calls “Mr. X Jr.”
Rosales is now a subject of investigations by the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which has impaneled a grand jury. And all the works may be fakes, although no one can yet say, with absolute certainty, whether any are: even forensic tests can be flawed.
So little were New Yorkers acquainted with art in 1852 when Bavarian-born Michel Knoedler came to manage a shop at Broadway and Duane Street started by his French employers, Goupil, Vibert & Co., it wasn’t even called an art gallery. The shop sold frames, art supplies, prints, and engravings. Even from the start, though, Knoedler had ambitions with American art: he sold a full-size engraving of Washington Crossing the Delaware at $20 per copy.
Then came the gold rush, and the first oil tycoons. By 1859, when Knoedler moved up Broadway across from Grace Church, he was selling Barbizon School landscapes to a new generation of mansion dwellers. Knoedler was . . . the New York art scene, there before any of the city’s major art museums.
Knoedler gallery—Vanity Fair, April 23, 2012
The robber barons who started flocking to Knoedler—from railroad builder Jay Gould and banker J. P. Morgan to oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller, and real-estate speculator John Jacob Astor—snapped up old masters that became the core of several key public collections: the Frick for one, the National Gallery for another.
But Knoedler’s real brilliance was in taking chances on contemporary art, one era to the next, from Degas and Manet to John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase. It did miss the Abstract Expressionists when they emerged, and came so close to bankruptcy that in1971 industrialist Armand Hammer could buy it for a mere $2.5 million. But Hammer hired, as Knoedler’s director, a well-connected art-world figure with a discerning eye named Lawrence Rubin, who brought in prominent contemporary artists, and so began the gallery’s last golden phase. Inclined to long lunches with his artists, Rubin tended to leave the business of actually selling their work to a young, ambitious assistant named Ann Freedman.
The daughter of a Scarsdale real-estate executive, a B.F.A. painting major at Washington University in St. Louis, Freedman had started as a receptionist at the André Emmerich gallery—arrival of Knoedler—before going to Knoedler in 1977. She lacked Rubin’s expertise, but she sure could sell.