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protect it from the elements.
Perhaps it would have re-
mained there were it not for
a chance encounter last sum-
mer.
Bara Zetter, a 23-year-old
U-M student about to receive
her Master of Fine Arts in
art history, visited Mr.
Prager with a group of
friends while in Israel last
year. He offered to show
them the painting.
"He took us into this room,
and it was almost like a rit-
ual.," she says. Mr. Prager re-
moved the curtain, and Ms.
Zetter looked up at the paint-
ing.
"It was," she says, "one of
the most powerful things I
have ever seen."
Ms. Zetter, a native of Edi-
son, N.J., is an artist whose
works often focus on gender
issues.
She spent a long time
studying the Aczel picture:
its details, how it looks in dif-
ferent light. She was in-
trigued by its curious past,
and decided she would re-
search the artist in her spare
time.
Then Ms. Zetter returned
to Ann Arbor. She discussed
the painting with one of her
professors and raised the
possibility of using it as the
subject of her master's the-
sis. Did he think it would
work?
"A master's thesis?" he
replied. "This could be a
book."
And so began Ms. Zetter's
journey — her temporary ca-
reer as a kind of Nancy Drew
— into the life of Derso Aczel.

he question is not

where Ms. Zetter
has researched,
but where she
hasn't: A huge notebook con-
tains copies and records of
her hundreds of letters and
phone calls and trips to New
York, to Hungary, to Ger-
many, to Florida, to Israel.
Some financial assistance
has come from a U-M gradu-
ate school discretionary fund.
But much of the money has
come from her own pocket.
She has sent letters to
everyone named Aczel still
living in Budapest. With the
help of a local genealogist,
she recently sent away for
Aczel's death certificate. She
has written to Yad Vashem
in Jerusalem, to YIVO (In-
stitute for Jewish Research)
in New York and to the Si-

mon Wiesenthal Center in
Los Angeles. She has con-
tacted former teachers and
directors of art schools
throughout Hungary. "But
no one seems to know who he
is."
She is especially surprised
that art institutes show no
records of a Derso Aczel. The
painting, done in the style of
the German Expressionist
school, shows more than just
raw talent, she says. "Obvi-
ously, he was trained."
What could have been Ms.
Zetter's one big break turned
out to be yet another riddle.
During her winter vaca-
tion, Ms. Zetter visited Mia-
mi to look into the life of
Charlotte Rajgrodzki or
Kruger (one name belonged
to her first husband, the oth-
er to her second), the woman
to whom Aczel had first giv-
en the painting.
Inexplicably, she found no
trace of Charlotte. There
were no listings in the phone
book. The city newspapers
indexed obituaries of only the
well known. She even con-
tacted the Miami school
board, to see if there were
records of Charlotte's son;
school officials said such in-
formation could not be re-
leased.
Ms. Zetter did manage to
find distant cousins, but they
knew little about Charlotte.
They suggested her son had
settled somewhere in the
Midwest, perhaps Chicago.
So Ms. Zetter looked through
Chicago phone books for
Kruger or Rajgrodzki list-
ings. She was never able to
make the connection.
Her latest hope is the
American Red Cross. A
bearded figure on the bottom
right of the painting, near
the artist's signature, shows
a fading death-camp regis-
tration number, A015013, on
his arm. Ms. Zetter believes
this may have been Aczel's
number. If so, the Red Cross
tracing service may be able
to provide more information
about the mysterious artist.
Meanwhile, Reuven Pra-
ger is making plans to dis-
play the Aczel work in a
two-room museum he will
open later this year in
Jerusalem. The painting will
be alone in one room. The
second room will hold arti-
facts that recall a more joy-
ful aspect of Jewish history.
The treasures will include
a golden crown cited in the

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