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about him, the clearer it seemed that he 
needed his own book.”
Both Transatlantic and The Flight Portfolio 
are historically accurate but have been 
fictionalized in order to illuminate the 
characters’ inner lives. In Orringer’s book, 
the historical facts were not altered and 
the characters bear their real names, but 
she wanted to dig a little deeper into Fry’s 
personal life. 
“I wanted to be completely faithful in 
the history and represent Fry’s life accu-
rately — where he went to school, who his 
friends were, how he learned about the 
injustices being perpetrated by the Nazis, 
and how his organization was formed,” 
says Orringer, who spent years combing 
through papers, books, photos and docu-
ments at libraries, colleges and institutions. 
“But the tone of Fry’s memoir is noirish 
— and I wondered why he had chosen 
that pose. Who was he really? What was 
he hiding?”
One of Fry’s secrets, Orringer learned, 
was that he was gay. The social mores of 
that time made it difficult for him to even 
acknowledge that element of his own char-
acter, much less live openly as a gay man. 
But in Marseille, Fry had a relationship 
with Stephane Hessel, who would later 
become a French diplomat. That relation-
ship was recorded in Hessel’s own memoir, 
but at the time it was kept secret. “In my 
book, I wanted to tell a part of that story 
that couldn’t have been told at the time,” 
Orringer says. “What was motivating him 
to do this work, aside from his altruism? 
Why did his life fall apart once he got back 
to the States? When history doesn’t hold 
the answers, fiction allows us to address 
questions like these. In effect, it gives us 
X-ray vision into the human soul.”

THE PATH TO ANN ARBOR
It’s not surprising Orringer became a 
prolific writer. She was born in Miami 
while her dad, Carl, a cardiologist and 
her mom, Agnes, a pediatrician, were 
medical students at the University of 
Miami. When Julie was 4,the family 

moved to Boston where 
her father had a fellowship 
at Harvard. Her brother, 
Dan, was born there, 
and her sister, Amy, was 
born in New Orleans, 
where they lived for six 
years. When Orringer 
was in eighth grade, 
they moved to Ann 
Arbor, where her parents worked at the 
University of Michigan hospital. They 
joined Congregation Beth Israel, where 
Julie became a bat mitzvah. 
“There was a wonderful progressive 
Jewish community in Ann Arbor,” she 
says. “Our synagogue encouraged us to 
think about how we could personally 
make the world a better place. That early 
learning contributed to my interest in Fry 
— he wasn’t Jewish himself, yet he went 
out of his way to help thousands of Jewish 
refugees.”
After high school, Orringer attended 
Cornell University where she earned 
a B.A. in English, and then earned an 
MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers 
Workshop. She eventually made her 
way to New York, where she resides in 
Brooklyn with her husband, writer Ryan 
Harty, and their two children. 
Orringer’s first book How to Breathe 
Underwater was published in 2003 (Alfred 
A. Knopf.) Her second book, The Invisible 
Bridge is about a Hungarian-Jewish 
student who leaves Budapest in 1937 to 
study architecture in Paris, falls in love 
with a former ballerina and struggles to 

survive the war. Orringer, who teaches at 
NYU and Stanford University’s Stanford in 
New York Program, has earned dozens of 
awards, including the Yale Review’s Editor’s 
Prize and Cowan Award from the Jewish 
Community Endowment Fund. 
Her interest in writing about the 
Holocaust can be traced back to hearing 
stories from her maternal grandfather. 
Orringer’s mom was Hungarian, and her 
family was in Budapest during the war. 
“
All my life I heard these whispered stories 
about our family’s survival,” 
she says. “One day I sat 
down with my grandfa-
ther and asked to hear 
all about his life, He was 
an architecture student 
and studied until he was 
conscripted into a forced 
battalion of the Hungarian 
army. His parents perished 
in Auschwitz and his older 
brother died of typhus 
during his own forced labor. 
My grandparents were mar-
ried during the war — my 
grandmother survived in a 
Red Cross shelter at the center 
of Budapest during the Nazi occupation.” 
Because her grandfather’s stories were so 
compelling, and many people are unaware 
of the details relating to the Holocaust in 
Hungary, Orringer knew they needed to 
become a novel.
Currently, Orringer is writing a con-
temporary novel about artistic and mar-
ital betrayal. Her dad, Carl Orringer, is a 
cardiologist at the University of Miami 
Health System; her brother Dan is a neu-
rosurgeon at NYU, and her sister Amy is 
a merchandising director at Google in San 
Francisco. Orringer’s mom, Agnes, died 
of cancer in 1993. They still have a lot of 
family in Ann Arbor. 
For now, Orringer is looking forward 
to watching her story come to life on the 
small screen. “Thanks to Anna and her 
team, millions of viewers will now get to 
learn about Varian Fry’s work in Marseille 
and about the artists and writers he saved,” 
she says. “That’s what’s really important 
here — that we understand how remark-
able Varian’s project was, and we all feel 
our personal responsibility to take action 
against injustice.” 

FACING PAGE: Deleila Piasko as Lisa Fittko, 
Ralph Amoussou as Paul Kandjo, Lucas 
Englander as Albert Hirschmann, Gillian 
Jacobs as Mary-Jayne Gold, Cory Michael 
Smith as Varian Fry and Amit Rahav as 
Thomas Lovegrove in Transatlantic.

Julie 
Orringer

BRIGITTE LACOMBE

