There are two stories being told by Michael Visontay in Noble Fragments, and they don’t easily fit together. But separating a book into the sum of its parts is rather his focus, so perhaps he can be excused.
Visontay, an Australian journalist and son of a Holocaust survivor, tells the story of Gabriel Wells, who in 1921 scandalised the rare books community (a fairly vibrant, backbiting group, as it transpires) by slicing and dicing a Gutenberg Bible.
That manuscript, one of around 50 known to be in existence at the time, is widely known as the first book printed on a printing press in Europe. Although, like many, the copy Wells came upon was incomplete, it was near enough so. Yet Wells, a canny Hungarian émigré to America who somehow schmoozed his way to the upper echelons of the antiquarian world, recognised that rarity meant even a single fragment would be desirable to collectors. Thus he committed what critics saw as the ultimate crime of placing commerce over cultural respect, making a not insignificant fortune in the process.
That’s where Visontay comes in, although it takes a while to work out the connection. As we learn, his grandmother was murdered by the Nazis, and his grandfather remarried Olga, another survivor, before emigrating to Australia. Olga turns out to have been Wells’s niece. And it was through an inheritance from him that allowed this patchwork of a family to rebuild a life in Sydney.
There is so much to be told about how survivors assembled new lives and salvaged futures out of the darkness, and Olga’s story is fascinating, if miserable; her stepson loathed her and she died prematurely. Visontay deserves praise for remembering her, since there is no one else today to do it.
Equally, I loved reading about cosmopolitan King’s Cross, a hub for postwar Jewish life and the site of the family’s deli. And there are some astonishing details in the Holocaust-era history. The story of Kálmán Ferenczfalvi, a non-Jew credited with saving the lives of more than 2,000 people, is an aside here that deserves far greater attention.
Then there’s Wells, a self-made man who forged a career in an exclusive, insular industry. How does a nobody who doesn’t speak the language become one of New York’s premier rare books dealers? It’s the Jewish American dream.
Visontay gives as much time to those strains as he does to exploring where all those Noble Fragments went, so there are endless pages about wealthy men and women buying a scrap here or there at auction. And many purchases were anonymous, leaving him struggling to fill in the blanks.
For Gutenberg aficionados this who’s who of auctions and collectors will no doubt intrigue. The research is meticulous and Visontay has certainly tried to spin an intriguing yarn. It’s just that ultimately, it’s not as satisfying a tale as his family history. I’d rather have read a whole book about that.
Nobel Fragments by Michael Visontay
Scribe
