"TRANSATLANTIC" MISSES THE BOAT

By Letting the Bottom-line Trump Truth

Promotional poster (courtesy of Netflix, Fair Use)

(If you’re spoiler-wary, be forewarned)

Even when its docudramas are based on a nonfiction source, Hollywood has been known, if not expected, to play fast and loose with the truth. So, given that Netflix’s 2023 miniseries Transatlantic was adapted from an historical novel, Julie Orringer’s 2019 The Flight Portfolio, it’s no great surprise how far the show has strayed from historical fact.

Transatlantic takes place, as did the events it caricatures, in Marseilles, France, in late 1940 and early 1941, before US entry into World War II. It centers on the efforts of US journalist Varian Fry (played by Cory Michael Smith), co-founder of the privately funded Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), to help refugees from Nazi Germany and occupied France escape Hitler’s clutches by gaining exit visas to the United States. Fry’s prime focus is on prominent European artists and intellectuals, of which about 200 ultimately found refuge in America, among about 2,000 people the ERC helped rescue overall.

It’s a complex, emotionally charged tale, which an earlier TV movie on the subject, 2001’s Varian’s War, starring William Hurt, had already fumbled and been taken to task by historians and critics alike. Among the harshest detractors was Bill Bingham, a relative of one of the true-life characters, US vice consul in Marseilles, Hiram “Harry” Bingham. The younger Bingham denounced the film as “dreadfully inaccurate and demeaning to Fry, [German author Lion] Feuchtwanger, [Fry’s assistant] Miriam Davenport and others.”[1] Perhaps the movie’s biggest mistake was advertising itself as “The true story of the American Schindler,” an uber-ambitious claim that was asking for trouble from the get-go. 

(Courtesy of Showtime Networks, Fair Use)

Transatlantic wasn’t about to fall into a similar trap, and it wisely is promoted simply and accurately as being “inspired” by Orringer’s novel. But the series is still dealing with highly sensitive material, and when a terrifyingly true story, one step from the Holocaust, is turned into “an oddball comedy” that spreads “a glossy sheen over grim history,” as some critics averred, even Mel Brooks might reach for the barf bag.[2]

Remarkably, however, unlike Varian’s War, Transatlantic’s “trivializing the situation and the historical characters” has been given a pass by a consensus of critics.[3] The series received a 94% approval rating from the respected Rotten Tomatoes website. And even some reviewers who acknowledge the show’s flaws tend to gloss over them in favor of its ability to draw a broad audience to a serious subject, the story’s resonance with “the ongoing plight of refugees, resurgent nativism and antisemitism,” and its strong female characters and allusions (however inaccurate or anachronistic) to LGBTQ and anti-colonialist issues.[4]

Others, such as myself and close friends whose parents experienced the Nazi terror firsthand, as well as historians concerned about the series’ gross distortions, fabrications, and omissions, are far less forgiving.   

“We try to be true to the history but also make fun by working with it in a heightened way,” series co-creator Anna Winger explains, revealing perhaps more than she intended.[5] For while the humor may have helped Transatlantic garner a 75% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it fell flat for historian Sheila Isenberg, author of A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry (2001), who called Transatlantic a “travesty.”[6] Nor was historian Catherine Collomp, author of Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934-1945 (2021), smiling when she concluded, “I am sorry this series exists.”[7]

Among Isenberg’s many complaints are the series’ exclusion of the Frenchmen Danny Benedite and Jean Gemahling, “Fry’s right-hand men, who took over the mission after Fry was expelled from France in September 1941.”[8] A committee representing the family of Benedite’s sister, Elizabeth Benedite Davidson, even sent a letter to Netflix complaining about this omission, as well as other inaccuracies.[9]

Isenberg also objects to the overemphasis on Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs), the series’ eye candy, and the erasure of Gold’s close friend and Fry’s assistant Miriam Davenport, who “was much more important to the operation.”[10]

Susan Subak, author of Rescue and Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis (2010), further derides Gold’s portrayal as the ERC’s chief bankroller, when she actually “did not become a major financial benefactor of Fry’s program. . . . The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) raised far and away more resources for rescue than all of the gentile organizations put together.”[11]

Another organization that contributed greatly to ERC’s mission but is stricken from the record in Transatlantic is the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). Yet according to Collomp, “Varian Fry and the JLC’s interventions were entangled, often serving the same persons, and collaborating for the same purpose of rescuing people of remarkable cultural, social or political influence.”[12]  

Collomp even takes exception with the film’s main setting in the Hotel Splendide, depicted as “a Wes Anderson-like grand hotel with uniformed concierges,” when it was in fact “a dingy little hotel near the railway station.” As for the Champagne parties and other wild goings-on at the Chateau Air-Bel outside of town where the elite among the refugees had found temporary refuge, these antics strain credulity given the exiles’ precarious status in a city “overrun by Nazi loyal Vichy police and criminals.”[13]

One of the most sensitive issues for many is Fry’s depiction as gay. This wouldn’t be as glaring a problem if it was clear, historically, that he actually was gay. For not only is Fry’s affair with a fictional male lover on ample display, but it becomes a major plot point when its discovery by US Consul Patterson (Corey Stoll), no friend of Fry or the ERC, almost derails the entire project.

Winger argues that Fry’s gayness is debatable (his son claims he was closeted), but Isenberg is adamant that Fry, who was married twice, was not gay.[14] Pierre Sauvage, president of the Varian Fry Institute, who’s working on a documentary on Fry, adds that even if he was gay—and not that there’s anything wrong with that—Fry “would never have let an affair distract him from his mission, to which he was passionately committed. Any movie or miniseries that suggests otherwise will vandalize the memory of a great man—great in those particular circumstances.”[15]

“There are moral issues here, too,” Sauvage believes, relating to what he calls “Holocaust distortion.” “If you trivialize real stories, and embroider them in a thousand different ways, then you make that whole period seem vulnerable to similar accounts. That is the risk,” he warns.[16]

Similarly frustrated with Transatlantic’s misrepresentations, Andrew Silverstein, a contributor to The Forward, suggests an alternative “Netflix series we’d like to see,” about the rescue operation in Marseilles. This wouldn’t play to commercial interests by emphasizing the glitterati among the refugees—Max Ernst, André Breton, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and the like—but instead would bring equally extraordinary lesser-lights to the fore.[17]   

As an example, Silverstein offers the true-life adventure of Jeffim Israel. A Menshevik revolutionary and government official in the fledging Soviet Union, Israel was exiled with his wife and young children: first from the USSR during “Lenin’s reign of terror,” then from Germany after the Nazi takeover, and next from occupied France after the Nazi invasion. Finally, in Marseilles, while Jeffim, his wife, and daughter obtained emergency visas and embarked for America, his son’s and his wife’s visas were held up. The young couple ended up being smuggled across the Pyrenees by foot—as, to its credit, we see several people having to do in Transatlantic—and eventually joined the rest of the family in New York.[18]  

Taking my cue from Silverstein, I have an even more astonishing alternative tale to propose, one that combines the courage of resistance, the terror of flight, and a love affair all in one. Fortunately, the incredible saga of Eva and Otto Pfister has been preserved for posterity by their children (and my good friends), Tom, Peter, and Kathy Pfister, in their meticulously documented memoir Eva & Otto: Resistance, Refugees, and Love in the Time of Hitler (2020).

(Courtesy of Purdue University Press)

Eva Pfister (née Lewinski), a 25-year-old German Jew, and Otto Pfister, a 35-year-old German Catholic, met and fell in love in 1935 in Paris. Their “meet cute” occurred at Le Restaurant Végétarian des Boulevards, where Eva was working and Otto happened to drop in for a bite. Eva’s most important work, however, was as a member of a revolutionary German group called ISK (Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund, or International Socialist Combat League). ISK had been actively opposing the Nazis before Hitler came to power, and the bulk of the group were forced into exile in France soon thereafter.

Otto, an ardent anti-Nazi well before 1935 but not yet active in the resistance until he met Eva, had been living in France since 1927. This sojourn would prove doubly auspicious, for in Nice he’d joined a group with a “return to nature” lifestyle that included vegetarianism, a dietary regimen that would lead to the love of his life, while the fluency in French he acquired would end up saving it. 

During their time together in Paris, Eva edited ISK’s anti-Nazi publications and Otto helped smuggle them into Germany for clandestine distribution. After France declared war against Germany in September 1939, Otto, despite his anti-Nazi work with ISK, was interned by the French as an “enemy alien” along with other men of German origin, though he was soon released to help the war effort. His missions included delivering bombs to sabotage German trains and ships carrying war materiel, and during this period he and Eva were reunited in Paris.

Shortly after Germany’s invasion of France in May 1940, Eva herself was interned as an “enemy alien,” first in Paris and then in southern France. Around the same time, Otto was arrested again, only this time as a POW by the Nazis!

Terrified for Otto but fearing for her own safety, Eva, upon her release from the French internment camp, sought and obtained, against great odds, an emergency visa in Marseilles. Then, having learned that Otto was alive but still in a POW camp, she also headed across the Pyrenees into Spain and from there to Portugal, where she boarded a ship to the US.

In New York, Eva could breathe again when word came that Otto was not only alive but had been released from the POW camp—though in a manner that turns this heroes’ journey from incredible to miraculous.

Otto had survived his imprisonment and gained his release by giving the Nazis a false name, claiming to be French (whose language, as mentioned, he now spoke fluently), and pretending not to understand German! Somehow, the ruse worked, though he was still in dire jeopardy and desperate to reunite with his beloved.

In the US, Eva worked tirelessly to enable Otto’s escape, and through the personal intercession of Eleanor Roosevelt (whose aid to the ERC in general is another missing link in Transatlantic), obtained his emergency visa. Otto then followed in Eva’s footsteps across the Pyrenees and arrived in New York in April 1941.

But hold onto your hats.    

Rather than resting on their laurels, Eva and Otto jumped back into the fray: Eva through continued rescue and relief work, and by working in New York with the OSS (precursor of the CIA) on resistance activities in France; and Otto, at age 44, by joining the US military and returning to the front in Europe where, ironically, he ended up interrogating German POWs during the Battle of the Bulge and performing other secret assignments for the OSS in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and Germany.

By the early 1950s Eva and Otto were ready for another trek, this time across the American continent to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles with their brood of, first, Kathy, then the twins Peter and Tom. Settling initially in Van Nuys, then moving to Canoga Park, Otto picked up his trade as a cabinet maker, Eva began teaching high school, and the children grew into adulthood, eventually joining forces to add their parents’ amazing story to—for my money—the greatest ever told.   

(Anna Winger, it should be noted, prior to Transatlantic had created and co-written the superb 2020 Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, also based on a true-life escape story, this time about Deborah Feldman, a 19-yeard-old American who manages to extricate herself—no easy task—from the ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect in Brooklyn, New York. Winger is clearly an extremely talented filmmaker and here’s hoping she returns to form in her next project.)

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Many thanks to Tom Pfister for his invaluable assistance in the writing of this blog.

[1] Quoted in Pierre Sauvage, “Getting the big picture wrong.” Chambon Foundation, February 12, 2008, https://varianfry.org/varians_war_en.htm.

[2] Greg Wheeler, “Transatlantic Season 1 Review - A tonally conflicted but enjoyable historical drama,” The Review Geek, April 9, 2023, https://www.thereviewgeek.com/transatlanctic-s1review; Jonathan Wilson, “Transatlantic Season 1 Review - a glossy sheen over grim history,” Ready Steady Cut, April 7, 2023, https://readysteadycut.com/2023/04/07/transatlantic-season-1-review.

[3] Catherine Collomp quoted in Andrew Silverstein, “The heroic WWII rescue story that Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ is not,” The Forward, April 20, 2023, https://forward.com/culture/543811/the-heroic-wwii-rescue-story-that-netflix-transatlantic-is-not.

[4] Robert Lloyd, “Review: ‘Transatlantic’ is a clunky, quasi-historical melodrama about Varian Fry,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2023-04-06/tranatlantic-netflix-varian-fry-review.

[5] Roger Cohen, “In ‘Transatlantic,’ Stories of Rescue and Resistance from World War II,” The New York Times, April 4, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/01/arts/television/transatlantic-varian-fry.html.

[6] Quoted in Ibid.

[7] Quoted in Silverstein, “The heroic WWII rescue story.”

[8] Renée Ghert-Zand, “Not ‘Holocaust’ distortion but creativity, says creator of Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic,’” The Times of Israel, April 17, 2023, http://www.timesofisrael.com/not-holocaust-distortion-but-creativity-says-creator-of-netflixs-transatlantic.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Susan Subak, “In Transatlantic’s Varian Fry story, Jews are not helping their own,” The Times of Israel, April 23, 2023, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/in-transatlantics-varian-fry-story-jews-are-not-helping-their-own.

[12] Quoted in Silverstein, “The heroic WWII rescue story.”

[13] Ibid.

[14]  Ghert-Zand, “Not ‘Holocaust’ distortion.”

[15] Quoted in Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Silverstein, “The heroic WWII rescue story.”

[18] Ibid.