The revealing secret lives of mysterious Jewish women

Anne-Marie O’Connor and Ora Ahimeir both stumbled on the stories of the extraordinary women at the heart of their bestelling books. On Monday, May 15, they will discuss their accidental finds in English at the next event in our series Personal Pages: Meet the Author at the Tower of David.

O’Connor spotted an item in a community newspaper in LA about a local woman trying to retrieve a family painting stolen by the Nazis that was now displayed in Austria’s main museum.

“There were paintings hanging in museums all over Europe that had been stolen by Nazis but no one ever got paintings back in those days,” recalls O’Connor, an LA Times reporter. “I didn’t think she had a prayer.”

But O’Connor hadn’t reckoned with the charm and tenacity of Maria Altmann and the skill of her young lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg.

“Only a legal Houdini could get a painting back from a foreign government that was in a national museum. I thought it was a lost cause,” she says.

After an eight-year legal battle against the Austrian government that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, Altmann recovered Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece, a painting of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, in 2006 and chose O’Connor to write the story. The result was “The Lady in Gold,” the extraordinary history of a Viennese Jewish family that was also made into a movie starring Helen Mirren.

Ora Ahimeir grew up in Jerusalem and until the age of 70 was a widely-respected writer, researcher and diplomat who helped establish the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies which she directed for 31 years.

A chance meeting revealed a secret she had never known: Her mother’s first husband had been murdered.

“I went out to uncover some family secrets about my mother, a beautiful and mysterious woman from Safed, who died at a very young age,” Ahimeir says. “The story I uncovered turned out to be tantalizing, mesmerizing, very fascinating. It wasn’t just a family story, it was a Jewish story and a story about the land of Israel in the pre-state years.”

After a lifetime of scientific research, she decided to write it as fiction.

“I discovered the passion of writing. Once I started I couldn’t stop myself,” she says. “To be free to play with language, to play with your imagination, to enjoy unrestrained writing — this became a passion. It was so enjoyable and fulfilling I decided this is what I am going to do with the rest of my life.”

“Bride” was shortlisted for Israel’s most prestigious literary award. Ahimeir’s new novel “Araratim,” the parallel stories of Jewish and Armenian families in Jerusalem and their experience of genocide, has just been published in Hebrew.

O’Connor and Ahimeir will be discussing their work at 7 p.m. on Monday, May 15, at the Crusaders Hall, Tower of David. Tickets, NIS 50, available HERE.

Books will be available for purchase and signing by the authors, courtesy of Katamon Books. Pre-order your copy by emailing Rachel at Katamonbooks@gmail.com or phone: 077-506 1311.

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