THE JUMP ARTIST
Austin Ratner
Bellevue Literary Press, 2009. 252 pp. $14.95 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978-1-934137-15-4 (pbk.)

Reviewed by Claire Rudin

A young Latvian man and his father are hiking in the Tyrolean Alps when disaster strikes. The father is murdered out of sight of the son who is accused, tried, and found guilty of patricide. That the accused was a Jew had much to do with the injustices perpetrated by both prosecutor and judge in the anti-Semitic Austrian court. Philippe Halsman was jailed despite the intervention of such Jewish notables as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and other Jewish intellectuals in this Austrian version of the Dreyfus Affair, as it came to be known.

Weak, ill, guilt-ridden in spite of his innocence, and filled with anger, Halsman is pardoned after serving part of his sentence by the more sympathetic Chancellor Johann Schober, and then is released from the wretched jail that had housed and almost destroyed him. The foregoing part of the story occupies more than half of this historical novel.

Halsman’s recovery in Italy, travels to France, love affairs, discovery of his penchant for photography,and escape to America, and then his rise to fame as a superb photographic artist, occupy the second half of this book, imparting a distracting imbalance to the treatment of Halsman’s life. Only the last few pages touch on the significance of the title, explaining how Halsman has discovered the value of obliging his subjects to jump before the taking of their portrait.

Although the novel is based on the results of Ratner’s considerable research into Halsman’s life and times, it is clearly a fictional work, as the author himself has noted. His purpose has been to explore his subject’s inner life, mirroring what Halsman has done visually in his portraits of the movie stars, politicians, and other notable performers on the world’s stage.

Claire Rudin is a retired director of the New York City school library system and former librarian at the Holocaust Resource Center and Archives in Queens, NY. She is the author of The School Librarian's Sourcebook and Children's Books About the Holocaust.


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