Rebecca Birrell is a British art historian and curator whose first book was a nonfiction study of women artists and intimacy in the early twentieth century. In her debut novel, Venus, Vanishing, she tells an astonishing story about the intimate life of a Jewish woman artist as the Nazis come to power.
Hannah Sherman is working in her parents’ Berlin tailor shop when her mother tries to marry her off to an older widower. An ambitious, headstrong teenager, she is having none of it. She runs away, adopts the surname Schmidt to pass as a Christian, moves into a boarding house in a different part of town, and sets about becoming a painter, using the knowledge of “women and their bodies” she acquired as a seamstress. For much of the book, “women and their bodies” are her all-consuming passion, in art as well as life. Yet she also falls in love with a young Jewish man named Saul, a curator at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum where Hannah goes to study the old master paintings.
As the economy worsens and Hannah’s sewing work dries up, she rekindles a relationship with a wealthy Berliner, Elke Grese, who once patronized her parents’ shop and is married to a high-ranking Nazi official. Elke inspires the artistically unformed Hannah with tales of a young Leonardo — he “received no formal education,” she says — and gives her a book about Michelangelo, inscribed with the words, “The artist invents what the seamstress merely serves, your friend, E.G.”
So begins a long seduction that eventually leads to Hannah being commissioned by her well-heeled patron to paint a series of neoclassical nudes — the preferred style of the Nazis — of Elke and her equally pale, blond, and socially connected friends. Each becomes a different version of Venus, the Roman goddess of love.
Birrell handles the historical aspects of the story with a light touch, focusing instead on the novelistic details of Hannah’s coming of age, including her steamy love affairs with Saul, Elke, and a lesbian dancer named Charlotte, who is also Jewish. Even when she writes about actual events, she does so obliquely, describing but never naming Kristallnacht and referring to Hitler only as “the chancellor” on the day he ascends to power.
As an art historian, Birrell is thoroughly versed in the ways in which the Nazis tried to suppress modern art movements. The regime labeled the work “degenerate” while elevating state-sanctioned realism through the so-called Great German Art Exhibition, which is featured in one of the final scenes of the book.
In an afterword, Birrell lists more than a dozen Jewish women artists whose real-life stories inspired the character of Hannah; many were murdered by the Nazis. Saul, too, is based on several historical figures, including a museum curator who died in Auschwitz. Birrell says she borrowed from their lives to create a “counter-narrative” of Jewish survival and flourishing. “I hoped to write a novel primarily about Jewish life, not Jewish death,” she says. With Venus, Vanishing, she has achieved this goal. It is brimming with queer love, art, and life.
Ann Levin is a writer, book reviewer, and former editor at The Associated Press. Her memoir and nonfiction have been published in numerous literary magazines and she has read her stories on stage with the New York-based writers group Writers Read.
