The Orpheus Clock: The Search for my Family’s Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis is a combination of family history and detective work. Goodman knew his grandparents came from a German-Jewish banking family and that they died in a concentration camp. It was not until his father died that he learned that the Gutmann’s were the owners of a magnificent art collection:
That included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many others. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives.
Although his father had worked to regain the art collection, Simon Goodman knew nothing of this. After his father’s death, he began the detective work necessary to prove that the work belonged to his family. The Orpheus Clock is the story of his family and his work.
It comes out in paperback from Scribe on August 3rd, 2015 and from Simon and Schuster on August 25th.
