The Dreyfus Collection

Lisa Warden is a talented young artist haunted by her father's disappearance. She was only fourteen in early 1956, when Peter Warden phoned from Europe to let her know he was returning soon. What he hadn’t told her was that he, the owner of a prestigious Manhattan art gallery, had been commissioned by the U.S. government to recover rare and valuable paintings confiscated by the Nazis after their invasion of France in 1940. After that call, Lisa never heard from her father again.

The paintings had been the family property of Peter's friend and client, David Dreyfus, a Jewish-American businessman with French roots. Prior to the invasion, Dreyfus had promised to donate the collection—containing works by Matisse, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and other greats—to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Dreyfus was murdered to conceal the theft. Luckily, he’d had the foresight to send his wife, Sarah, and their two young daughters back to the States. The Germans entered Paris a few days later.

Years after her father’s disappearance, Lisa takes a job with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod.  One day, quite by chance, she meets Sara Dreyfus’, David’s widow. And soon after, Lisa is visited by another seemingly strange coincidence. She learns the truths of her father’s fate, and more: Further clues about the paintings may lie within the doomed Italian liner Andrea Doria on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps not coincidentally, Russian fishing trawlers have been congregating in the vicinity of the ship, which sank in 1956, the same year that Peter Warden disappeared.

As the tension ratchets up, Lisa and Sarah become pawns in a high-stakes treasure hunt that spans the globe as they fight to avenge the lives of their loved ones and deliver the family paintings to their rightful home.

About the Author

Estelle Rubin Brager was a writer, township supervisor, and committed conservationist who lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where she was the longest-serving Democratic committeewoman in that county’s history. The mother of four and grandmother of nine, Estelle became a certified scuba diver while researching this novel. She is also the author of Gittle, a Girl of the Steppes, which is about her own grandmother, an adventuresome Jewish woman who escaped persecution in 19th century Russia by emigrating to America with her family. Estelle passed away in 2014 at the age of 86.