A solid 3-1/2 stars. I found the first two parts engaging and the dialogue believable. I wanted to keep reading. The last part while probably true to the norms of the day fell flat and was tedious and ultimately felt completely engineered. Despite my disappointment with this last part I think the author left enough questions unanswered that I kept wondering about the characters whose stories were unfinished. I keep thinking about the humanism, ethics, morality or perhaps the lack thereof and the justifications that were proffered. The few sentences offering redemption are going to require more questioning and pondering. ( )

This lovely novel opens with a prologue set in 2013, involving elderly Jack Wiseman and his granddaughter Natalie. Her new husband has abandoned her, and she’s just quit her Manhattan attorney’s job to come stay with Jack in Red Hook, Maine, and her beloved grandfather is dying. It’s questionable which of them needs more tender care.
Searching a drawer, Jack runs across a worn black pouch containing a jeweled peacock dangling on a chain. “Whose was it?” Natalie asks, her curiosity aroused. “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know.” He charges her with the near-impossible task of returning it to its rightful owner, which will require unraveling its history.
The book then reveals how the pendant came into Jack’s hands at the close of World War II. It had been one item among thousands and thousands on the Hungarian Gold Train, a 42-car freight train the Germans were using to remove valuables—most of them looted from Hungarian Jews—to Berlin. The train was seized by French troops and finally came under U.S. military control and the contents warehoused in Salzburg, Austria. (The U.S. government kept most details about the Hungarian Gold Train secret for 50 years.)
Items were pilfered from the horde by thieves and the soldiers guarding it; U.S. military commanders used the warehouse as a department store for outfitting their quarters with fine china, silverware, crystal, furniture, and oriental rugs. Jack, in charge of the loot, had to comply with his superiors’ orders and was constantly frustrated at his inability to protect and preserve these treasures, much less return them to their rightful owners. His responsibilities as a soldier and as a Jew are at war within him.
Waldman writes compellingly about Jack’s situation and the treatment of the Displaced Persons flooding Salzburg, many of whom were concentration camp survivors. He meets one, a Hungarian with flame-red hair, Ilona Jakab, and falls in love. Jack keeps the peacock pendant in her memory, but never loses the feeling that taking it was dishonorable.
In her quest to fulfill her grandfather’s charge to find the pendant’s rightful present-day owner, Natalie travels to Budapest and finds much more than she expects. That section of the book is a treasure hunt, a mystery story, and a romance.
The last major section of the book dips back in time to 1913. It’s narrated by a libidinous psychiatrist charged with “treating” Nina S., an early suffragist who wears the pendant, and whom he rapidly concludes is quite sane, just at odds with her repressive father.
Natalie, Ilona, and Nina are interesting, compelling characters in challenging situations. Waldman doesn’t tell a good story once, but three times. Descriptions are vivid, characters’ motivations heartfelt, and conversations witty and spirited. Occasionally, she may be a little heavy-handed, and occasionally a verbal anachronism or clunky love scene sneaks in, but overall, the stories have strong narrative power. I don’t quite understand all the carping about this book in the mainstream media—each reviewer seeming to fixate on some different issue. I found it not only an exploration of conflicting loyalties, identity, and the struggle to be honorable, but also a fascinating historical mystery.
Love & Treasure is certainly timely, given recent renewed attention to the issue of Nazi plunder. The peacock pendant, silent witness to the pain and abuse of history, is the treasure in Waldman’s story, but love is the constant. ( )

Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman is highly recommended for those who enjoy WWII historical fiction based on facts.

Following three different time periods, Love and Treasure opens in the present with a granddaughter, Natalie Stein, caring for her dying grandfather, Jack Wiseman. Then the story jumps back in time, to 1945 at the end of WWII, when then Lt. Jack Wiseman is with the US troops in Austria who seize a train full of treasures that were all originally items confiscated from Hungarian Jews by the Nazis - the so called Hungarian Gold Train. Jack becomes involved with with Ilona, a Holocaust survivor, who eventually breaks his heart and leaves him to go to Palestine. Jack ends up keeping an enamel peacock necklace in remembrance of Ilona, but his dying wish is that Natalie returns it to its rightful owner. In the present, Natalie travels to Budapest in hopes of tracking down the rightful owner and discovers the necklace was depicted in a painting, Portrait of Frau E. The last part of Love and Treasure takes another jump back in time to 1913 where we meet Frau E, Nina Schillinger.

Waldman does an exemplary job incorporating history with a richly layered story. The complicated story is told through the perspective of characters based in three different time periods and under very different circumstances. Her characters are finely crafted, multidimensional people, flawed but realistic. She doesn't shy away from some of the less than stellar characteristics of her characters and those around them, like the officers who furnished their quarters with items from the train, or Jack taking the peacock necklace, but Waldman also treats her characters with care and compassion rather than harsh judgement as they try to do the best they can in their circumstances.

This is a perceptive, well written novel that assumes a measure of intelligence on the part of the reader as you follow the three separate stories that combine to make a complete picture of who originally owned the peacock necklace. There is a wonderful sense of time and place captured in the writing of each part of the story, allowing them to separately represent their respective time periods but also making the whole of the story that much richer for the care taken with them.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Knopf Doubleday for review purposes. ( )

When we think of Holocaust books it is rare to see one set in Hungary. This is based on the true Hungarian Gold Train captured by the Allies at the end of the war. The novel is a triptych looking at the impact of the war and the contents of a necklace today, then and earlier in turn of the 20th century Budapest. This earlier part looks at the rise of psychoanalysis, as advertised. However, I found the role of women and the early Progressive Movement absolutely fascinating ( )

This is an ambitious historical fiction piece that centers on a pendant taken from the historic Hungarian Gold Train near the end of World War II. The story follows the pendant and all its owners through their loves and loses. Adding interest is the early suffragette movement in Europe and the early use of psychoanalysis. ( )