Book
The Girl in the Oil Painting
by Uri Dushy
Book 1 in the Art of Resistance series.
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Rhodes, 1940–1944. Sixteen-year-old Dora Behar and her cousin Sarah grow up within the island’s long-established Jewish community, painting Mediterranean landscapes and imagining the lives ahead of them. As Italian rule gives way to German occupation and anti-Jewish persecution closes in, Dora’s family faces separation and deportation, while a childhood portrait becomes a fragile link to the world that existed before catastrophe.
In 2023, a young artist is haunted by the recurring image of a solitary figure at an abandoned harbour watching a ship that will not return. Her attempt to understand the painting uncovers a family history shaped by the 1944 deportation of the Jews of Rhodes to Auschwitz and asks how art can preserve identity when homes, witnesses and entire communities have been destroyed.
