When Michael Visontay’s mother died in 2020, he came upon a vast cache of his family’s papers. These held aspects of family history he already knew — such as the deportation of his father, Ivan, from Hungary to Auschwitz as a teenager, and the death of Ivan’s mother there — but also plenty of surprises, and some questions, too.
Who, exactly, was Olga, his grandfather’s never-mentioned second wife? And what was the source of the money that had allowed Visontay’s family to emigrate from Europe to Australia at the end of World War II, and start a new life?
Visontay, a Sydney-based journalist, started digging.
The answer would take him down a winding, unexpected path — one that circled the globe and the centuries, was peopled with a staggeringly varied cast of characters and involved one of the most notorious acts of literary vandalism ever perpetrated. Ultimately, this complex story would become the aptly titled new book, “Noble Fragments,” published by Scribe this month.
Olga, it turned out, was a niece of one Gabriel Wells (né Weisz), a Hungarian émigré who in the early decades of the 20th century became one of the United States’ most prominent antiquarian booksellers. His remit was vast and many of the books that passed through his hands — including a gem-encrusted edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám that went down on the Titanic — were legendary.
His clientele ran the gamut from celebrities to flamboyant business titans and discreet old-world aristocrats. Wells moved easily between these worlds. A passionate admirer of Honoré de Balzac, he was personally responsible for saving the writer’s Paris home from demolition. (It is now a museum.) He also had regular cameos in The New York Times column called “Notes on Rare Books” — which were definitely having a moment in an era when new fortunes meant buyers eager to accrue prestigious artifacts.
However, as this same newspaper noted delicately in Wells’s 1946 obituary, “some of his business methods were at variance with the usual trade procedure.” An understatement, given that Wells had been responsible, in 1921, for what many considered one of the greatest controversies in book-selling history: breaking up a two-volume Gutenberg Bible, one of 41 in the world, and selling off the individual pages. Branded as “Noble Fragments” and encased in morocco leather, the pages ended up in the hands of hundreds of collectors and institutions.
It was not unheard-of for dealers to dismantle rare editions and create such bespoke “leaf books,” which could substantially increase their profits, if not their professional reputations; one such dealer termed himself a “biblioclast.”
But to do so to one of the first books created using movable type in the 15th century was, to many, unthinkable — “a crime against history,” in Visontay’s words, albeit one wrapped in very canny P.R. In addition to commissioning a florid introductory essay to accompany each “Noble Fragment,” Wells, too, made up a word, this time to describe the act formerly known as vandalism: “disseveration.”
Wells justified the “disseverating” by pointing out that the copy was damaged — children may have been responsible for cutting out some of the illuminations — and lacked 50 of its original 643 leaves. Breaking up the Bible would allow other Gutenberg Bibles to approach completion: Wells himself donated to the New York Public Library almost all the leaves missing from its edition. The breakup also gave a wide array of institutions an opportunity to buy a relatively affordable piece of history (each leaf sold for under $3,000 in today’s money.)
This was, after all, a world in which J.P. Morgan owned three Gutenberg Bibles — and wanted more. Wells argued, with remarkable chutzpah, that this was no act of destruction but rather an enterprise in the spirit of Gutenberg himself. Much like the medieval printer, he was democratizing the written word.
But no one could have called the choice purely philanthropic. Selling the Gutenberg Bible page by page added up to a small fortune, and elevated Wells’s business to the big leagues. And the criticism he engendered in the rare books world was not mere gentlemanly cravat-clutching: At 593 leaves, his Bible was, in fact, relatively complete.
Such scruples did not seem to deter buyers. As Visontay writes, “for every frown of disapproval, there was a lick of the lips.” Institutions lined up; private collectors vied for Ten Commandments and other favorite passages.
But whatever Wells’s motivations, the money the sales generated would in time allow another family, broken by the Holocaust, to begin a new life. As Visontay discovered, when the childless Wells died after the war, Olga and her surviving Hungarian cousins received a substantial bequest from her uncle in faraway New York.
The timing was fortunate. The author’s father and his family had run a delicatessen in the Hungarian village of Gyöngyös, both before and after the war. They had lost the business twice — first to the Nazis, and later to the Russians. Thanks to Olga’s inheritance, Ivan and the family were able to emigrate to Sydney and open a third shop. It sold Eastern European delicacies, and became a hub of the largely immigrant community in bohemian Kings Cross.
For Ivan, his stepmother Olga had been a deep source of resentment. Ivan’s father had married her soon after losing his first wife in Auschwitz. That he had been lonely, that Olga’s own husband had also died there, did not soften the feelings of a young teenager who had “experienced the unimaginable,” in Visontay’s words.
When Olga died, her cousins sued for the return of her inheritance, so even that benevolence was, for Ivan, nullified; it would take five years to rebuild their thriving business. His father married a third time; Olga was effectively expunged from Ivan’s life.
For Visontay, returning Olga to the story is one of the many “noble fragments” that’s come out of the project.
“She had been a hazy figure, virtually erased from our family histories and never spoken about,” he said. “I wanted to bring her out of the shadows.”
He had not planned to write a family memoir; but in the end, he said, it felt natural to braid the family’s story with that of the book that altered their paths so significantly.
In tracking down the pages — he’s located 120 — Visontay traveled around the world, in the process immersing himself in the arcana of Gutenberg scholarship and the world of rare books. Wells’s act of destruction has meant that the fragments are, indeed, scattered, but also experienced by so many around the world.
“I saw that as a parallel between my own family, who were given a second lease on life by the breakup of the Bible,” said Visontay.
The whole story, he says, speaks to the importance of serendipity — and “the surprising richness of life that is lying just beneath the surface if you dig.”
