What makes the Orringer’s work noteworthy is the complex human character that she creates out of the historical record of Fry. Based on existing correspondence that suggests that Fry was gay, Orringer intertwines two narratives – Fry’s extraordinary efforts on behalf of the people who came to him for help and his struggle to define his sexual identity. Orringer creates a fictional friend from college, Elliott Grant, with whom Fry had had a sexual relationship while they were students at Harvard. After a 12-year separation, Grant resurfaces in Marseilles and offers to help with the ERC activities. Grant’s motives are unclear but he quickly makes himself an indispensable member of the team, and Fry and Grant renew their close relationship. Fry has a loving wife at home who is anxiously awaiting his return from France. Fry is guilt-stricken that he has not been honest with her about his sexual orientation and that their relationship is a sham.  As events unfold in the novel, he is able to come to a meaningful resolution of his dilemmas.

There are many identities that cause anguish and pain in the novel. Grant’s father was a talented black musician who married a Jewish woman from Philadelphia and then abandons his family. His son hides his black identity in order to gain entry to Harvard and secure a faculty position at Columbia. The Jewish intellectuals only come to Fry for his help as a last resort because Hitler and the Third Reich have made their religious identity a crime against the state. Finally, the basic human identity of the famous intellectuals that Fry saves is called into question. What about them makes them more worthy of his selfless efforts than any other Polish or German or Austrian or Hungarian Jewish father or mother? Is artistic accomplishment such an important feature of what we are as people that it should be the decisive criterion that determines whether we are saved from impending disaster?

Orringer offers no easy answers to these challenging questions. But the book she has written conveys a man in full. Fry’s legacy was cemented when Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, bestowed on him the title of “Righteous among the Nation.” He was the first of five Americans to be given this honor. Righteousness may be the ultimate human identity.