Felice’s Worlds

Also published as Art of a Jewish Woman—From the Holocaust to the Halls of Modern Art

A Memoir by Henry Massie

An eBook, BooksBnimble Press, New Orleans, 2012, and on Amazon

My mother fled the Nazis twice. She left her village on the Polish-Russian border as a young woman in the 1930s for France because Nazi inspired laws took away all opportunities for her, and then fled France for British Mandate Palestine. While working in Jaffa as a dentist in an Arab office and sympathetic to both the Arab and Jewish causes, she became entangled in the first intifada. When she received death threats from Jews, she decided to move on. She landed penniless at Ellis Island in 1937, and by dint of answering an ad in a newspaper, she secured her first job—governess and French tutor to the daughter of the president of Yale University. By the end of her life she had amassed one of the most important collections of Abstract Expressionist Modern Art in America, “Because it was all new, all American. It had nothing to do with the wars in Europe.”