The Imperfects by Amy Meyerson, Park Row Books, 2020; ISBN 9780778-305071; 372 pages plus notes and acknowledgments; $27.99.
SAN DIEGO – What Helen Auerbach’s youngest daughter initially mistook for costume jewelry was in fact a 137-carat diamond, none other than the Florentine Diamond that had been missing since the end of the Habsburg Dynasty. Helen left it to her youngest granddaughter Beck, skipping over her daughter Deborah Miller, as well as her other grandchildren Ashley and Jake.
This was a reflection of how very estranged her family had become.
While granddaughter Beck had stayed in Philadelphia to be near Helen; daughter Deborah never could be could be counted upon. In Beck’s view, “Helen was more than a grandmother; Deborah was less than a mom.”
There was trouble, as well, among Deborah, Beck, and Jake, the middle grandchild. He had written a screenplay that was made into a successful movie in which he mercilessly had caricatured his sisters and mother. The third grandchild, Ashley, who left home young and married well off – or so she had thought – forgave Jake, but Deborah and Beck could not so easily. Now with Helen’s death, they would come together as a family after an absence of two years.
Family tensions rise when the broach that Beck thought was costume jewelry turned out to be the famed diamond. When Beck offered to divide the proceeds of the diamond – which could run into multi-millions—with the other three members of her family, one crisis was averted. But another one quickly presented itself after the world learned that the family had the famed diamond that had been missing for decades. The Austrian and Italian governments, among others, claimed that they were the rightful owners and that Helen must have stolen it.
From there, Meyerson’s book takes readers on the family’s journey to find out if they were indeed the rightful heirs to the diamond, and to learn how it came into their grandmother’s hands in the first place. But while they cooperated in their quest, troubles in their various homes caused Jake and Ashley to want a quick sale of the diamond and division of the proceeds.
Jake, who had fallen on hard times after his movie and was working as a retail clerk pending the writing of a second script, had learned that his girlfriend was pregnant, and that they would need money to raise a baby.
And, Ashley learned that her husband, heretofore a successful attorney, had been receiving kickbacks on work that he supposedly had farmed out to an associate – to the tune of $500,000. If he didn’t repay the firm pronto, he could expect a much heavier prison sentence than the ones his defense team had been bargaining for.
Because her office affair was over with a senior partner in the law firm where she worked as a paralegal, Beck was less distracted, but consumed with the idea of finding out the real story behind Helen’s inheritance.
And so, as the book wends toward its conclusion, we learn more about a family under stress that fights each other, yet loves each other, especially when under attack and suspicion from the media.
One of the reason the diamond was so valuable, in addition to its size, was a unique imperfection. Perhaps it may be said that it was their imperfections, also, that made the Miller family members dear to each other, despite all.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com