The Lost Studio: The Life, Tragic Death, and Rediscovery of an Artist in Paris

In this astonishing, dramatic story—a mystery, a family memoir, and a cultural history all in one—Karen Liebreich investigates the life and death of artist Edith Borger, her aunt, who was murdered in Paris in 1970, along with her baby.

In 2021, fifty years after her aunt Edith’s murder, Karen Liebreich received a strange email from a French couple. Through chance, they said, they’d found Edith’s studio, boarded up and untouched for decades, exactly the way she’d left it: filled with sculptures in bronze and clay; oil paintings; letters; and forty years of diaries.

The Lost Studio tells of Karen’s attempt to recover Edith’s life’s work, told alongside the story of that life. Edith, born in a Jewish family in what is now the Czech Republic in the 1930s, spent her childhood as a war refugee in England and her adulthood moving between London, Tel Aviv, and finally Paris, where she settled in her thirties to study art. When she reached her early forties, after years of struggle, she was on the precipice of true fame and also the mother of an infant with her estranged husband, Robert. Until one night, all of it was taken away from her.

Escaping the Holocaust by traveling on a train that passed close to the gates of Auschwitz, attending the Nuremberg Trials, visiting Hitler’s mountain hideout, studying in Prague during the Communist coup, fighting in the Israeli War of Independence, strolling through Paris during the événements of 1968—Edith, like a real-life Forrest Gump, was present at some of the most seminal events of the 20th century, an ordinary person shaped and buffeted by the forces of history. Through, in part, Edith’s evocative and meticulously kept diaries, Karen tells the story of her life against the backdrop of these major world events, bringing the work of this extraordinary artist and the tragedy of her death vividly to life.