Yona Zeldis McDonough
The fictional Goldbaums are similarly powerful and almost unimaginably wealthy, but unlike most of the aristocrats in Europe at the time their wealth is earned. They are more like the American industrialists or new money, and were considered by many as gauche and bourgeois, viewed with even more intense suspicion by the establishment because of their Jewishness. To me, that makes the Goldbaums interesting – to be both singularly powerful, intricately involved in international affairs and needed by governments and emperors, and yet still be vulnerable and isolated.