Journalist Leslie Maitland researched and wrote this story of her mother's flight from Europe during WWII and subsequent life in the United States. Jeanne, her mother, was born in Germany to a prosperous Jewish family. With Hitler's rise to power the family moved to Mulhouse, France, then Lyon, and finally to Marseille before boarding a ship to Cuba. Eventually they were able to join relatives in New York. During Jeanne's teen years in France she met and fell in love with Roland, a handsome and kind French Catholic. They were painfully separated in Marseille, and had no contact for 50-ish years. Their eventual reunion, partially engineered by Leslie herself after her father's death, makes for icky reading. (As did the descriptions of their adolescent trysts in France; I guess I'm a prude, but I kept wanting to scream "TMI" as I was reading. Should anyone really write about the sex life of a parent?)
On the other hand, the story of Jeanne's family in Europe was fascinating, and beautifully researched. As we read about Jewish families during the war, it seems painfully obvious that they should bolt for the New World at the first opportunity. Jeanne's story highlights how difficult this decision was in real life, and just how much was lost to those who 'successfully' got away.
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