Crossing the Borders of Time
A True Story of War, Exile, and a Love Reclaimed
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
France, 1941. Janine, a Jewish teenager, and Roland, her Catholic boyfriend, are passionately in love, and believe that nothing can come between them. But World War II intervenes, and Janine is forced to flee the Nazis with her family. They set sail from the docks of Marseille on one of the last ships to take Jews to safety. For 50 years, the last memory she has of Roland is an image of him in a rowboat on the sea, desperately trying to catch a last glimpse of her as the ship speeds towards the horizon.
Janine and her family become refugees in Cuba and, later, settle in the United States. Their new world is unpredictable, but the family is bound together by love and their memories of happier years in Europe. Janine marries and has a family of her own, but never forgets her love for Roland.
Decades later, Janine’s daughter, journalist Leslie Maitland, decides to track down the lost love who has haunted her mother for so many years. What happens when she finds Roland changes all of their lives irrevocably, and proves that even the worst violence of the 20th century is not enough to extinguish hope, passion, and romance.
Crossing the Borders of Time is at once an expansive history, a deeply personal family memoir, and a brilliant work of investigative journalism by an award-winning former New York Times reporter. Yet, above all else, it is a unique love story that will move you from the first page to its touching conclusion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1990, Maitland, a former New York Times reporter, went to Europe searching for her mother Janine's long-lost love. Janine was born to a prosperous German-Jewish family, and she enjoyed a sense of belonging in Freiburg, her hometown until age 15 when the family fled the Nazis to Mulhouse, France, in 1938. There her parents granted her greater freedom, and she began a romance with a 19-year-old Catholic, Roland, only to flee the advancing Germans to Gray, France, and then to Lyon, where Janine bumped into Roland in 1941 and was again entranced. But forced to flee once more, the family finally arrived in America, where Janine embarked on a difficult marriage to a philanderer and rabid Ayn Rand acolyte. But Janine always pined for Roland, whose letters her father had intercepted and hid. While this book is overlong and Maitland fails to make Janine's love affair and dysfunctional marriage compelling, Janine's prewar life and wartime travails and Maitland's descriptions of prewar European Jewish communities and their suffering under the Nazis are far more engrossing, This is a worthy testament to how war and displacement conspire against personal happiness. Photos.
