Crossing the Borders of Time
A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
On a pier in Marseille in 1942, with desperate refugees pressing to board one of the last ships to escape France before the Nazis choked off its ports, an 18-year-old German Jewish girl was pried from the arms of the Catholic Frenchman she loved and promised to marry. As the Lipari carried Janine and her family to Casablanca on the first leg of a perilous journey to safety in Cuba, she would read through her tears the farewell letter that Roland had slipped in her pocket: “Whatever the length of our separation, our love will survive it, because it depends on us alone. I give you my vow that whatever the time we must wait, you will be my wife. Never forget, never doubt.”
Five years later – her fierce desire to reunite with Roland first obstructed by war and then, in secret, by her father and brother – Janine would build a new life in New York with a dynamic American husband. That his obsession with Ayn Rand tormented their marriage was just one of the reasons she never ceased yearning to reclaim her lost love.
Investigative reporter Leslie Maitland grew up enthralled by her mother’s accounts of forbidden romance and harrowing flight from the Nazis. Her book is both a journalist’s vivid depiction of a world at war and a daughter’s pursuit of a haunting question: what had become of the handsome Frenchman whose picture her mother continued to treasure almost fifty years after they parted? It is a tale of memory that reporting made real and a story of undying love that crosses the borders of time.
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.
Customer Reviews
Crossing the Borders of Time
Long but excellent historical account of Nazi Germany and it's impact on one Jewish girl, her family, and their flight to safety, with a poignant and endearingly satisfying ending. Very worth reading!
Absorbing
This book started a bit slow, I am glad I stayed with it. What an amazing story, I am glad the daughter of the main character took the time to tell it and share it so beautifully. I could not put it down.
Crossing the borders of time
I don't think I have have ever read a book so interesting
I learned so much about a time in history that is so unbelievable to imagine the circumstances of those who had to endure so much in their lifetime. The pages seemed to lure me back to this historic time and I could imagine the places and even the smells of each place described. The wonderful love story that kept me reading and reading way into the night when my eyes were so tired but were captivated by their love for each other and wanted to learn each detail as I turned each page.
Thank you for such a story, so those that lived thru each tragedy and suffered so much we want to remember and tell others so this horrific memories no human should have to bear.
Pat Ellison