Sins of the Innocent
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In her first memoir—Immortelles: Memoir of a Will-o’-the-Wisp—Mireille Marokvia described her life growing up in a small village near Chartres, France, in the first decades of the 20th Century. We learned in that beautiful book that the people in her life so long past still live like ghosts in her memory.
This extraordinarily sensitive and assured writer brings that same dear voice and sharp vision to bear in her new book. But Sins of the Innocent covers the most difficult years of her life.
From Paris in 1939, a young Mireille follows her artist husband, Abel, when he returns to Germany to care for his mother. Once Hitler begins his invasions across Europe the displaced couple must find a way to survive the war in a country they both consider foreign. Abel finally takes work, but it requires extensive travel through the war zones, and so Mireille is left essentially alone. With France lost to her, and horribly misfit in wartime Germany, suspected by her neighbors of spying for the Allies, Mireille has to define a life for herself, a life that is as quiet as possible in a dangerous world.
Sins of the Innocent is a lyrical portrait of those harsh years, infused with doubt, anger, and the author’s love of life. These were the years in which Mireille learned the difference between quiet persistence and courage—during WWII in Europe, a time when so many had to find their own small places in history. It was the era that determined who Mireille Marokvia was—and who she still is.
Read Mireille Marokvia’s account of the making of the manuscript in “History of a Story.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A politically na ve French country girl when she entered the Sorbonne in 1928, Marokvia (Immortelles: Memoir of a Will-o'-the-Wisp), who today is almost 98 years old, soon fell in love with art student Abel; the two enjoyed the Parisian bohemian scene of the 1930s, without worrying much about world events. Even when Hitler took Austria in 1938, no one seemed too shocked it "was as if we had begun to think he had the right to do what he was doing." Alas, Abel was German and by 1939, he decided to return to Stuttgart. Marokvia followed and the two married, each verifying that they came from four generations of Jew-free ancestry. While both hated the Nazis and refused to collaborate actively, neither felt able to do anything against the regime. Abel avoided the military by working for a propaganda ministry, traveling throughout the Reich sketching for various government publications, while Marokvia variously worked as a weaver, translator and subsistence farmer. They considered themselves innocent of Nazi atrocities, yet sullied by the passive sin of complicity. At times they contemplated suicide or murdering Hitler, but then went on with finding housing, food and work, like other citizens. Readers of last year's A Woman in Berlin will find the similarities (constant suspicion of neighbors, ignorance about Jews) and contrasts illuminating.
