Star Crossed
A True WWII Romeo and Juliet Love Story in Hitler's Paris
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3.9 • 7 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
For readers of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah who are looking for an immersive true account of Nazi-occupied Paris, Star-Crossed is an epic story of love and resistance during WW2 from the award-winning author of Pen America Literary Award Finalist and Goodreads Choice Award Nominee, 999. Part historical portrait of life during the Occupation, part valentine to The City of Light and the resilience of its people, this transportive love story follows the romance between a Catholic Resistance fighter and a Holocaust victim who meet at the famous Café Flore before war, prejudice, and disapproving families set them on divergent and tragically inevitable paths.
A Goodreads Choice Awards Nominee
“What a beautiful, heartbreaking story.” —Erica Robuck, National Bestselling Author of Sisters of Night and Fog
Paris, 1940. The City of Light has fallen under German occupation. Among patriotic Parisians, the pursuit of art, culture, and jazz has become a bold act of defiance. So has forbidden love for talented and spirited Jewish teenager Annette Zelman, a student at the Beaux-Arts, and dashing young Catholic poet Jean Jausion. Despite their devout families’ vehement opposition, the young couple finds acceptance at the famed Café de Flore, whose habitues includeSimone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, Django Reinhardt, and other luminaries of the Latin Quarter.
For a time, Annette and Jean feel they have eluded the brute might of the relentless Nazis -- and more immediately, their parents’ threats and demands. But as restrictions on the Jewish community escalate to arrests and deportations, the maleficent forces gathering around the young lovers set them on divergent and tragically inevitable paths.
Drawn from never-before-published family letters and other treasures, as well as archival sources and exclusive interviews, Star-Crossed offers us precious insight into the Holocaust and the lives French people bravely led under the Hitler regime. This breathtaking true story of beauty, art, liberation, and the transformative power of love resonates with an intimate story of undying devotion, seen through the prism of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Macadam (999) and journalist Worrall (The Poet and the Murderer) offer a poignant account of the doomed WWII love affair between Annette Zelman, a Jewish student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and Jean Jausion, a Catholic poet. Zelman, who was born in 1921 in Alsace-Lorraine, had moved with her family to Paris in 1940. There she got involved with Surrealist and Dadaist social scenes, and fell for the like-minded Jausion. Born in 1917, Jausion was the son of a well-off family; his father, a doctor and collaborationist, made an official complaint about the couple's engagement. When the report reached Theodor Dannecker, the SS officer appointed as "Jewish Advisor" of Paris, he had Zelman arrested and immediately introduced a new law banning intermarriage. Jausion's father then attempted to negotiate Zelman's release on the condition that she renounce her intention to marry his son, but she refused; eventually, she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died in 1942. Jausion, a member of the French Resistance, went missing during a fight on the front lines in 1944 and was presumed dead. Drawing on Zelman's letters, drawings, and diaries, the authors paint an exceptionally vivid portrait of the couple, conveying both their happy courtship and Zelman's grim struggle for survival in Auschwitz. The result is an evocative depiction of the horrors of the Holocaust.
