Pagesofjulia's Blog

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. The idea is to open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. And try not to include spoilers!

I continue to enjoy this memoir by the daughter of a French-German Jew who fled the Nazis as a teen and thereby lost her love. I did tease you from it last week, but I thought these lines were too evocative, thoughtful and real not to share.

His impromptu recital was a peaceful close to a day that had wakened to the tumult of athletes speeding through narrow Renaissance streets, crowds cheering at corners and loudspeakers blaring. That evening I would leave feeling grateful for the quiet bravery of all the Ficks and the Fimbels, people who risked their lives to wrestle with power in places whose names are not even footnotes in history’s pages.

The setting for this scene is a French town the author is visiting, one of the several towns along her family’s route from Freiburg eventually to the United States. Fick and Fimbel are two men who helped them escape occupied France. The athletes are triathletes in competition, and the impromptu recital is given especially for the visiting Maitland by Fick, now a very old man, on the organ in his church; and I think all together they make a fine sweeping view of this place in time. For one thing (referencing Maitland’s title), the Renaissance streets that now see triathletes whizzing by on what I’m sure are very fancy bikes surely never expected such a thing. And then add the organ music played by a quietly heroic man for the daughter of a woman he hasn’t seen in many decades… there is something profound in this vignette, isn’t there?

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. The idea is to open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. And try not to include spoilers!

I am pleased with the early chapters of this memoir, in which the author travels back to Europe to hunt down her mother’s long-lost love, from whom she was separated during World War II. Today’s teaser concerns the mother’s family, Jews who lived on the border between France and Germany in a region that changed hands between those two countries frequently, confusing their sense of heritage.

…for Sigmar, returning to French-controlled Mulhouse after [World War I] – a German war veteran with a new German bride – proved difficult too, with anti-German sentiment in France running so high. Feeling even less welcome as Germans in France than as Jews in Germany, Sigmar and Alice crossed the Rhine once again to settle and start a family in Freiburg.

This is a nuance I had not considered before, and drives home the displacement of Jews in this era.

What are you reading this week?

Filed under: tuesday teasers | Tagged: audio, history, nonfiction | 1 Comment »