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Now familiar warning to Readers: This column has attenuated ties to Minnesota Highway 61. If that offends you, turn the page.
Ties do exist–the writer resides two blocks from 61; he read the e-book version while here; he once visited Marseilles and Perpignan castle near Spain; and in 1973, he knew Marly Rusoff, whose uber-literary agency repped author Meg Waite Clayton.
I finished reading The Postmistress of Paris today. It is a moving love and adventure story of an American woman (Nanee) who helps Hitler’s refugee artists leave Vichy France up to 1941. Many of the characters are based on real people who dared so much. Nanee’s lead romantic interest is one Edouard Moss, a fictional Jewish photographer on the Gestapo’s list. He had taken pictures of Nazi behavior in Germany and became non grata there.
Nanee’s life is inspired by that of Mary Jayne Gold, an American heiress honored in Wikipedia. “Gold …. fled to the Mediterranean seaport of Marseille which…. was under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime. In Marseille she met … and Varian Fry, an American journalist and intellectual. Fry had $3,000 and a short list of refugees under imminent threat of arrest by agents of the Gestapo, mostly Jews. …. In the armistice agreement between Germany and defeated France, France had agreed to “surrender on demand” refugees to the Nazis. ….
Gold helped subsidize the operation which is credited with participating in the rescue of some 2,000 refugees, among the escapees were notables such as the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, artist Marc Chagall, writer Hannah Arendt and Nobel Prize winner, physician and biochemist Otto Meyerhof.”
The Postmistress of Paris takes us to the brothels of Marseilles, a Vichy labor camp, and around Vichy France. It ends with the daring escape of Moss and his daughter over the Pyrenees in winter, aided by Nanee. The lovers are parted without our knowing whether they will reconnect after W.W. II. Here are passages that caught me up.
Opening Epigraph: “Hope is the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul— Emily Dickinson.”
“I have traveled through many countries and learned to hide my thoughts in many languages. Hans Sahl.”
First sentence: “January, 1938. Once back in Paris, I learned that most Americans were scurrying home. I decided to stay on.”
“That daughter of yours would rather be wild than broken,” he said. “Don’t you worry she’ll end up alone?”
“…he lay back on the bed and closed his eyes for a moment, raking his heart over the spike of memory.”
About the Vichy labor camp: “Art and intellect and humor—they washed away boredom, maintained morale, and allowed, somehow, a modicum of dignity.”
“One was an artist. One was successful or not at selling work, but the sale of art no more made a man an artist than it made him a man.”
“If Danny or Varian knew she was taking a later train so she could appeal to the camp commandant in the soft hours of evening rather than the hard light of day, they might prevent her from rescuing Edouard in the only way she could imagine it would work.”
“Was there a man in the world whose favorite topic wasn’t himself?
“… the only warmth imprisoned here would be the closeness of filthy bodies packed into inadequate space, in the company of fleas and lice, bedbugs, dysentery, and men dying in the night.”
Later on. “Nanee submerged in bathwater, the intoxicating stretch of her long, shadowed neck, her up-tilted chin. Always, what can be seen suggests what is hidden, the surface interesting not in what it is but in what it isn’t.”
“This is what he photographed: the genteel society from which violence seeped up.”
“I now think this is what people fear more than anything: not that they will be revealed as horrible, but that they won’t be revealed at all, that they will be nothing.”
“To have expectations was to open your heart to breaking.”
” December, 1940 The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either good or evil.”
Hannah Arendt.”
“No one suspects American women of anything but needlepoint. Men so seldom imagine us capable of the things we’re capable of.”
“He watched Nanee watching Luki as Luki wound down, her fear settling out through her tears. Yes, this child had already won her heart, too.”
“He said, ‘I ought to stay.’ ‘You would endanger everyone who knows you,’ she said.”
Final thoughts. This powerful novel grabbed my heart so many ways. It is hard to imagine being in Hitler’s Europe. The scenes between Nanee and Edouard are both achingly soft and harshly hard. So are the scenes between Edouard, Nanee, and his daughter, Luki. There are many echoes of present times.
I suspect the novel calls to readers who are artists, photographers, and thinkers– and all who seek or remember courage in their lives and those around us.
Steve Aldrich is a retired Hennepin County lawyer, judge, and mediator, serving as judge from 1997-2010. He and his wife moved here in 2016. Steve was once a Junior NRA member. He likes to remember that he was a Minnesota Super Family Lawyer before being elected to the bench. Steve writes this column to learn more about his new home area and to share his learnings with others—and to indulge his curiosities. Bouquets and brickbats to the editor or stevealdrich41@gmail.com. Copyright Stephen C. Aldrich and News Herald, 2022.
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