Paris Never Leaves You by Ellen Feldman

The opening scene of this fabulous new novel from Ellen Feldman is vivid and gut-wrenching. It takes place in Drancy, a French internment camp outside Paris, in the waning days of the German occupation. It's 1944 and the American liberators are coming, but some of the French people, whose humiliation at the hands of the

Boches has devolved into a sickness of hatred, are determined to punish someone. Their anger falls on the  women, so-called "collabo horizantale" because they had sexual relations with the enemy. They are being tortured, their heads shaved, swastikas carved into their foreheads, stripped and brutalized for all to see. It is a surreal picture of mob rule that reminded me of lynching parties in the south. Charlotte and her four-year-old daughter Vivi turn away in fear and disgust. The significance of it all we won't understand until much later in the book. 

"Paris Never Leaves You," I'm sorry to say, won't be out until late summer but do put it on your "to read" list now as it's another powerful entry in the World War II/Holocaust genre that's booming as the world quickly loses the  generation that lived it. Charlotte gives birth to Vivi alone in a Paris deprived of all that it's best known for. Food is scarce, neighbor turns on neighbor, Jews are in hiding or passing as Christian, Nazi soldiers parade the streets, and people hunker down not wanting to be noticed. Charlotte's husband Laurent, a soldier at the front, is dead before his daughter is even born, but not realizing this, Charlotte chooses to remain in Paris, running her bookstore, feeding the baby scraps in the back room, standing in line for dry bread and rotten fruit, in case Laurent finds his way home.

As Jeanine Cummins did so beautifully in "American Dirt," Feldman also does here. She frames the question, "what would we do if...what would we do to protect our only child...to find sustenance in a world gone mad?" This is a love story, yes, between a man and a woman, but more so between a mother and child. The secrets Charlotte keeps, the lengths she will go to give Vivi a chance at life, are life threatening in themselves. When does the end justify the means and how do we tamp down that horribly human urge to judge others without even a modicum of understanding of the circumstances?

Through a New York-based humanitarian organization that worked to bring Jewish refugees to America, Charlotte and Vivi are now ensconced in a brownstone on the upper west side of Manhattan, living in an apartment in their benefactor's home. Charlotte has her dream job editing novels at Gibbon and Field, the publishing house headed up by her landlord, Horace Field. Vivi is a scholarship student at a prestigious public school. Though it's been ten years since their arrival in the states, Charlotte has suddenly begun receiving letters from France that revive difficult memories and debilitating guilt, emotions she has struggled to subsume. And Vivi, now fourteen, is brimming with questions and curiosity about her father and her Jewish faith.

Toggling back and forth between occupied Paris in the forties and the literary scene of a thriving New York City in the fifties, author Ellen Feldman https://www.ellenfeldman.com/about-ellen-feldman.html has written an engrossing novel about physical and emotional survival, acceptance of the decisions we are forced to make in the gray areas of life, and the courage to push forward, to life, l'chaim!