Crossing the Borders of Time

February 13, 2012
In 1990, Maitland, a former New York Times reporter, went to Europe searching for her mother Janine’s long-lost love. Janine was born to a prosperous German-Jewish family, and she enjoyed a sense of belonging in Freiburg, her hometown until age 15 when the family fled the Nazis to Mulhouse, France, in 1938. There her parents granted her greater freedom, and she began a romance with a 19-year-old Catholic, Roland, only to flee the advancing Germans to Gray, France, and then to Lyon, where Janine bumped into Roland in 1941 and was again entranced. But forced to flee once more, the family finally arrived in America, where Janine embarked on a difficult marriage to a philanderer and rabid Ayn Rand acolyte. But Janine always pined for Roland, whose letters her father had intercepted and hid. While this book is overlong and Maitland fails to make Janine’s love affair and dysfunctional marriage compelling, Janine’s prewar life and wartime travails and Maitland’s descriptions of prewar European Jewish communities and their suffering under the Nazis are far more engrossing, This is a worthy testament to how war and displacement conspire against personal happiness. Photos. Agent: Rob Goldfarb, Ron Goldfarb & Associates.

February 15, 2012
Love lost in Alsace during World War II, rediscovered 50 years later in New Jersey. A former New York Times journalist, Maitland has seized on her family's far-flung tale of fleeing the Nazis in Europe and energetically made it her own. Having grown up under her mother's heavy emotional baggage, the author came to share the sense of shame and sadness that her mother carried with her as an immigrant to the United States in 1943, a refugee of Nazi Germany. Maitland's mother Janine, along with her German-speaking parents, sister and brother, originally fled in 1938 from Freiburg, having lost everything they owned. From Mulhouse, France, where the teenagers hastily learned French, they moved to Gray, where the family eventually got transit papers to pass through to the Free Zone. The family then landed in Lyon, where Janine, now a young woman, reignited a friendship with a dashing Catholic law student, Roland Arcieri. After falling in love during their brief time together, Janine was yanked away again with her family--to Cuba and then America. Soon married to a successful salesman, Janine did not stop grieving for her first love, and Arcieri apparently tried to find her. However, Janine's father, who wanted her to have a fresh start in America, intercepted his letters. In 1989, Maitland organized a trip back to Freiberg and to Mulhouse with her family. Once her father died, she tracked down Arcieri, who was then living in Montreal. Though the details of the courtship are a little bizarre, especially since the author re-creates her mother's bold seduction of Arcieri, who was married, this is a touching story about the odd collision of fate and will. A poignantly rendered, impeccably researched tale of a rupture healed by time.

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Starred review from April 15, 2012
Former New York Times reporter Maitland grew up listening to her mother Janine's romantic tales of her first love. Janine fell in love with Roland, a French Catholic, and they planned to marry when the impending Nazi invasion of France in 1942 forced Janine's German Jewish family to flee. Janine journeyed with her family from Marseilles to Casablanca to a Cuban detention camp before they finally reached New York. The war and family secrets prevented Janine from reuniting with her fiance. Janine eventually married Maitland's father and settled into a sometimes acrimonious family life, and she never forgot Roland. Maitland, haunted by her mother's romantic story of first love, set out to find out what happened to Roland and to trace her family's long history in Germany and perilous flight to avoid Nazi persecution. This is a fascinating story of thwarted love, longing, and the travails of one woman and one family within the broader context of war and persecution. Maitland includes a treasury of old family photographs and documents to enhance this incredible story of the gauzy intersection of memory and fact.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)