This provocative novel explores the challenges of living in an oppressive political environment. The springboard for the story is a character, a little girl featured in Gertrude Stein's 1940 book, Paris France. This author has taken that character from the Stein book and made her the protagonist of Helen Button--giving her a whole (fictional, but very believable) life. In the process the reader is led into considering not only Gertrude Stein's activities and sympathies during the Nazi Occupation of France--but also what each of us would have the courage, or the presence of mind, to do when confronted with situations that call for exceptional courage.
Winner of the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts.Daughter of a Collaborationist. Housekeeper to Gertrude Stein. An ordinary woman lives through extraordinary times.In this dual timeline narrative, a young French housekeeper lives out the years of World War II near Vichy France with her famous employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Decades later, she returns to France from the United States, finding that a fateful decision she made as a young woman echoes in the present in unexpected ways.In the years leading to Nazi occupation, young siblings Hélène andGuillaume Bouton, reluctant newcomers to the village of Bilignin, France happen upon…
This memoir by Joseph Joffo about the series of adventures--and misadventures--he and his 12-year-old brother had when they were sent alone by their parents into the (relative) safety of the Free Zone of Occupied France is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. Joffo's ability to capture the childhood innocence of these brothers as well as their astonishing resourcefulness, resilience, and sangfroid is superb. The realistic picture it offers of the daily challenges and dangers of France under Nazi occupation is sobering--but also a testament to the ability of good to prevail even in the worst circumstances.
When Joseph Joffo was ten years old, his father gave him and his brother fifty francs and instructions to flee Nazi-occupied Paris and, somehow, get to the south where France was free. Previously out of print, this book is a captivating and memorable story; readers will instinctively find themselves rooting for these children caught in the whirlwind of World War II.
This collection of essays published by Sarah Smarsh from 2013 to 2024 gives a much richer, more complex and more authentic picture of life in the great heartland of the US than is usually provided in mainstream media. Her compassion for those struggling in the rural working class world in which she was raised, the sharpness of her insights into the current social and political challenges Americans are facing, and her gift for compelling storytelling and graceful writing make this a book that anyone who cares about the future of this country could benefit by reading.
“A must-read for today's politics” (San Francisco Chronicle), the brilliant and provocative essays that established National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh as one of the most important commentators on America's class problem are collected in one searing and insightful volume.
In Bone of the Bone, Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times—class division, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, the rural-urban gulf. Smarsh, a journalist who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and was the first in her family to graduate from college, has long focused on…
This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written in by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year search to find her grandmother’s journals, and uncover the hidden interior lives of her mother and grandmother. Her adventures take her to a variety of locations, from a small town in Iowa to New York, Washington, London and Paris—and finally to a little village in France, where she is finally able to write the book that will tell her own story, intertwined with the stories of her mother and grandmother.
