Survival, Sex, and Self-Loathing: - Paris Never Leaves You

Paris Never Leaves You 

by Ellen Feldman

How far would you go to save your child? That’s the central question in Ellen Feldman’s new novel, “Paris Never Leaves You.”

 Drifting backward and forward by a decade between the Nazi Occupation of Paris and the publishing world of New York City, this deeply internal novel follows Charlotte Foret, war widow and mother of Vivi, as she faces down the privation and humiliation of the war only to be haunted by the peace.

 A refugee sponsored from her father’s American publisher friend, Charlotte has built a new life in America for herself and Vivi. She has a comfortable apartment, friends, a congenial job as an editor of fine books. The prologue lets us know this story will hearken back to the war, but still – when I was barely settled into the New York story – I was caught off guard by the swift setting of a hook that, in retrospect, more than delivered on its initial promise.

When a letter from Bolivia is delivered to Charlotte’s New York office, her confrontation with her Paris past seems inevitable. The tension rises from that moment, sending Charlotte into flashbacks as she grapples with how much to tell her daughter about her war years, and Vivi’s parentage. The landlord, a military veteran with his own wartime secret, recognizes in Charlotte a similar terror of facing her own shadows. As they gradually open up to each other, the secrets exposed reveal more secrets beneath, each layer both intensely personal and achingly understandable.

Threaded through the plot are revelations about the status and struggles of Jews not only in Hitler’s Europe but in post-war America. The character of Vivi allows a glimpse into the uneasy maturation of survivor children, too young to remember the Holocaust they were born into and yet affected by its shadow every day. Yet this is not the now-classic tale of camp horror and fresh starts that seems foreshadowed at the start. It explores lesser-known devils’ bargains made for survival by ordinary people across an entire continent, and the psychic scars those bargains impose on the survivors in their post-war lives.

A taut, and fraught, tale of the depths a mother must plumb to protect her child in a world gone mad.

Paris Never Leaves You

 Published August 4th 2020 by St. Martin's Griffin

Hardcover, 368 pages  ISBN 1250759897 (ISBN13: 9781250759894)

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