A daughter's gift to her mother - the return of a lost love.
On a pier in Marseille in 1942, with desperate refugees
pressing to board one of the last ships to escape France
before the Nazis choked off its ports, an 18-year-old German
Jewish girl was pried from the arms of the Catholic
Frenchman she loved and promised to marry. As the Lipari
carried Janine and her family to Casablanca on the first leg
of a perilous journey to safety in Cuba, she would read
through her tears the farewell letter that Roland had
slipped in her pocket: βWhatever the length of our
separation, our love will survive it, because it depends on
us alone. I give you my vow that whatever the time we must
wait, you will be my wife. Never forget, never doubt.β
Five years later β her fierce desire to reunite with
Roland first obstructed by war and then, in secret, by her
father and brother β Janine would build a new life in New
York with a dynamic American husband. That his obsession
with Ayn Rand tormented their marriage was just one of the
reasons she never ceased yearning to reclaim her lost love.
Investigative reporter Leslie Maitland grew up enthralled
by her motherβs accounts of forbidden romance and harrowing
flight from the Nazis. Her book is both a journalistβs vivid
depiction of a world at war and a daughterβs pursuit of a
haunting question: what had become of the handsome Frenchman
whose picture her mother continued to treasure almost fifty
years after they parted? It is a tale of memory that
reporting made real and a story of undying love that crosses
the borders of time.
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