Best of
French-Literature

2019

The Heroes of Sainte-Mère-Église


J.D. Keene - 2019
    He waits with the German war machine for the order from Adolf Hitler to start the western Blitzkrieg--the "lightning war."Six hundred kilometers away, WWI veteran René Legrand plows his fields. He is enjoying the life he has made with his wife and two sons in the peaceful village of Sainte-Mère-Église. Since the end of the last war, he has tried to forget the atrocities he'd witnessed. Most of all, he has tried to forget the horrors he inflicted on others as the deadliest assassin the French Army has ever known, unaware he will soon need the skills of war he once used to perfection.His youngest son, Jean-Pierre, lives the life of a typical thirteen-year-old. He attends school, helps his father in the fields, and tries not to be nervous around the mesmerizing Angelique Lapierre. Events will soon force him to become a man, and along with his father, brother, and a small group of citizens, they harass their German occupiers and help the Allies prepare for the D-Day invasion.Guilty of nothing other than being a Jew, Jean-Pierre's best friend, Alfred Shapiro, flees to Spain with his family. They hope to make it through the treacherous Pyrenees Mountains before the Nazis capture them.Working with the French Resistance, Gabrielle Hall uses her beauty and cunning to obtain military intelligence from the Nazi officers who frequent her café.In Fort Benning, Georgia, Captain James Gavin discusses a plan with Major William Lee to begin the U.S. Army's first parachute brigade. Four years later, General "Jumpin' Jim" Gavin will descend through the night sky and into Normandy, France, along with the greatest invasion force the world has ever seen.These and others are the heroes of Sainte-Mère-Église.

The Long Road to Auschwitz


Anthony Vincent Bruno - 2019
    Max is a British Territorial soldier and Zia is a Jewess from the south of France. Zia's grandmother is a wealthy socialite who owns a painting that could embarrass the Nazis. Zia is kidnapped by the Gestapo and Max is hospitalised on the same day. He awakes to find no trace of his beloved who he had planned to marry in England. The Red Cross reported that it was almost certain that Zia was trafficked across the border and delivered to Sachsenhausen Labour Camp at Oranienburg, not far from Berlin on the night of May 26th, 1939. A criminal act, regardless of the forthcoming war. The first warring Germans to step over the border onto French soil did not do so until May 13th, 1940. The Gestapo had kidnapped her 343 days before they attacked France.June 6th, 1944 - four years later, Max is one of 150,000 Allied troops headed towards the Normandy beaches. He has two options - find the woman he could never forget or kill the people responsible for her death. From the very beginning, Berlin had ordered SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Baumann to deal harshly with their VIP captive but never to kill her. Through three concentration camps, ending in Auschwitz, Zia wishes she had been killed many times over. Traumatized, she has no idea that Max and a few unlikely friends are battling their way through Nazi occupied Europe in a crazy attempt to rescue her. Berlin tries one last ploy to get their hands on her grandmother's painting. Zia's life hangs in the balance when Max meets his own personal nemesis in the guise of an undercover Gestapo officer. This novel explores the dark depths that humans can sink to in times of war. It is for adults only and even then; it is not for readers of a sensitive disposition. Whatever you read in this novel of extraordinary graphic Holocaust content, consider this – it was immeasurably worse, a hundred thousand times so.

Courage to be Counted


Eleri Grace - 2019
    When she wins a coveted overseas post with the Red Cross, she focuses on her war service. Falling hard for a sexy pilot wasn't part of her plan. Jack Nielsen has a mission. Motivated by patriotic duty and desire to avenge the death of his best friend, Jack commands a ten-man B-17 crew. Keeping himself and his men alive in the fire-filled skies over Europe will require Jack's full focus. Romancing a headstrong Red Cross Girl is a distraction he knows he shouldn't indulge. While Vivian's work takes her across France and into the heart of Nazi Germany, mounting casualties drive Jack to confront his dwindling odds of survival. As Allied forces converge on all fronts, can Vivian and Jack's relationship withstand an excruciating battle between love and duty?Courage to be Counted is the first book in the Clubmobile Girls series of thrilling historical romances. If you like brave military heroes, trailblazing heroines, and romance under fire, then you'll love Eleri Grace's page-turning tale. Buy Courage to be Counted and soar into this historical romance today!

Finding Edith: Surviving the Holocaust in Plain Sight


Edith Mayer Cord - 2019
    Like a great adventure story, the book describes the childhood and adolescence of a Viennese girl growing up against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the religious persecution of Jews throughout Europe. Edith was hunted in Western Europe and Vichy France, where she was hidden in plain sight, constantly afraid of discovery and denunciation. Forced to keep every thought to herself, Edith developed an intense inner life. After spending years running and eventually hiding alone, she was smuggled into Switzerland. Deprived of schooling, Edith worked at various jobs until the end of the war when she was able to rejoin her mother, who had managed to survive in France.After the war, the truth about the death camps and the mass murder on an industrial scale became fully known. Edith faced the trauma of Germany's depravity, the murder of her father and older brother in Auschwitz, her mother's irrational behavior, and the extreme poverty of the postwar years. She had to make a living but also desperately wanted to catch up on her education. What followed were seven years of struggle, intense study, and hard work until finally, against considerable odds, Edith earned the Baccalaur�at in 1949 and the Licence �s Lettres from the University of Toulouse in 1952 before coming to the United States. In America, Edith started at the bottom like all immigrants and eventually became a professor and later a financial advisor and broker. Since her retirement, Edith dedicates her time to publicly speaking about her experiences and the lessons from her life.

A Quiet Hero: A Novel of Resistance in WWII France


Dwight Harshbarger - 2019
    After the census in Holland, the Nazis used the census to murder 75 percent of the Dutch Jews. After the census in France, the Nazis used the census to murder 25 percent of the country’s Jews. What made France different?At Vichy France’s National Statistical Service headquarters in Lyon, General René Carmille and his aide Miriam Dupré know spies are everywhere. They race against time to sabotage the census-based lists of Jews and mobilize the Resistance to combat the Nazi death machine. In this novel, Miriam tells the true story of General René Carmille’s leadership in saving the lives of thousands of Jews—the story of A Quiet Hero.

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo - tome 1 (1) (Pocket classiques)


Alexandre Dumas - 2019
    It is one of the author's more popular works, along with The Three Musketeers. Like many of his novels, it was expanded from plot outlines suggested by his collaborating ghostwriter Auguste Maquet.

Eva and Otto: Resistance, Refugees, and Love in the Time of Hitler


Tom Pfister - 2019
    It is an intimate and epic account of two Germans--Eva born Jewish, Otto born Catholic--who worked with a little-known German political group that resisted and fought against Hitler in Germany before 1933 and then in exile in Paris before the German invasion of France in May 1940. After their improbable escapes from separate internment and imprisonment in Europe, Eva obtained refuge in America in October 1940 where she worked to rescue other endangered political refugees, including Otto, with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt. As revealed in recently declassified records, Eva and Otto later engaged in different secret assignments with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in support of the Allied war effort. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, Eva and Otto gave each other hope and strength as they acted upon what they understood to be an ethical duty to help others threatened by fascism. The book provides a sobering insight into the personal risks and costs of a commitment to that duty. Their unusually beautiful writing--directed to each other in diaries and correspondence during two long periods of wartime separation--also reveals an unlikely and inspiring love story.

Coma Crossing: Collected Poems


Roger Gilbert-Lecomte - 2019
    Now, thanks to David Ball’s fine translation, English readers can experience its fractured eloquence in full, from wry early sketches and experiments with prose poetry, to the stark, skeletal verse for which he is best known. Gilbert-Lecomte’s adult life was spent gazing, wilfully, into the abyss. In his poetry, the voice that dominates is cold, ancient, and inhuman. It is the hum of the abyss gazing back.Dennis Duncan, University College London, Author of Theory of the Great Game and The Oulipo and Modern ThoughtWhile a handful of other translations of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte’s poetry exist, David Ball’s Coma Crossing is likely to be the one whose pages we’ll be absorbed in for some time to come. Gilbert-Lecomte was one of those peripheral poets who went against the Surrealist tide to carve his own psychic path; René Daumal was one of his comrades in their effort called Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game). Now, because of Ball’s expertise as a thinker and translator, we will have to pay attention to Gilbert-Lecomte at last.Bill Zavatsky, author of Theories of Rain and Other Poems, and co-translator of Earthlight: Poems of André Breton

Prince Narcissus and Other Stories


Robert Scheffer - 2019
    Glutted with over-the-top imagery and set largely against a backdrop of Venice, it tells, in glistening prose, of the bizarre suffering of Prince Mitrophane Moreano, impassioned by his own image and armed against fleeting youth with only the science of the cosmetic box and his singular madness.Included in the current volume are four additional tales which show Scheffer’s broad range, covering the grounds of the conte cruel, horror, the occult, and the naturalist nouvelle.CONTENTS"Prince Narcissus""Anntjö-Mö""The Atonement" (L'Expiation)"The Other" (L'autre)"The Stranger" (L’Étrangère)

The Exit Visa: A Family's Flight from Nazi Europe


Sheila Rosenberg - 2019
    He has been living in Switzerland since he fled Vienna in November 1938, as the Nazi persecution of the city's Jewish population intensified. He is now waiting for the arrival of the wife he has not seen for nearly four years. Against all odds he has managed to get an entry permit for her to join him in Switzerland. She appears on the French side. They see each other. Call out. She begins to cross the few yards of no-mans-land that separate them. An official calls her back. She hesitates, turns, goes back - and is lost forever. This book tells the story of the wartime journey of Toni Schiff, as she ventured across Europe to the this fateful near-meeting at the Franco-Swiss border – and what happened next. Based on the extensive research of her daughter, Kindertransportee Hilda Schiff, and told by Sheila Rosenberg, who shared much of the later research and many of the research journeys, this book sheds light on the lives of one family – caught up in, and ultimately separated by, the tragic and tumultuous events of World War II.