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A Bookshop in Berlin the rediscovered memoir of one woman's harrowing escape from the Nazis

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel--a Jewish woman from Poland--fulfills a dream. She opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin's first French bookshop, attracting artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets. The shop becomes a haven for intellectual exchange as Nazi ideology begins to poison the culturally rich c...

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Main Author: Frenkel, Françoise, 1889-1975 (Author)
Other Authors: Modiano, Patrick, 1945- (Writer of preface), Maria, Frédéric (Compiler), Smee, Stephanie (Translator)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
French
Published: New York : Atria Books, 2019.
Edition:First Atria Books hardcover edition.
Subjects:
Frenkel, Françoise, > 1889-1975.
Jewish women > Germany > Biography.
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) > Germany > Berlin > Biography.
Berlin (Germany) > Biography.
Autobiographies.
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Summary:In 1921, Françoise Frenkel--a Jewish woman from Poland--fulfills a dream. She opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin's first French bookshop, attracting artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets. The shop becomes a haven for intellectual exchange as Nazi ideology begins to poison the culturally rich city. In 1935, the scene continues to darken. First come the new bureaucratic hurdles, followed by frequent police visits and book confiscations. Françoise's dream finally shatters on Kristallnacht in November 1938, as hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses are destroyed. La Maison du Livre is miraculously spared, but fear of persecution eventually forces Françoise on a desperate, lonely flight to Paris. When the city is bombed, she seeks refuge across southern France, witnessing countless horrors: children torn from their parents, mothers throwing themselves under buses. Secreted away from one safe house to the next, Françoise survives at the heroic hands of strangers risking their lives to protect her.
Item Description:"First published in France as Rien où poser sa tête by L'Arbalète Gallimard in 2015"--Title page verso.
"Originally published in English by Vintage Australia in 2017"--Title page verso.
"Previously published by Pushkin Press in 2018"--Title page verso.
Physical Description:xiii, 269 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
ISBN:9781501199844
1501199846
Author Notes:Françoise Frenkel was born in Poland in 1889. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, she opened the first French-language bookshop in Berlin with her husband. In the summer of 1939, with war looming, Frenkel fled to Paris. She sought refuge across occupied France for the next several years until finally escaping across the border to Switzerland, where she wrote a memoir documenting her refugee experience. Her memoir, originally published in 1945 as Rien où poser sa tête ( No Place to Lay One's Head ), was rediscovered in an attic in southern France in 2010 and republished in the original French as well as in a dozen other languages. This is its first publication in the United States. Frenkel died in Nice in 1975.

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