Paper Love

July 28, 2014
Wildman's childhood image of the world was built on a family narrative filled with danger, good luck and success. That story included grandfather's escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna and the successful life he created in America. However, a few years after her grandfather's death, a conversation with her grandmother shattered the "myth of a spotless escape; and, in part, a carefully curated history." After finding a trove of letters from Valy, her grandfather's "true love," tucked away in a file drawer, Wildman, a former New York Times reporter, begins a journey, hoping to uncover what became of the young woman whose letters stopped in 1941. "I wanted to use these small clues, these pieces of paper to rescue Valy's memoryâretrace her steps from birth through school through the years she wrote her letters and, perhaps, even find her again." Wildman reveals the complicated story behind her grandfather's and Valy's lives once the war shattered their youthful, innocent world. Wildman's quest took years and took her across the globe. She visited Trebic, one of the most well-preserved Jewish ghettos in the world, the Czech countryside, London, Vienna, Berlin, the secretive International Tracing Service archives in the German village of Arolsen, and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Wildman's intimate and mesmerizing biography blends her family history into the larger framework of World War II and the Holocaust.

September 15, 2014
A journalist's account of how her attempts to learn about her grandfather's lost "true love" turned into a quest to understand the place of the Holocaust in her life and the lives of other young Jews. Former New Republic staffer Wildman grew up surrounded by stories about her grandfather Karl's charmed existence. He had been one of the lucky Jews able to escape Vienna with both his life and professional credentials intact not long after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. But when the author found photos of an unknown woman in a family album, her grandmother revealed that Karl had once been profoundly in love with a girl named Valy, whom he'd reluctantly had to leave behind. Many years later, after stumbling across letters that her grandmother had somehow overlooked in her destructive mission to preserve the myth of Karl's "spotless escape," Wildman began to put together the story behind Karl and Valy's relationship. Hungry for details, she traveled to Vienna and, later, Germany and the Czech Republic, where she researched Valy's life and visited the places that bore her imprint. The author concluded that both Karl and his lover had borne burdens of sorrow, guilt and loneliness far greater than anyone had known. At the same time, she also uncovered a worldwide network of people outside her family whose lives had been touched by not only Valy and Karl, but by Nazi terrorism. Wildman realized that history had been served to her, and the members of her generation, in ways that were far too "sanitized" and "clean." This profound book derives its power not so much from the love story at its heart, but from the historical urgency with which Wildman infuses it. The author makes clear that only by engaging with inherited past trauma deeply and fully can individuals and communities begin the long and difficult process of looking for ways to regain wholeness. A poignant and humane memoir.

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September 15, 2014
Wildman takes an unexpected journey through her family's past to piece together her grandfather's history and uncover the fate of a young woman bound in unforeseen ways to her own life. Always believing that her grandfather had been incredibly blessed and extremely lucky to escape from Vienna and Nazi persecution on the eve of WWII, the author was surprised to discover, after her grandfather's death, a cache of passionate letters from Valy, her grandfather's first love. Determined to track the tragic trajectory of her grandfather's early lifea bitter chapter he repressed and glossed over for yearsand to retrace the harrowing odyssey of the woman he left behind, she traveled the globe in search of evidence and answers. Wildman's personal investment in this Holocaust-era narrative heightens the tension and raises the emotional stakes as her investigation unfolds.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)