Crossing the Borders of Time

February 13, 2012
In 1990, Maitland, a former New York Times reporter, went to Europe searching for her mother Janine’s long-lost love. Janine was born to a prosperous German-Jewish family, and she enjoyed a sense of belonging in Freiburg, her hometown until age 15 when the family fled the Nazis to Mulhouse, France, in 1938. There her parents granted her greater freedom, and she began a romance with a 19-year-old Catholic, Roland, only to flee the advancing Germans to Gray, France, and then to Lyon, where Janine bumped into Roland in 1941 and was again entranced. But forced to flee once more, the family finally arrived in America, where Janine embarked on a difficult marriage to a philanderer and rabid Ayn Rand acolyte. But Janine always pined for Roland, whose letters her father had intercepted and hid. While this book is overlong and Maitland fails to make Janine’s love affair and dysfunctional marriage compelling, Janine’s prewar life and wartime travails and Maitland’s descriptions of prewar European Jewish communities and their suffering under the Nazis are far more engrossing, This is a worthy testament to how war and displacement conspire against personal happiness. Photos. Agent: Rob Goldfarb, Ron Goldfarb & Associates.

Within minutes of pressing Òplay,Ó the listener may forget this is a work of nonfiction--so engrossing is its story and so vividly is it told. As the author, Maitland crafts the story of her mother's life as a young Jewish woman during WWII. Her writing exhibits the detail of a reporter and the narrative skill of a novelist. As the performer, Maitland provides smooth pronunciation of French and German terms, as well as various European accents, and superb pacing. The story is vast in scope, but the blend of facts about the time period and the personal love story between Maitland's mother and a young Frenchman make the production engrossing. L.B.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine