A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman's Harrowing Escape from the Nazis
Written by Françoise Frenkel and Patrick Modiano
Narrated by Jilly Bond
4/5
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About this audiobook
WINNER OF THE JQ–WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE
“A haunting tribute to survivors and those lost forever—and a reminder, in our own troubled era, never to forget.” —People
An “exceptional” (The Wall Street Journal) and “poignant” (The New York Times) book in the tradition of rediscovered works like Suite Française and The Nazi Officer’s Wife, the powerful memoir of a fearless Jewish bookseller on a harrowing fight for survival across Nazi-occupied Europe.
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.
Published quietly in 1945, then rediscovered nearly sixty years later in an attic, A Bookshop in Berlin is a remarkable story of survival and resilience, of human cruelty and human spirit. In the tradition of Suite Française and The Nazi Officer’s Wife, this book is the tale of a fearless woman whose lust for life and literature refuses to leave her, even in her darkest hours.
Françoise Frenkel
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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Reviews for A Bookshop in Berlin
39 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I listened to this on audio. I thought the book different from other German POW stories I have read. She seldom voiced any self pity but was very deprived and faced hard circumstances as a prisoner and harrowing close calls when having to hide from the Gestapo. I wish I could have met this woman.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A tribute to the many French and Italian citizens who assisted Jewish Countrymen and women to escape to Switzerland during the German take-over of France.
1 person found this helpful