A Bookshop in Berlin: A Blog Tour and Review

When a major publisher offers me a newly translated World War II memoir for a blog tour review, I sit up and take notice.  I was also inclined to read it because the author was a Jewish bookstore owner.  A title like A Bookshop in Berlin implies that it delivers a first hand perspective on the Nazi persecution of Jewish owned stores before the Holocaust began. This sounded like it could be a riveting perspective.   So I accepted a free copy of this memoir by Françoise Frenkel.

                            

ABOUT THE AUTHOR  

Françoise Frenkel was born in Poland in 1889. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, she opened the first French-language bookshop in Berlin with her husband. Frenkel's bookshop miraculously survived Kristallnacht, when hundreds of synagogues and Jewish businesses were destroyed. But 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, on her third attempt, 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. 

                                                       

REVIEW

When I started this book, I wanted to know why a woman who was born Frymeta became Françoise. As I read further,  I theorized that she felt more at home in a nation that was probably more welcoming to her than Poland may have been.  Readers won't find out about her childhood experiences in Poland.  We  also learn very little about her family, but they must have been successful financially.  Frenkel had the opportunity to leave Poland and pursue an education in Paris.  Those Paris years shaped her identity and her life goals.  

I found Frenkel's omission of her husband from her memoir more startling than putting Poland behind her.   The preface by Patrick Modiano reveals that she and her husband opened the bookshop together.  His name was Simon Raichenstein, he was born in Russia and died in Auschwitz.  I wanted to know more about him.  I feel that he deserves to be remembered. We have no way of knowing whether she didn't mention him because it was too painful to mourn his loss in public through the pages of a memoir, or her relationship with him wasn't really significant to her.  We don't know how they met or why she married him.

There is no way to determine what role Simon Raichenstein might have played in the decision to open a French language bookstore in Berlin in 1921.  Presumably, he was supportive since he helped her run the store.   We do know from this memoir that many people advised against it including the Consul General at the French Consulate in Berlin.  He thought that anti-French sentiment in Germany was so strong in the aftermath of WWI that the bookstore would fall victim to an arson attack.   Some readers might question Frenkel's judgement at that point, but it turned out that the French language bookstore enjoyed great success during the Weimar Republic.

Frenkel's persistence, resourcefulness and courage in the face of Nazi persecution make her admirable.   I also found out about the Italian occupation of Provence during WWII as a result of this book.   This was a research opportunity for me. I would love to know more.   Perhaps the re-publication of Frenkel's memoir will encourage more publishers to release French books about WWII in English.  This would be a tremendous benefit to those who read in English who are historically inclined.