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A True Story of War, Exile, and a Love Reclaimed
by Leslie Maitland
Leslie Maitland is an award-winning former New York Times investigative reporter whose mother and grandparents fled Germany in 1938 for France, where, as Jews, they spent four years as refugees, the last two under risk of Nazi deportation. In 1942 they made it onto the last boat to escape France before the Germans sealed its harbors. Then, barred from entering the United States, they lived in Cuba for almost two years before emigrating to New York. This sweeping account of one family's escape from the turmoil of war-torn Europe hangs upon the intimate and deeply personal story of Maitland's mother's passionate romance with a Catholic Frenchman.
Separated by war and her family's disapproval, the young lovers - Janine and Roland - lose each other for fifty years. It is a testimony to both Maitland's investigative skills and her devotion to her mother that she successfully traced the lost Roland and was able to reunite him with Janine. Unlike so many stories of love during wartime, theirs has a happy ending.
"This is a worthy testament to how war and displacement conspire against personal happiness." - Publisher's Weekly
"A poignantly rendered, impeccably researched tale of a rupture healed by time." - Kirkus Reviews
"How the small flame of an undying love can illuminate the darkness of a tragic era. This elegantly told story is for everyone." - James Carroll, New York Times best-selling author of Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Constantine's Sword
"Maitland is a brilliant reporter who knows what questions to ask and how to get her story. Written with the precision of a historian, the result is a work I could not put down and scarcely wanted to end..." - Michael Berenbaum, former director of the Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
This information about Crossing the Borders of Time was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Leslie Maitland is a former reporter for the New York Times who specialized in legal affairs and investigative reporting. She joined the Times after graduating from the University of Chicago and the Harvard Divinity School. After breaking stories on the FBI's undercover “Abscam” inquiry into corruption in Congress, she moved to the New York Times Washington Bureau to cover the Justice Department. After leaving the Times, she began, among other projects, extensive research for this nonfiction book, including five reporting trips to Europe and one to Cuba. She has frequently participated in programs discussing literature on the Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio. Maitland lives with her husband in Bethesda, Maryland.
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