NO PLACE TO LAY ONE’S HEAD
Pushkin Press, 304pp, £16.99, Oldie price £11.88 inc p&p Françoise Frenkel was a Polish Jew who studied at the Sorbonne and loved French literature so much that in 1921, at the age of 32, she opened La Maison du Livre, the first French bookshop in Berlin. After Kristallnacht, she was forced to flee in 1939, journeying first to Paris and then, on the eve of the city’s occupation, making a desperate cross-country journey to Switzerland.
Frenkel’s memoir of her flight from Nazi Germany was first published in Geneva in 1945 and was subsequently forgotten until a copy turned up in a French jumble sale only recently. In this way, as Catherine Taylor pointed out in the
Financial Times, her book joins Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and Irène Némirovsky’s unfinished Suite
Française sequence of novels as works of Second World War literature that have followed circuitous routes to publication. And Frenkel’s book does not suffer by comparison to those two. It’s a ‘vital addition’ to eyewitness accounts of the war. Frenkel’s ‘appealing style’ has been translated assuredly, and her prose has a ‘wild beauty’ to it, with ‘ravishing descriptions of medieval towns, from Annecy to Avignon, held in check by a businesswoman’s instinct for facts’.
Robert Fisk, reviewing the book in the Independent, found himself startled by the power of Frenkel’s ‘abrupt, shocking yet delicate prose’, which contains paragraphs that ‘might be used in a modern tourist guide to the countryside of Nice, Annecy and Avignon’ while simultaneously being alive to ‘the wickedness of Nazi Germany – both its cancerous effect and heroic reactions among the soon-to-be occupied French’. Indeed, said Anne Sebba in the Literary Review, the book’s ‘power’ stems from both Frenkel’s ‘controlled’ tone and the stories it contains about ‘ordinary French who, when their country was occupied, risked their own lives by helping her survive’. ‘Just when it seems there is nothing else to be said on this subject, here is a book of compelling freshness.’