Haunting tale explores impact of tough choices

Paris Never Leaves You by Ellen Feldman, St. Martin’s Griffin

Charlotte Foret is “one tough cookie,” they say. But a softer nature wouldn’t have helped her feed her child, grieve her husband or keep her bookstore going in Nazi-occupied Paris. Ten years later, she’s in New York City with a teenager, a job in a publishing house and a soul full of secrets. The invisible armour she wears to keep her past from getting out keeps anyone else from getting in.

Author Ellen Feldman’s haunting novel explores the impact of the choices people make to survive. Charlotte finds herself in that situation as Jews are being rounded up and fewer people in Paris can be trusted. Then a German officer begins frequenting her bookstore. Before long, he’s bringing much-needed food and tending to her little daughter. If she lets him any closer, she risks the punishment dished out to “collabos horizontales,” the name for women who consort with Germans. “She is not thinking of prostitutes but of nice Frenchwomen, hungry like herself.”

Secrets start piling up as the German helps Charlotte escape to a camp where she gains passage to America as a Jewish refugee. In New York, that status brings her close to the couple who sponsored her - maybe too close. She manages to conceal her true story until her daughter insists on knowing more about her roots. Now Charlotte, too, has to reconcile who she is, what she did, and what she didn’t do.

The theme of unrequited love hangs heavy in this pageturning novel, but this is not so much a romance as a reckoning of missed opportunities and old demons being laid to rest. The end doesn’t try to tie up all the loose ends, a decision that is both admirable and not completely satisfying. It makes the story a much more real and engaging look into some lesserknown shadows of the Second World War.