Bookshop in Berlin

A PEOPLE BOOK OF THE WEEK WINNER OF THE JQWINGATE LITERARY PRIZE A haunting tribute to survivors and those lost foreverand 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 Franaise and The Nazi Officers Wife, the powerful memoir of a fearless Jewish bookseller on a harrowing fight for survival across Nazi-occupied Europe.In 1921, Franoise Frenkela Jewish woman from Polandfulfills a dream. She opens La Maison du Livre, Berlins 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. Franoises 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 Franoise on a desperate, lonely flight to Paris. When the city is bombed, she seeks refuge across Nazi-occupied France, witnessing countless horrors: children torn from their parents, mothers throwing themselves under buses. Secreted away from one safe house to the next, Franoise survives as a Jewish refugee 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 Franaise and The Nazi Officers 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.