Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Politics & government

PAPER LOVE

Sarah Wildman

Searching for the Girl my Grandfather Left Behind

PAPER LOVE by Sarah Wildman is the account of one woman’s journey to find the lost love her grandfather left behind when he fled pre-war Europe, and an exploration into family, identity, myth, and memory. Based on a series written for Slate.

Years after her grandfather’s death, Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a box of his letters labeled “Patient Correspondence.” But the letters inside weren’t the dry quotidian details of his patients; instead they were a path into his past, and the story of the woman he had left behind when he left Europe on the eve of the Nazi annexation of Austria.

Wildman had spent her entire childhood obsessed with her grandfather’s escape from Vienna. He was the hero in a great narrative and his story was one of luck and quick thinking—a story of success, of happiness. But this box revealed only part of the story. Years before, Wildman had found a photo of a young woman tucked away in a photo album. When confronted with the photo, her grandmother would only say “she was your grandfather’s true love.” Who was this woman? Why had he left her? And why was her photo hidden from view? And, most importantly, what had happened to her?

In her search, Wildman found both the answers to these questions and a host of new ones. The woman whose photo she found was named Valerie (Valy) Scheftel and Wildman's grandfather had left her behind as the doors of Europe closed behind him. In her letters she begged for help in escaping, but also remembered a shared past, now lost to both of them, and a love that she held desperately to, even as Wildman’s grandfather began a new life in America. Determined to find out what happened to Valy and what her grandfather had done to help, Wildman began a quest that lasted years and forced her to reexamine the story of her grandfather’s triumphant escape and how this history fit within her own life, discovering Valy's ultimate fate, and in the process rescuing a life seemingly lost to history.

Sarah Wildman has reported across Europe and the Middle East for The New York Times, Slate, and The New Yorker, among other places; she is a former New Republic staffer. She is the recipient of the Peter R. Weitz Prize from the German Marshall Fund “for excellence and originality in reporting on Europe and the transatlantic relationship” for the series in Slate where Paper Love originated.

Available products
Book Published 2014-10-30 by Riverhead
Book Published 2014-10-30 by Riverhead

Comments

Wildman’s extensive investigation into her grandfather’s history is well documented and analyzed, but it is her determination to find out what happened to Valy, a woman at the periphery of the family circle, that distinguishes this family history. The author’s gradual realization that others cared about Valy’s fate, too, led her to a larger understanding of the unbearable circumstances and decisions faced by everyone involved, even those lucky enough to establish new lives elsewhere.

In spellbinding prose, Sarah Wildman traces her quest to understand what happened to her grandfather’s mysterious lover whom he had to leave behind when he fled Vienna in 1938. Revealing deeper truths about history and the tricky nature of memory, Paper Love is a breathtakingly powerful and beautiful new book.

Paper Love begins with a quest for a lost lover, and then radically inverts that path. Here the search becomes a terrific a terrifying tale of not one person, but of how each person is so much more than one, how no single life has meaning without all the others that encircle it. Wildman's spellbinding story, with its dramatic and unexpected twists, breathes each forgotten person back to life.

moving & in-depth interview with Sarah Wildman on their podcast Read more...

Sarah Wildman is a member of the last generation of young Jews who grew up in families presided over by Holocaust survivors and their stories—both the reliable tales and the necessary myths. Wildman long ago turned her attention to the complex afterlife of the Holocaust, and this book—thoroughly researched, adventurously reported, and vulnerably written—has fulfilled her promise as the most important literary representative of her generation.

...perfect read for a ten-hour flight,... nothing’s going to make that seat any more comfortable, but Sarah Wildman’s PAPER LOVE—a gripping memoir about her grandfather, his escape from Austria on the eve of its annexation by the Nazis, and a family secret—is so compelling that you might stop counting how many hours are left.

In this captivating and elegantly written book, Wildman uses the story of a single, fascinating but utterly normal woman to illuminate the tragedy of the millions murdered during the Holocaust. Though the themes are universal—family, memory, myth—what makes this remarkable book shine is the way Wildman brings to life a person lost to history, making us care desperately both for her and for her vanished world.

A poignant and humane memoir. Read more...

feat in historical detective work

Ignore anyone who tells you there is nothing more to be said about the Holocaust, and no new ways of telling the tragedy. Sarah Wildman's gripping, tender, beautifully painful book gets to the heart of the matter through matters of the heart. And along with the pathos and pain, there is profound and honest thoughtfulness too.

This profound book derives its power not so much from the love story at its heart, but from the historical urgency with which Wildman infuses it. The author makes clear that only by engaging with inherited past trauma deeply and fully can individuals and communities begin the long and difficult process of looking for ways to regain wholeness. A poignant and humane memoir.