For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
—Virginia Woolf
Star Crossed - Romeo & Juliet in Hitler's Paris
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On the First Jewish Transport of French Women to Auschwitz - Annette was just 20 years old. Her crime? Love.
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Paris, 1940. The City of Light has fallen under German Occupation. Among patriotic Parisians, the pursuit of art, culture, and jazz have become bold acts of defiance. So has forbidden romance for talented and spirited Jewish teenager Annette Zelman, a student at the Beaux-Arts, and dashing young Catholic poet Jean Jausion. Despite their devout families’ vehement opposition, the young couple finds acceptance at the famed Café de Flore, whose habitues include Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, Django Reinhardt, and other luminaries of the Latin Quarter’s creative world.
For a time, Annette and Jean elude the brute might of the relentless Nazis and their parents’ threats and demands. But as restrictions on the Jewish community escalate, maleficent forces gather around our young lovers setting them on divergent and tragically inevitable paths.
Drawn from never-before-published family letters and other treasures, as well as archival sources and exclusive interviews, Star-Crossed offers us precious insight into the Holocaust and the lives French people bravely led under the Hitler regime. This breathtaking true story of beauty, art, liberation and the transformative power of love resonates with an intimate story of undying devotion, seen through the prism of history.
Heather Dune Macadam should be included in that rare category of literary mystery masters such as Lawrence Block, Craig Holden, and Giles Blunt, whose lyrical prose and beautifully developed characters have a great deal to say about the troubled world we live in and its legacy of violence.
Kaylie Jones, author of Celeste Ascending and A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries