num_pages: 270
description: The memoir of a Jewish bookseller on a harrowing fight for survival across Nazi-occupied Europe.In 1921 Franoise Frenkel--a Jewish woman from Poland--fulfills a dream. She opens La Maison du Livre Berlin's 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.Franoise's 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 southern 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 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.
language: English
title: A Bookshop in Berlin
publisher: Atria Books