Essay by Leslie Maitland
“During the fall that my father was dying, I went back to Europe and found myself seeking my mother’s lost love. I say I went back almost as if the world my mother had fled and the dream she abandoned had also been mine, because I had grown to share the myth of her life.”
With these opening words, I invite readers on a tumultuous journey to times and places whose misty imaginings had been with me always. Gripped by my mother’s accounts of love, persecution, war, and escape, I embraced the mission to pass them on to a new generation. But as a journalist, I felt compelled to ground memory in history. I needed to be able to state with assurance, for myself as well as my readers: this is what happened. And so I set out to explore the terrain of the past and recreate a world that was gone.
Confronting Hitler’s dread transformation of Europe is no simple matter, and nowhere more complex, perhaps, than in France. Pursuit of the facts sent me on five trips there, as well as to Germany, Canada, and Cuba. Over the years I spent delving through archives and into a period that must not be forgotten, my scope enlarged to include those whose lives intersected my mother’s, many of whom did not survive to tell their own stories. As a result, I came to believe that the context in which my mother, Janine, and her true love, Roland, had found, adored, and lost one another was essential to understanding their passion.
Beyond that, compared to the hellish suffering inflicted on millions under the Nazis, the thwarted love of two young people was something I wanted to keep in perspective. As Rick insisted to Ilsa in the 1942 film Casablanca, speaking of their own anguished love triangle: “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Losing Roland felt like a death to Janine in 1942, but her escape on a ship sailing from France at the eleventh hour placed her among the most fortunate few in that era of terror. And so my aim was to weave the golden thread of their romance through a broad and vivid historical canvas.
Crossing the Borders of Time brought me face to face with “characters” I had long known through my mother’s stories. Several, confused by my physical likeness to a younger Janine they still remembered, unwittingly helped to foster an uneasy sense that I had slipped through time and was somehow reliving my mother’s experience. Others have contacted me since the book’s publication to add their own postscripts. With news articles about the book appearing in Germany, I have received surprising messages filled with reminiscences, regrets, and kind wishes.
A man of 80, for instance, recalled the alarming first sight of his own father weeping in 1938 – his grief prompted by learning that his generous Jewish employer, my grandfather Sigmar, was fleeing the country. “Maybe it is good for you to know that during the horrible years of the persecution of Jews,” he wrote, “some people felt and suffered with you.”
From outside Berlin, a woman emailed to say that the Wehrmacht soldier described in my book as having proposed marriage to Janine in 1940 in order to save her from Hitler had actually been a member of her family! “Just think,” she mused, “had circumstances been different and had your mother fallen for him, we could be related today.” Still more wrote simply to thank me and to recount their own stories of heartbreaking loss and of seeking new lives and fresh purpose in strange places.
It is an irony of time and technological progress that unknown readers have been able to reach me and share such personal contacts. Janine and Roland – separated through no fault of their own – were obliged to make hard compromises. My own life is a consequence of their painful rupture. I am grateful that in pursuing their story I could help to shape the way that it ended.
Review
“One of those sweeping, epic, romantic novels that seems tailor-made for the Oscars and a long summer afternoon. Except it’s real! Leslie Maitland has the rare ability to bring history, adventure, and love alive.” —Bruce Feiler, New York Times best-selling author of Walking the Bible and Abraham
“How the small flame of an undying love can illuminate the darkness of a tragic era. This elegantly told story is for everyone." —James Carroll, New York Times best-selling author of Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Constantine’s Sword
“Not only original social history of a high order, but one of the most poignant love-lost, love-found stories I have ever read, with an ending that Hollywood wouldn't dare.” —Robert MacNeil, Journalist-author
“Maitland is a brilliant reporter who knows what questions to ask and how to get her story. Written with the precision of a historian, the result is a work I could not put down and scarcely wanted to end.” —Michael Berenbaum, former director of the Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
“A love affair thwarted by war, distance and a disapproving family became the defining story of Leslie Maitland’s mother's life, and by extension, her own. What happens next is surprising indeed.” —Cokie Roberts, NPR and ABC News analyst and author.
“A poignantly rendered, impeccably researched tale of a rupture healed by time.” —Kirkus Reviews
“This is a worthy testament to how war and displacement conspire against personal happiness.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“Maitland’s personal account of her family is a major contribution to history interlaced with a lovely love story.” –Arts and Leisure News
“This is a fascinating story of thwarted love, longing, and the travails of one woman and one family within the broader context of war and persecution. Maitland includes a treasury of old family photographs and documents to enhance this incredible story of the gauzy intersection of memory and fact.” –Vanessa Bush, Booklist (starred review)
“[Maitland] writes with a clear, candid journalist’s eye and manages to remove herself from the story, yet place herself into the narrative at the same time. [She] writes...with insight and honesty. She closes this noteworthy read with poetic understanding and gentleness.” –Jewish Book Council
“Schindler’s List meets Casablanca in this tale of a daughter’s epic search for her mother’s prewar beau-50 years later.” –Good Housekeeping
“[A] gripping account of undying love-a tale of memory that reporting made real.” –Town & Country
“Crossing the Borders of Time is more beautiful than a novel because of the power of its true story and the richness with which it is told.” –Neal Gendler, The American Jewish World
“A gripping true-life tale of victims of Nazi persecution and one survivor's quest for her lost love.” –Shelf Awareness
“Sometimes the truth is not “stranger than fiction” but more compelling than fiction, and that’s the case here. Any reader who likes exciting World War II drama and a good love story will be drawn to this book. Well written and captivating, its story will stay with readers well after the book is finished.” –Library Journal
“An absorbing true account of romance, resilience, and survival during the years leading up to and during World War II, set against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the harrowing social history of mid-20th-century France.” –The Daily Beast
“Crossing the Borders of Time will bewitch you. There is no fictionalized account of long-lost love that could be as compelling as this valentine to Leslie Maitland’s parents and the sad situations that threatened to ruin their moral compasses throughout their entire lives. Simply put, this is an unforgettable tale.” –Book Reporter
"Crossing the Borders of Time is a hair-raising tale of escape and survival, where crossing a border means everything. But sometimes, in this complicated world of loss, change and missed opportunities, it is just as amazing that love can make it across the biggest border of all: the border of time. Highly recommended." -American Girls Art Club in Paris
"The author makes fine use of her journalistic skills to conduct the search and to write about it, producing a narrative that is both informative and electrifying. History and the family saga combine in an informative and heart-warming tale that grips the reader's attention." -Indianapolis Jewish Post & Opinion
"This book gives a valuable window into how real people coped with war and also tells a compelling love story with modern twists. I highly recommend it." -Book Buzz
About the Author
Leslie Maitland is an award-winning former New York Times investigative reporter and national correspondent who covered the Justice Department. She appears regularly on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR to discuss literature. She lives with her husband in Bethesda, Maryland.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
During the fall that my father was dying, I went back to Europe and found myself seeking my mother’s lost love. I say I went back almost as if the world my mother had fled and the dream she abandoned had also been mine, because I had grown to share the myth of her life. Perhaps it is common for children whose parents survived the Nazi regime to identify with them, to assume a duty to make their lives better. As my mother’s handmaiden and avid disciple in an oral tradition, I felt possessed by a history never my own. Still, not as yoked as she was to life’s compromises, I would prove more prepared to retrace the past and use it to forge a new future for her.
Time was running out on the present, and while my father grew weak in a lonely cave of silent bravado, it pained me to realize he would not even leave us the words that we needed. No deathbed regrets, explanations, or tears. An emotional bandit, he would soon slip away under shadow of night, wearing his boots and his mask.
When work as a journalist compelled me to leave New York for a week that October, I was anguished to lose precious time at Dad’s side. Yet how fast he would fade I failed to imagine. Nor could I foresee the course of my journey: that an impetuous detour to France from reporting in Germany would send me in search of Roland Arcieri—the man my mother had loved and lost and mourned all her life. Dreading my father’s imminent death and the void he would leave, I took a blind leap of faith into the past, dragging my mother behind me.
This is how one Sunday morning in 1990 I came to be visiting Mulhouse, a provincial French city just twelve miles from Germany’s Rhine River border. With cousins in town, I had visited Mulhouse twice years before. But on this crisp autumn day I was drawn toward a new destination: a fourteen-story, concrete and blue brick building whose boxy design represented what passed too often for modern in Europe. Although there was nothing about this unexceptional structure on a street densely shaded by chestnut trees to attract an American tourist, I instantly sensed that this was the place I needed to find. I stood at the spot—the X on a map to a treasure buried by time—torn
by contradictory feelings. I ran a very real risk of discovering something better left hidden, yet I could not understand or forgive my failure to look here before.
An ache of remorse for all the lost years mingled with nervous excitement. Just up the stairs, I would finally learn what I had always wanted to know. Who was Roland? Where was Roland? What had happened to him in the near fifty years since the cruelties of war had stolen the girl he wanted to marry? I yearned to find my mother’s grand passion. Love for the dark-eyed Frenchman, whose picture she always kept tucked in her wallet, continued to pulse in her memory, the heartbeat that kept her alive.
