There’s no end to books about The Holocaust . . because there’s no end to the hatred that fueled it and the despair and malignancy it left behind, not to mention the inability of authors and readers to process the kind and degree of its depravity. Still, fiction and nonfiction writers continue to try to lay bare facts and attempt explanations about man’s inhumanity to man, as though acknowledgment and revelation might be a step to prevent further genocides.
It’s challenging, though, to focus on something new that justifies publication, but award-winning writers Heather Dune Macadam and her husband Simon Worrall try and for the most part, succeed. Their book, Star Crossed: A True Romeo and Juliet Story in Hitler’s Paris follows a doomed romance as seen mainly through the letters of a vivacious 20-year-old- art student at the Academie des Beaux-Arts, Annette Zelman. The book also recreates Annette’s favorite milieu – the Café de Flore on the left bank, a lefty hangout for artists, literati, philosophers, and celebrities in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s in thrall to “Surrealism, existentialism, and humanism.”
The cafe is where Annette and Jean met, though Annette was also attracted to another bohemian. As the two men compete for her in the cafe, she chooses the other, then suddenly shifts and chooses Jean. Such was love then – Instinctive, on view for all to see.
It was a time like no other, a cliché by now, but clichés once upon a time were original expressions, rich in significance and symbolism. By first bringing back that magical time of poetry and jazz, art and innovation, Macadam and Worrall make the subsequent contrasting chapters that detail the concentration camps even more horrific. Masses of people died, hope died. civilization died.
The title and subtitle of their book, however, mislead a bit because the story of Annette, a Jew, and her well-educated poet amour, Jean Jausion, the son of a well-revered Catholic doctor who had friends in high places in occupied Paris, is not really Shakespearean. It’s not really about star-crossed lovers, though the families of both Annette and Jean tried to stop their romance.
As Annette’s younger sister, now 92-year-old Michelle Zelman Kersz, reveals to the authors about her sister and their tight, talented, beloved family of seven, and their energetic and courageous take on life, Annette’s story is one of youth, love, rebellion, art, frivolity, the joie in joie de vivre. All of it was cut short not by clan warfare but by something much more insidious.
Well off Annette, “our Zelman spitfire,” as the authors refer to her, goes from being a center-stage free thinker to being a starved and enslaved inmate, worked and probably gassed to death in Auschwitz-Birkenau – records of women prisoners were not well kept. Jean, who joined The Resistance and tried to find her is killed fighting.
Star-Crossed is a big book, with a few photos and artwork – I wish there were more – but what it does well and what film, documentary, or fiction, cannot do, is reproduce by way of resonant prose, often in the present tense, not just the beautiful, heartbreaking sights of Paris but the indelible smells and screams of the camps. How sad that now,75 years after the liberation of the camps, to see flags with swastikas unfurled at political demonstrations in this country.
Star Crossed is a disturbing but timely book.
