Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

In 1990, Maitland, a former New York Times reporter, went to Europe searching for her mother Janine’s long-lost love. Janine was born to a prosperous German-Jewish family, and she enjoyed a sense of belonging in Freiburg, her hometown until age 15 when the family fled the Nazis to Mulhouse, France, in 1938. There her parents granted her greater freedom, and she began a romance with a 19-year-old Catholic, Roland, only to flee the advancing Germans to Gray, France, and then to Lyon, where Janine bumped into Roland in 1941 and was again entranced. But forced to flee once more, the family finally arrived in America, where Janine embarked on a difficult marriage to a philanderer and rabid Ayn Rand acolyte. But Janine always pined for Roland, whose letters her father had intercepted and hid. While this book is overlong and Maitland fails to make Janine’s love affair and dysfunctional marriage compelling, Janine’s prewar life and wartime travails and Maitland’s descriptions of prewar European Jewish communities and their suffering under the Nazis are far more engrossing, This is a worthy testament to how war and displacement conspire against personal happiness. Photos. Agent: Rob Goldfarb, Ron Goldfarb & Associates. (Apr.)