The Coldest Winter : A Stringer in Liberated Europe [Hardcover]

Paula Fox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 13, 2005

In this elegant and affecting companion to her “extraordinary” memoir, Borrowed Finery, a young writer flings herself into a Europe ravaged by the Second World War (The Boston Globe)

In 1946, Paula Fox walked up the gangplank of a partly reconverted Liberty with the classic American hope of finding experience—or perhaps salvation—in Europe. She was twenty-two years old, and would spend the next year moving among the ruins of London, Warsaw, Paris, Prague, Madrid, and other cities as a stringer for a small British news service.
In this lucid, affecting memoir, Fox describes her movements across Europe’s scrambled borders: unplanned trips to empty castles and ruined cathedrals, a stint in bombed-out Warsaw in the midst of the Communist election takeovers, and nights spent in apartments here and there with distant relatives, friends of friends, and in shabby pensions with little heat, each place echoing with the horrors of the war. A young woman alone, with neither a plan nor a reliable paycheck, Fox made her way with the rest of Europe as the continent rebuilt and rediscovered itself among the ruins.
Long revered as a novelist, Fox won over a new generation of readers with her previous memoir, Borrowed Finery. Now, with The Coldest Winter, she recounts another chapter of a life seemingly filled with stories—a rare, unsentimental glimpse of the world as seen by a writer at the beginning of an illustrious career.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A year after WWII ended, Fox, then 22, left New York City for Europe, where she found work as a stringer for a small British news service. Those who haven't read her previous memoir, Borrowed Finery, will be curious about the reasons for her desperation to escape New York, but they'll quickly forgive the omission. In sparse, careful prose, Fox relates her experiences in London, Paris, Prague, Warsaw and Spain in 1946. Her writing style is detached, often sparing details (e.g., "We fell in love," she states simply of her brief relationship with a Frenchman). Her assessments, even of herself, are refreshingly frank: "I was too young and too dumb to worry about entering a fascist country; what I was apprehensive about were my meager funds." In her most moving chapter, "Children of the Tatras," Fox visits an orphanage on the Polish-Czechoslovak border that housed children born in concentration camps. Spending time with a small boy, Fox communicates through body language. The interaction is precise and quite moving as she connects, momentarily, with the child, letting readers fill in the emotion. The picture Fox paints of postwar Europe is both profoundly beautiful and sad, and her memoir is affecting, leaving one wishing she had stayed there longer.
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From Booklist

In her acclaimed memoir, Borrowed Finery (2001), Fox wrote with quiet power about her traumatic childhood. Now she writes about huge political upheaval, and once again she brings it close with small, intimate details. She remembers herself at 23 in 1946 as a journalist stringer in post-World War II Europe. She meets the famous, including Paul Robeson and Jean-Paul Sartre. But what moves her beyond herself are the experiences of ordinary people. There is no uplift about the loftiness or dignity of the human spirit. She knows that clear answers don't tell the truth. Racism and brutality are still there, along with indifference. But she finds redemption in a sick old man who finds the strength to rescue a stray dog on the railroad tracks. In an unforgettable scene in a freezing, bombed-out opera house in Yugoslavia, the orchestra plays the Brahms violin concerto and the audience listens so intently "it was as though we had never heard music nor would again." You read the simple words slowly, and they haunt you. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (October 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805078061
• ISBN-13: 978-0805078060
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #576,364 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brief, haunting, post-war impressions, February 27, 2006

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Coldest Winter : A Stringer in Liberated Europe (Hardcover)

Paula Fox's impressionistic memoir of her year in Europe immediately after the war in 1946, "The Coldest Winter," paints small scenes that evoke larger feelings, much like her earlier memoir, "Borrowed Finery." In both books Fox shifts, sometimes abruptly, from one experience to another, moving through the memories that stuck in her mind through the years. She was only 23 at the time of her European trip, a willing, but not lighthearted soul.

"The Coldest Winter" benefits from a reading of "Borrowed Finery," the 2001 award-winning memoir of her childhood, now out in paperback. The impressions of a fairly impoverished American innocent, alone and quiet, though by no means meek, among the war worn people of London, Paris, Warsaw and Spain take on greater heft when you know the trauma and rootlessness of Fox's own childhood.

The daughter of glamorous, feckless, disturbed parents, Fox had been left at a Manhattan foundling home days after her birth, "by my reluctant father, and by Elsie, my mother, panic-stricken and ungovernable in her haste to have done with me." Her parents were Hollywood screenwriters and her father was an alcoholic of the impulsive type who might insist his daughter visit then leave her with friends - or forget to go the railway station to pick her up at all. Her mother remained consistently hostile and terrifying.

There was, however, love in her life. Reverend Elwood Amos Corning, a Congregational minister in a poor, rural upstate community, took her in at five months old and provided unconditional love and safety. What he could not do, however, was protect the child from the erratic claims of her parents. Each week after the comforting ritual of his church service she would have a moment of panic.

"My unquestioning trust in Uncle Elwood's love, and in the refuge he had provided for me...would abruptly collapse. In an instant I realized the precariousness of my circumstances. I felt the earth crumble beneath my feet. I tottered on the edge of an abyss. If I fell, I knew I would fall forever.

"This happened too every Sunday after church. But it lasted no longer than in takes to describe it."

Eventually the day she dreaded arrived. After a horrific year in Malibu with her parents, from which she was rescued by Uncle Elwood, her Spanish grandmother, Elsie's mother, shows up to claim her once and for all. "She is of my blood," Candeleria tells Elwood.

"It was far worse than a fairy tale enchantment. My parting from the minister was an amputation."

Two of Elsie's four oddball brothers live with Candeleria. One of them is almost as terrifying as Elsie while the other is kind and playful. He lifts her out of the depression that has crept over her. But nothing can make her world safe again.

"The Coldest Winter," has a melancholy, almost desperate aura that readers who have not read the earlier memoir will find perplexing, having no way of knowing that Fox is running off to Europe to escape her New York life and the searing memories of a brief, brutal marriage and a sad pregnancy which ended with an instantly regretted adoption.

Though Fox often conveys the impression of being an outsider looking on at the world, this feeling is especially pronounced in "The Coldest Winter." In London she gets a job working for a publisher. One day a policeman knocks at her door, asking for her work permit, then takes her to the station to get one.

"I had heard that one needed a work permit but had not taken the requirement seriously. Perhaps it was myself I did not take seriously. For a minute I grasped at the shadowy nature of reality; of how one moves through it like a mist, forever thinking of what comes next and how impalpable the present is.

"I made my way back to Wandsworth, chastened....I held the work permit in my hand, consoled by its meaning: The government protected its citizens and took my presence in England seriously."

Later, working for a small news wire, she meets people still reeling from the war - a fascist youth who talks raptly of executions he had witnessed, a tireless American Jew driven by the guilt of remaining unscathed by the Holocaust, a former political prisoner whose twin daughters had been killed by Mengele, and, most haunting of all, the children at an orphanage for those born in the camps. Enmeshed with these small, intense portraits is the bone-chilling cold of that winter, the glamour of hobnobbing with real journalists in smoky bars, and the general privation and destruction that prevailed throughout Europe in 1946.

The author of six novels and the Newbery Award-winning author of many children's books, Fox's prose is as elegant as it is spare, conveying a haunting, sad beauty that remains with the reader long after the last page is turned.

--Portsmouth Herald

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A genuine memoir, wholly satisfying, January 21, 2006

By 

Tristan Keane (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Coldest Winter : A Stringer in Liberated Europe (Hardcover)

This is what a memoir should be. The Coldest
Winter does not purport to be a history of the immediate post war countries that she visited but, rather, a story of herself, a frightened young woman with ambitions that she didn't understand and her struggle to reach up to a higher calling that was driving her. The writing is exquisite, this is as much about the cold that enveloped Europe that winter as it is about the people or the politics that lurched along uncertainly after the holocaust. Anyone expecting to read a study of the post war European condition should look for another book. This a small gem by one of our best writers and a true national treasure.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sparse yet moving, March 5, 2006

By 

Finnegan "Finnegan" (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Coldest Winter : A Stringer in Liberated Europe (Hardcover)

Those who did not like this book must not have read any of Paula Fox's other books. Her sparse, unsentimental style may not appeal to anyone, but to those who know and love her writing, of which there are many, this book is representative of her work and highly recommended. Many of the vignettes are profoundly moving.