Customer Reviews

The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe

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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

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.

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.

This book is devoted to a trip the author took in the winter of 1946 to Europe, as a "stringer" for a news service. The American author went to London, Paris, Prague, Warsaw and Spain.

I purchased this book in the hope of getting a feel for Europe immediately following the war. I had thought that the author's visit to Poland right when the Cold War was beginning might throw light on those turbulent times. If these are the kind of insights you seek, this book will not provide them.

Many things bothered me about this book. Among them:

- The first two chapters (about NY and London) are made up of little anecdotes in the nature of "chit chat." In them the author tells us she met this or that person who has this or that job. The anecdotes don't paint a coherent picture nor do they seem to have any significance other than social snobbery.
- The book is very short and therefore very laconic. It's telegraphic at times. Paris is covered in less than twenty pages (including three pictures and one out-of-town trip). Did the author really have so few impressions? The author went to Poland to cover the first elections after WWII, but she never tells us who stood for election, who won, what was going on politically and socially. She does tell us about sad, cold and poor people, who have suffered terribly, but it's very clichéd. Nothing like Frankl or Wisenthal.
- In addition to not telling us very much beyond the obvious, the author does not engage in any moral reasoning that would seem to critical when visiting Europe a year after the end of the Holocaust. She never questions who are guilty or innocent, never discusses retribution. She is not interested in the fate of the Nazis and collaborators, nor does she even mention the beginning of the Cold War. I wondered as I was reading this book what the author actually learned in Europe, since so many central issues did not engage her. The author answers this in the end of the book. She says that the trip to Europe taught her how to see "beyond myself"-that is, how to be less selfish and self-engaged. I am sorry that this is the only lesson with which the author walked away. Other writers have been better able to draw real lessons from the Holocaust-lessons that engage in the moral, political and religious questions that are central to discussions of the Holocaust.
- One part of the book that irked me particularly is an unbridled attack that the author launches at a women called Helen Grassner. Grassner was a Midwestern Jewish women sent to assist refugees (I could find no information about her in any other source). As Fox's descriptions make clear Grassner was rather out of her element in Europe, tormented by sorrow and bewilderment. Why this so irritated the author I am not certain, nor can I make sense of why Fox spent so many pages (of her very short book) lambasting this poor soul.

I don't recommend this book, which seems to me to be a sad miss without any meaningful information or insight. Had the author not already been a published entity, I doubt this book would have been printed. If you are interested in learning about post-war Europe, you might consider reading Joseph Kanon's "The Good German," which is a brilliant book.

The Coldest Winter is one of Paula Fox's earliest books, and I had meant to read it years ago. It is a memoir of a year spent traveling through Europe when she was twenty-two. The year was 1946. World War II had ended just a year earlier, and much of Europe still showed the ravages of war--heaps of rubble, food rationing and other shortages, a somber and depressed citizenry wherever she went, a gray sky and freezing cold weather to match the mood of the people. She visited London, Paris, Warsaw, Barcelona, Madrid and many smaller villages in the surrounding countryside.

When I first read about this memoir, I knew I wanted to read it. I, too, had wanted to travel through Europe as a young girl, so I was eager to read what happened to her as she ventured forth into unpredictable, precarious situations without itinerary or plans, living each day as it comes, willing to be a stranger in a strange country with few, if any, acquaintances and little knowledge of its laws, traditions and customs.

I was born in Germany. Though I came to the States at a young age, I often wondered how my life might have been had my family been able to remain in Europe. I often dreamed of returning, to make a trip as Fox had done, to see if perhaps I might feel more at home there than in my adopted country, and might even prefer to live there. I identified with the author and read her stories, her many impressions and observations as though they were my own.

Fox had little money for her trip. I also would have had limited funds. She stayed with friends of her parents or distant relatives, took what jobs she could find such as reading scripts for small sums or writing a few articles for a small British news service. I turned every page, wondering what would happen next to this wandering young woman.

In her inimitable writing style, Fox relates a somewhat harrowing experience in London one afternoon when she was in her small room reading a manuscript.

There was a sharp knock on the front door. I looked through the mail slot, and saw dark cloth. I opened the door with my gut clenched. A bobby towered over me, or maybe it was only his helmet that made it seem so. He touched it with two fingers, addressed me as miss, and asked me if I held a work permit. I shook my head no. He said I'd need to come to the police station with him.

Once there, I filled out a form that required me to swear not to take employment that a British citizen could do and, further, to work only at part-time jobs. 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 moment 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 my apartment 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.

This bittersweet little story seemed rather typical of how I think about the British people: somewhat severe but with a civility we don't always find in this country. And again, Fox's description of a bleak Paris is as vivid as a picture postcard:

A year and a half after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved inedible, as it had been ever since its tribal beginnings on an island in the Seine, the Īle de la Cité.

I stood on the Champs-Élysées, down which the black-booted Nazis had marched, some with reverence and cultural piety, I had heard, some triumphant, some astonished that they should be in command of the City of Light. But there was little brightness in 1946, except a sunset on a fair day when the last of the sun's rays struck the roof of Sacré-Caeur and the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame and the spindle top of the Eiffel Tower; except in the bright scarves of the Frenchwomen who walk swiftly and inscouciantly as they went about their daily tasks and errands to the baker, the grocer, the butcher, and the open markets that had begun that year to display their wares. Perhaps the women were hoping to find their former lives among the stalls. But though there was no bomb damage, as there had been in London, the old life of Paris was gone.

In another chapter one colorful sentence told me the bitter cold she experienced in Warsaw: "Cigarette smoke, strong drink, and conversation in a dozen languages sent you off to your narrow room with an illusion of warmth that lasted until you slid between sheets that were like frozen lead."

Almost every page of this memoir conveys a kind of sternness in people everywhere, with sour expressions on the faces of waitresses, chambermaids, and the people she met on trains and in shops. The author seemed to be describing a general attitude of pessimism, a kind of bureaucratic rigidity and indifference suspended like a heavy cloud over the lives of war-torn Europe. Nevertheless, when her journey ends, Fox is not happy to be going home. A part of her would like to hold on to her European year. Returning to New York brings up questions of "What now?" She has no clear idea of how to start her new life, how to find a new direction.

Once home, she works with difficult adolescent boys who have experienced the worst forms of abuse. One day, she takes them to view the stars and constellations through a special telescope belonging to Columbia University. She hopes by viewing something larger than themselves, their perspective might shift, and that they might view their own tragic lives with greater objectivity, less anger, as her experience amidst the devastation of Europe had "...shown me something beyond my own life, freeing me from chains I hadn't known were holding me, showing me something other than myself."

Reading The Coldest Winter shifted my own perspective as well. It helped me to realize that I am a true American, a grateful American who believes that Europe is a great place to visit. But home for me will always be the good ole USA.

by Duffie Bart
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

The book dealt more with her social/personal life than with her as a journalist in the aftermath of the war. The book is well written and very readable, I had just expected more of a post-war history.

I'm sufficiently intrigued by her story that I've already bought her other biographical book, "Borrowed Finery," and look forward to reading it.

Coleen from Kent, Wa

I am addicted to memoires of all types and this is one of the most touching in its honest, sparse style. I also enjoyed Fox's memoire "Borrowed Finery."

I didn't like her novels -- Poor George, Desperate Characters, and The West Coast -- all that much. They, too, are sparse, but somehow in a novel I find the lack of detail and concrete information more troubling.

This book is cobbled from pieces in a wide variety of magazines, reviews & little journals--with some chapters written for the book--so the point of view does vary.

Fox's story follows her biography _Borrowed Finery_, which was amplified by the novel _The Western Coast_. _The Coldest Winter_ fills out the story of her beginnings as a writer & explores how she gained a foothold in the world. She explores the oppression of both the communist bloc & Franco's Spain, by talking about the people who crossed her wandering path.

There are astonishing vignettes, such as seeing Winston Churchill in the street, drunk, being steered along by a group of men, while he is weeping & mascara runs down his face. (She later found that Churchill's lashes & brows were so pale that he always wore mascara in public.) There are many such stunning moments. It's a fast read, but worthwhile.

I was very disappointed , expecting to much. It was rambling of her memories with not much thought given to expanding on her thoughts or memories. She left so many unanswered questions.