On a pier in Marseille in 1942, with desperate refugees pressing to board one of the last ships to escape France before the Nazis choked off its ports, an 18-year-old German Jewish girl was pried from the arms of the Catholic Frenchman she loved and promised to marry. As the Lipari carried Janine and her family to Casablanca on the first leg of a perilous journey to safety in Cuba, she would read through her tears the farewell letter that Roland had slipped in her pocket: “Whatever the length of our separation, our love will survive it, because it depends on us alone. I give you my vow that whatever the time we must wait, you will be my wife. Never forget, never doubt.”
Five years later – her fierce desire to reunite with Roland first obstructed by war and then, in secret, by her father and brother – Janine would build a new life in New York with a dynamic American husband. That his obsession with Ayn Rand tormented their marriage was just one of the reasons she never ceased yearning to reclaim her lost love.
Investigative reporter Leslie Maitland grew up enthralled by her mother’s accounts of forbidden romance and harrowing flight from the Nazis. Her book is both a journalist’s vivid depiction of a world at war and a daughter’s pursuit of a haunting question: what had become of the handsome Frenchman whose picture her mother continued to treasure almost fifty years after they parted? It is a tale of memory that reporting made real and a story of undying love that crosses the borders of time.
Crossing the Borders of Time
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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.
Amazon.com Review
A Look Inside Crossing the Borders of Time
On the right, Janine Maitland with daughter Leslie; on the left, Janine’s sister Trudi with daughter Lynne
Alice Heinsheimer, Janine’s mother, before her marriage in Germany in 1920
Roland Arcieri, Janine’s love, in Lyon, France, 1942
Janine’s official identity card from Gray, France, 1939
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More 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.
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116 of 118 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Maybe I'm being chauvinistic, but as a reporter since 1966, I've long believed that news people make the best writers. Think Ernest Hemingway, honing his writing and reporting skills at the Kansas City Star and the Toronto Star. And think Leslie Maitland, a prize-winning former investigative reporter for the New York Times whose "Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed" is a panoramic work of nonfiction that I believe Hemingway would have been proud to put his name on. The book has the power of "War and Peace," the movie "Casablanca" and the romanticism of "Doctor Zhivago" -- reading like a novel but with the resonance of reality.
Maitland used all the skills she acquired as reporter to tell the story of how her German Jewish mother, born Johanna Gunzburger in Freiburg, Germany, in 1923 managed to flee the Nazi killing machine in 1938, with her father, mother, sister and brother, landing first in Mulhouse, France, moving as the Germans defeated the French in June 1940, finally leaving on the last ship out of Marseille, France in 1942 before the harbors were sealed.
Barred from entering the U.S. due to an indifferent FDR administration and an actively anti-Semitic State Department under Cordell Hull, the Gunzburger family -- father Samuel Sigmar Gunzburger, a German Army WWI veteran, his wife Alice, their daughters Gertrude (Trudi) and Johanna (later Janine) and their son Norbert -- spent more than a year in a Cuban detention camp before finally securing papers allowing them to move to Miami and later New York City.
As a child, Leslie learned of her mother's first love, called Roland Arcieri in the book, a French Catholic who tried to contact Janine when she was pregnant with the future investigative reporter. Janine -- she adopted the French name because of her love of France -- and her family had settled in Washington Heights, at the extreme northern tip of Manhattan. Now heavily Hispanic, Washington Heights was the home of so many German Jewish refugees during and immediately after World War II that it was ironically dubbed "The Fourth Reich."
Janine Gunzburger was so lacking in the stereotypical Jewish features that Nazi propagandists popularized that Mona, the blunt-spoken sister of her future husband, Leonard Maitland, remarked to the doctor for whom Janine was working "Too bad she's a shiksa [Gentile]. If she were only Jewish, I'd fix her up with my brother." Mona went on to describe Leonard -- born Friedman -- as a cross between "Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant." In the complicated world of Judaism, Janine's parents at first objected to her future husband's Eastern European Jewish origins; German Jews considered themselves to be at the top of the pecking order.
A moving part of Leslie Maitland's memoir is her portrayal of her father, Leonard. He had served in the Merchant Marine during World War II, in wartime a branch of the military that sustained more casualties than any other service branch. In spite of this, Merchant Marine veterans were denied benefits under the G.I. Bill of Rights, including health benefits for people exposed to deadly asbestos on the ships. Trained as an engineer, Leonard Maitland was a Type-A hard-charging businessman who had a heart attack in his forties and died before his time of cancer -- he was born in 1918 and died in 1990.
Maitland encouraged his daughter in her pursuit of higher education and was so proud of her career at the New York Times that he carried clips of her stories in his wallet and showed them to everybody. The realistic portrait of Leonard Maitland includes his daughter's account of his love of Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy -- which she calls a "cult" -- and his womanizing. It's apparent that Len Maitland, who modeled himself on Howard Roark in Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", resented the role Roland Arcieri played in his wife's life and even initiated a "tearing up party" (Page 315) where Janine was coerced into tearing up photographs of Roland and love letters from him. The author says her mother had made the "selfish mistake" of telling her new suitor Leonard about "his past rival, a confession with permanent impact on the course of their marriage." The author is nothing if not brutally honest about the details of the lives of her mother and father -- a mark of a good reporter!
I noticed that Maitland has included in the bibliography Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's best-selling "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (Knopf, 1996), about ordinary Germans who went along with the murderous anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. I read and reviewed the book when it was published and I thought it explained many details glossed over in the post-World War II rehabilitation of Germans and Germany, as well as the countries, like Vichy France, that collaborated with the Nazis. Maitland also includes accounts of "ordinary" Germans and French who defied the Germans and their collaborators in Vichy France to save Jews from the death factories.
She also chronicles the reconciliation visits where German cities, including Freiburg, hosted their exiled former residents. The receptions were almost uniformly friendly, yet one major exception, she writes, was the Glatt family, the Gentiles who acquired Sigmar Gunzburger's prospering home supply firm in the forced "Aryanization" that led the Gunzburgers to flee Germany. The Glatts stated in their brochures that the multi-office firm was "founded" in 1938 -- the year Sigmar was forced out of the firm he had founded with his brother Heinrich in 1919, on his return from the war. Freiburg's synagogue -- consecrated in 1885 -- was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 and had been replaced with a modern structure, but the "reconciliation" visits were marred by desecrations of the city's Jewish cemetery.
A particularly moving passage in "Crossing the Borders of Time" occurs on a pier in Marseille in 1942, with desperate refugees pressing to board one of the last ships to escape France before the Nazis choked off its ports, the 18-year-old Janine was pried from the arms of Roland, a man she loved and promised to marry. As the Lipari carried Janine and her family to Casablanca on the first leg of a perilous journey to safety in Cuba, she would read through her tears the farewell letter that Roland had slipped in her pocket: "Whatever the length of our separation, our love will survive it, because it depends on us alone. I give you my vow that whatever the time we must wait, you will be my wife. Never forget, never doubt." Fans of the 1942 movie "Casablanca" will relate to the scene, comparing it to the scene where Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, waits in the rain in Paris for Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) as he makes his escape by the last train out of beseiged Paris.
Fifty years after the Marseille events, Leslie's efforts reunited the widowed Janine and the married -- for the second time -- Roland, now living in Montreal, Canada. It is a testimony to both Maitland's investigative skills and her devotion to her mother that she successfully traced the lost Roland and was able to reunite him with Janine. Unlike so many stories of love during wartime, theirs has a happy ending.
Maitland used all the skills she acquired as reporter to tell the story of how her German Jewish mother, born Johanna Gunzburger in Freiburg, Germany, in 1923 managed to flee the Nazi killing machine in 1938, with her father, mother, sister and brother, landing first in Mulhouse, France, moving as the Germans defeated the French in June 1940, finally leaving on the last ship out of Marseille, France in 1942 before the harbors were sealed.
Barred from entering the U.S. due to an indifferent FDR administration and an actively anti-Semitic State Department under Cordell Hull, the Gunzburger family -- father Samuel Sigmar Gunzburger, a German Army WWI veteran, his wife Alice, their daughters Gertrude (Trudi) and Johanna (later Janine) and their son Norbert -- spent more than a year in a Cuban detention camp before finally securing papers allowing them to move to Miami and later New York City.
As a child, Leslie learned of her mother's first love, called Roland Arcieri in the book, a French Catholic who tried to contact Janine when she was pregnant with the future investigative reporter. Janine -- she adopted the French name because of her love of France -- and her family had settled in Washington Heights, at the extreme northern tip of Manhattan. Now heavily Hispanic, Washington Heights was the home of so many German Jewish refugees during and immediately after World War II that it was ironically dubbed "The Fourth Reich."
Janine Gunzburger was so lacking in the stereotypical Jewish features that Nazi propagandists popularized that Mona, the blunt-spoken sister of her future husband, Leonard Maitland, remarked to the doctor for whom Janine was working "Too bad she's a shiksa [Gentile]. If she were only Jewish, I'd fix her up with my brother." Mona went on to describe Leonard -- born Friedman -- as a cross between "Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant." In the complicated world of Judaism, Janine's parents at first objected to her future husband's Eastern European Jewish origins; German Jews considered themselves to be at the top of the pecking order.
A moving part of Leslie Maitland's memoir is her portrayal of her father, Leonard. He had served in the Merchant Marine during World War II, in wartime a branch of the military that sustained more casualties than any other service branch. In spite of this, Merchant Marine veterans were denied benefits under the G.I. Bill of Rights, including health benefits for people exposed to deadly asbestos on the ships. Trained as an engineer, Leonard Maitland was a Type-A hard-charging businessman who had a heart attack in his forties and died before his time of cancer -- he was born in 1918 and died in 1990.
Maitland encouraged his daughter in her pursuit of higher education and was so proud of her career at the New York Times that he carried clips of her stories in his wallet and showed them to everybody. The realistic portrait of Leonard Maitland includes his daughter's account of his love of Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy -- which she calls a "cult" -- and his womanizing. It's apparent that Len Maitland, who modeled himself on Howard Roark in Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", resented the role Roland Arcieri played in his wife's life and even initiated a "tearing up party" (Page 315) where Janine was coerced into tearing up photographs of Roland and love letters from him. The author says her mother had made the "selfish mistake" of telling her new suitor Leonard about "his past rival, a confession with permanent impact on the course of their marriage." The author is nothing if not brutally honest about the details of the lives of her mother and father -- a mark of a good reporter!
I noticed that Maitland has included in the bibliography Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's best-selling "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (Knopf, 1996), about ordinary Germans who went along with the murderous anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. I read and reviewed the book when it was published and I thought it explained many details glossed over in the post-World War II rehabilitation of Germans and Germany, as well as the countries, like Vichy France, that collaborated with the Nazis. Maitland also includes accounts of "ordinary" Germans and French who defied the Germans and their collaborators in Vichy France to save Jews from the death factories.
She also chronicles the reconciliation visits where German cities, including Freiburg, hosted their exiled former residents. The receptions were almost uniformly friendly, yet one major exception, she writes, was the Glatt family, the Gentiles who acquired Sigmar Gunzburger's prospering home supply firm in the forced "Aryanization" that led the Gunzburgers to flee Germany. The Glatts stated in their brochures that the multi-office firm was "founded" in 1938 -- the year Sigmar was forced out of the firm he had founded with his brother Heinrich in 1919, on his return from the war. Freiburg's synagogue -- consecrated in 1885 -- was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 and had been replaced with a modern structure, but the "reconciliation" visits were marred by desecrations of the city's Jewish cemetery.
A particularly moving passage in "Crossing the Borders of Time" occurs on a pier in Marseille in 1942, with desperate refugees pressing to board one of the last ships to escape France before the Nazis choked off its ports, the 18-year-old Janine was pried from the arms of Roland, a man she loved and promised to marry. As the Lipari carried Janine and her family to Casablanca on the first leg of a perilous journey to safety in Cuba, she would read through her tears the farewell letter that Roland had slipped in her pocket: "Whatever the length of our separation, our love will survive it, because it depends on us alone. I give you my vow that whatever the time we must wait, you will be my wife. Never forget, never doubt." Fans of the 1942 movie "Casablanca" will relate to the scene, comparing it to the scene where Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, waits in the rain in Paris for Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) as he makes his escape by the last train out of beseiged Paris.
Fifty years after the Marseille events, Leslie's efforts reunited the widowed Janine and the married -- for the second time -- Roland, now living in Montreal, Canada. It is a testimony to both Maitland's investigative skills and her devotion to her mother that she successfully traced the lost Roland and was able to reunite him with Janine. Unlike so many stories of love during wartime, theirs has a happy ending.
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Leslie Maitland's "Crossing the Borders of Time" is a superb book about the fluidity of family, love, and home. Maitland, a former NYT reporter, has written about her mother's family and the physical journey the took from Germany into exile and the memories - both positive and painful - they took with them. And she writes of their new life in the United States, where they brought those memories and connections.
Maitland's book actually covers several subjects - the life in Germany and then France in the run-up to WW2 - as well as how the Gunzburger family made their way in perilous times and conditions to the United States via north Africa, with a short stay in Cuba. The book continues with their post-war life, including Leslie's parents' difficult marriage, which was plagued by infidelity; her mother's continued yearning for the love of her life, a young Catholic man she left behind in France and by her father's physical infidelity with several women and by his emotional one with the teachings of author Ayn Rand.
Maitland's book covers so much territory and all of it painted with a deft hand. One of the most interesting parts to me is her telling of returning to Germany and France with her parents in the early 1990's. They returned to the cities of Freiburg in Germany where her mother was born in 1923 and raised until the 1930's when the family fled to the (perceived) safety of Mulhouse, France. (Maitland covered the trip in a series of articles for the NYT, which I vaguely remember reading and thinking they were interesting. I didn't think I'd be reading 20 years later a book about the family.) As the family traveled, they returned to the places of Janine's childhood and met friends and family - both Jewish and Christian - who had survived the war years and had had to come to terms with the Nazi era and whatever part they played in those years.
Some of the "reunions" were happy ones and some were sad. They saw the business that Janine's father had to turn over to Nazi-approved Christian ownership when they left Freiburg for France and how the "Jewish past" had been erased in the company's history. They visited the house they owned in Freiburg - originally standing next to a hotel - and toured it. The house had been divided into apartments after the war, and in one of the apartments, they met one of Janine's childhood Christian playmates. The woman, Rosemarie Stock, whose family had owned the hotel next door, was not glad to see her old friend, returned to Germany for what reason? Did she want the family house back? Rosemarie rather querulously informs Janine that her father had paid Janine's father "good money" for the house back in the 1930's. ("Good money" at the time was a pittance of the true worth of the house.) Rosemarie also proudly showed the Maitland family the picture of her in full Deutche Maiden regalia, hanging on the living room wall. BUT what was impressive to me as a reader of 20th century history, was the attitude of Stock's SON. Born after the war, Michael Stock was one of the postwar generation of Germans who studied and learned from the horrors of the Nazi era. I have read about and met members of this generation - MY generation - and have been impressed about the soul-searching they've done to understand and not repeat the past. So we have the Maitland family meeting the two divergent generations of Germans - the Nazi-sympathising mother and her son, who has seemed to learn the lessons of the past.
Maitland's book covers so much more than I've written above. Returning to Germany and France on reunion trips is only a small piece of it. She fearlessly looks at her parents' difficult marriage but writes about the improbable love between the two. And, she writes about the love of her mother's life - "Roland Acieri" - the Frenchman she left behind in Marsailles in 1942 but never forgot. I am not saying any more on the subject...
Leslie Maitland has written a book that looks at the generations of Jews - and some Christians - and how families form and tear-apart through the years. It is a brilliant book. And reading it reminds me of another book on much the same subject, Donald Katz's "Home Fires", the study of one family in post-war America. An epic picture of a family in joy and distress, it is out-of-print, but available on Amazon. Buy Maitland's book, and buy Katz's book, if you're interested in truly learning about 20th century families.
Maitland's book actually covers several subjects - the life in Germany and then France in the run-up to WW2 - as well as how the Gunzburger family made their way in perilous times and conditions to the United States via north Africa, with a short stay in Cuba. The book continues with their post-war life, including Leslie's parents' difficult marriage, which was plagued by infidelity; her mother's continued yearning for the love of her life, a young Catholic man she left behind in France and by her father's physical infidelity with several women and by his emotional one with the teachings of author Ayn Rand.
Maitland's book covers so much territory and all of it painted with a deft hand. One of the most interesting parts to me is her telling of returning to Germany and France with her parents in the early 1990's. They returned to the cities of Freiburg in Germany where her mother was born in 1923 and raised until the 1930's when the family fled to the (perceived) safety of Mulhouse, France. (Maitland covered the trip in a series of articles for the NYT, which I vaguely remember reading and thinking they were interesting. I didn't think I'd be reading 20 years later a book about the family.) As the family traveled, they returned to the places of Janine's childhood and met friends and family - both Jewish and Christian - who had survived the war years and had had to come to terms with the Nazi era and whatever part they played in those years.
Some of the "reunions" were happy ones and some were sad. They saw the business that Janine's father had to turn over to Nazi-approved Christian ownership when they left Freiburg for France and how the "Jewish past" had been erased in the company's history. They visited the house they owned in Freiburg - originally standing next to a hotel - and toured it. The house had been divided into apartments after the war, and in one of the apartments, they met one of Janine's childhood Christian playmates. The woman, Rosemarie Stock, whose family had owned the hotel next door, was not glad to see her old friend, returned to Germany for what reason? Did she want the family house back? Rosemarie rather querulously informs Janine that her father had paid Janine's father "good money" for the house back in the 1930's. ("Good money" at the time was a pittance of the true worth of the house.) Rosemarie also proudly showed the Maitland family the picture of her in full Deutche Maiden regalia, hanging on the living room wall. BUT what was impressive to me as a reader of 20th century history, was the attitude of Stock's SON. Born after the war, Michael Stock was one of the postwar generation of Germans who studied and learned from the horrors of the Nazi era. I have read about and met members of this generation - MY generation - and have been impressed about the soul-searching they've done to understand and not repeat the past. So we have the Maitland family meeting the two divergent generations of Germans - the Nazi-sympathising mother and her son, who has seemed to learn the lessons of the past.
Maitland's book covers so much more than I've written above. Returning to Germany and France on reunion trips is only a small piece of it. She fearlessly looks at her parents' difficult marriage but writes about the improbable love between the two. And, she writes about the love of her mother's life - "Roland Acieri" - the Frenchman she left behind in Marsailles in 1942 but never forgot. I am not saying any more on the subject...
Leslie Maitland has written a book that looks at the generations of Jews - and some Christians - and how families form and tear-apart through the years. It is a brilliant book. And reading it reminds me of another book on much the same subject, Donald Katz's "Home Fires", the study of one family in post-war America. An epic picture of a family in joy and distress, it is out-of-print, but available on Amazon. Buy Maitland's book, and buy Katz's book, if you're interested in truly learning about 20th century families.
47 of 52 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
German Jew Janine loved her life in Freiberg. However, in 1938, the Nazis forced fifteen year old Janine and her family to flee across the border settling in Mulhouse, France. There she met her first love nineteen year old Catholic law student Roland Arcieri. Her family fled to Gray and then Lyon as the Nazis annex Alsace Lorraine. In 1941 in Lyon she and Roland meet again and remain attracted to one another. One year later, Janine and her family flee to Marseilles and then America. Unbeknownst to Janine, her father and brother insured she would not meet Roland again as they intercept his letters. Janine marries a philandering Ayn Rand advocate and one of their children Leslie Maitland supported by her brother Gary and her husband Dan begins the odyssey of finding her mom's first love who lives in Montreal.
This is a superior memoir with an intriguing quest in which the vividly harrowing descriptions of the Jewish plight during WWII overshadow the forbidden love affair and the failed marriage. Timely with the insight into refugee displacement and exile due to war, this is a triumph of love and survivor though it took five decades for the former to catch up to the latter.
Harriet Klausner
This is a superior memoir with an intriguing quest in which the vividly harrowing descriptions of the Jewish plight during WWII overshadow the forbidden love affair and the failed marriage. Timely with the insight into refugee displacement and exile due to war, this is a triumph of love and survivor though it took five decades for the former to catch up to the latter.
Harriet Klausner
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Second Generation
The story of a German Jewish family's survival in WWII that is written by and encompasses it's effect on the second generation.
Published 6 hours ago by sonja jaffee
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect condition!
For anyone who likes a good story about love, war, loss and new beginnings, this is the book for you. It's based on a true story, which made it all the more fascinating.
Published 7 days ago by Eithne Clarke
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable reading
was highly recommended good writing difficult to put down./
Following books were for grand-kids difficult for me to rate thanks
Following books were for grand-kids difficult for me to rate thanks
Published 17 days ago by Mary C Nicotra
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nonfiction Reads Like Fiction
This nonfiction book reads like fiction. In tracing the lives of the two lead characters and the impact of war, the author focuses the majority of the time on history in order to... Read more
Published 22 days ago by N. Zimmer
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poignant and well-documented family history
Leslie Maitland's Crossing the Borders of Time traces her mother's escape from Freiberg across France to Casablanca, Cuba and eventually to the USA. Read more
Published 23 days ago by Alice Schaffer Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love and war
This book was one of my favorites read this year. Leslie Maitland has a charming writing style and was able to bring her family alive for the reader. Read more
Published 24 days ago by Emily Ambler
3.0 out of 5 stars
Way too long
If the long, long, long part in the United States had been cut down by about half, this book would have been fantastic. Read more
Published 25 days ago by Greta K. Berlin
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a story!!!
One of my favorite books I have read in a long time. Read it twice already and will read again in the future. A true story that has a wonderful ending. Read more
Published 29 days ago by DANI
4.0 out of 5 stars
Crossing the Borders of Time
This book is well written, well researched and is a remarkable
love story. The story gets bogged down a bit in the first half with lots of
statistics about the tragic... Read more
love story. The story gets bogged down a bit in the first half with lots of
statistics about the tragic... Read more
Published 29 days ago by Hilary Pearson
3.0 out of 5 stars
Too much history detail.
Had trouble getting through all the history. Put it down and then went back to it. Story is great after the first 300 pages, but t's tough to get past it.
Published 1 month ago by Patricia Branciforte
