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Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind
by Sarah Wildman
Years after her grandfather's death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters in a file labeled "Correspondence: Patients A-G." What she found inside weren't dry medical histories; instead what was written opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family's prewar Vienna. One woman's letters stood out: those from Valy-Valerie Scheftel. Her grandfather's lover who had remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed Austria.
Valy's name wasn't unknown to her - Wildman had once asked her grandmother about a dark-haired young woman whose images she found in an old photo album. "She was your grandfather's true love," her grandmother said at the time, and refused any other questions. But now, with the help of the letters, Wildman started to piece together Valy's story. They revealed a woman desperate to escape and clinging to the memory of a love that defined her years of freedom.
Obsessed with Valy's story, Wildman began a quest that lasted years and spanned continents. She discovered, to her shock, an entire world of other people searching for the same woman. On in the course of discovering Valy's ultimate fate, she was forced to reexamine the story of her grandfather's triumphant escape and how this history fit within her own life and in the process, she rescues a life seemingly lost to history.
"Starred Review. Wildman's extensive investigation into her grandfather's history is well documented and analyzed, but it is her determination to find out what happened to Valy, a woman at the periphery of the family circle, that distinguishes this family history." - Library Journal
"Wildman's intimate and mesmerizing biography blends her family history into the larger framework of World War II and the Holocaust."—Publishers Weekly
"A poignant and humane memoir. " - Kirkus
"In spellbinding prose, Sarah Wildman traces her quest to understand what happened to her grandfather's mysterious lover whom he had to leave behind when he fled Vienna in 1938. Revealing deeper truths about history and the tricky nature of memory, Paper Love is a breathtakingly powerful and beautiful new book." - David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z
"Paper Love begins with a quest for a lost lover, and then radically inverts that path. Here the search becomes a tale of not one person, but of how each person is so much more than one, how no single life has meaning without all the others that encircle it. Wildman's spellbinding story, with its dramatic and unexpected twists, breathes each forgotten person back to life."—Dara Horn, author of The World To Come
"Wildman long ago turned her attention to the complex afterlife of the Holocaust, and this book - thoroughly researched, adventurously reported, and vulnerably written - has fulfilled her promise as the most important literary representative of her generation." - Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction
This information about Paper Love was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Wildman has reported across Europe and the Middle East for The New York Times, Slate, and The New Yorker, among other publications, and is a former New Republic staffer. She is the recipient of the Peter R. Weitz Prize from the German Marshall Fund of the United States, "for excellence and originality in reporting on Europe and the transatlantic relationship," for the series in Slate where Paper Love originated. Wildman lives in Washington, D.C.
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