NINETTE'S WAR

Exodus and exile.

Young Ninette Dreyfus had it all: social status, financial ease, a beautiful Paris apartment that once belonged to Claude Debussy, a loving family. As happened to so many upper-class, secular European Jews, the truth came late. But unlike many of their peers, the Dreyfus family had luck as well as great resources. With the outbreak of World War II and the capitulation of France, the family decamped to the south. There, amid the shadows of the Riviera, the teenage Ninette hid in plain sight with her family. They changed their names. They faked their passports. In 1944, they found a way out, spirited across the Spanish-French border by Basque smugglers. Ninette sat out the rest of the war in Madrid, only returning to France after the Allied victory. Her life is told by a master storyteller, himself a child of Jewish survivors, based on her diaries and the conversations that the elderly Ninette had with her biographer. Jay’s book focuses on a young woman’s coming of age in a time of trauma. It writes an inner, psychological narrative of getting by, getting along, and not getting caught. It illustrates how even the most privileged of people could be ensnared in prejudice and persecution. Ninette’s life does not have the tragic poignancy of Anne Frank’s, and her diary and reminiscences carry little of the existential weight of Frank’s famous journal. Ninette ages into what her biographer calls “une grande dame from central casting.” What we learn from her story, though, is how family gets you through the worst of times—how parents and children bond and bear the terror of a knock on the door, a casual encounter with a man in uniform, and the foreboding sense that, irrespective of your importance, they may come for you too.

A tale of grit and girlhood, set against a time of deportation.