Paris in the 1930s was a temple of all cultural forms: music, art, literature, film. Unfortunately, as Nazis moved into occupy France, they dimmed the City of Light. Star Crossed is the story of a Jewish family, the Zelmans, as they intersect first with Paris and then with the Nazis. Annette, the eldest daughter babysits her younger siblings and attends art school at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. She also hangs out at Café de Flore and meets such notables as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sarte, Simone Signoret, Jean Jausion, Picasso, Giacometti, and Dora Maar. As the Nazi stranglehold on Paris tightens, very existence of Annette and her family is threatened.
The title of the book, Star Crossed: A True Romeo and Juliet Story in Hitler’s Paris, seems a bit off. True, Annette is Jewish and her lover, the poet Jean Jauson, is Gentile, somewhat akin to Romeo and Juliet’s feuding families. However, the modern love story doesn’t begin until about halfway through the book, and the two lovers don’t die for each other as Romeo and Juliet did, but are individually done in the the war. The story is more a cultural history of Paris blended with a biography of Annette with a lot of cultural references, real events, photographs, drawings, and correspondence embedded. As such, the book covers a lot of ground and thus can’t do justice to it all.
Although the book misses somewhat on the title, it does get one thing right: the atrocities committed by the Nazis in their efforts to rid the world of populations they deemed undesirable. Such books should be written—and read—so the world cannot escape the record of past genocides and hopefully will learn to rise above such destructive malevolent behavior.
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Star Crossed: A True Romeo and Juliet Story in Hitler’s Paris (Citadel Press, August 22, 2023) is available through:
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