Star Crossed: A True WWII Romeo and Juliet Love Story in Hitler's Paris
About this ebook
A Goodreads Choice Awards Nominee
“What a beautiful, heartbreaking story.” —Erica Robuck, National Bestselling Author of Sisters of Night and Fog
Paris, 1940. The City of Light has fallen under German occupation. Among patriotic Parisians, the pursuit of art, culture, and jazz has become a bold act of defiance. So has forbidden love for talented and spirited Jewish teenager Annette Zelman, a student at the Beaux-Arts, and dashing young Catholic poet Jean Jausion. Despite their devout families’ vehement opposition, the young couple finds acceptance at the famed Café de Flore, whose habitues includeSimone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, Django Reinhardt, and other luminaries of the Latin Quarter.
For a time, Annette and Jean feel they have eluded the brute might of the relentless Nazis -- and more immediately, their parents’ threats and demands. But as restrictions on the Jewish community escalate to arrests and deportations, the maleficent forces gathering around the young lovers set them on divergent and tragically inevitable paths.
Drawn from never-before-published family letters and other treasures, as well as archival sources and exclusive interviews, Star-Crossed offers us precious insight into the Holocaust and the lives French people bravely led under the Hitler regime. This breathtaking true story of beauty, art, liberation, and the transformative power of love resonates with an intimate story of undying devotion, seen through the prism of history.
About the author
Heather Dune Macadam’s first book, co-authored with Rena Kornreich Gelissen, was Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz. Rena’s Promise has been published throughout the world. Director of the Rena’s Promise Foundation, Macadam also sits on the advisory board of the Cities of Peace Auschwitz and is the producer/director of the documentary film 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz. Her work has been recognized by Yad Vashem in the U.K., the USC Shoah Foundation, the National Museum of Jewish History in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the Memorial Museum of Auschwitz in Oswiecim, Poland. Her writing has been featured in National Geographic, The New York Times, The Guardian, on NPR, and in other major media outlets. She divides her time between New York and Herefordshire, England. Visit 999thefirstwomeninauschwitz on Facebook, @heatherdune on Twitter, or www.999themovie.com.
SIMON WORRALL is the author of two highly acclaimed books The Poet and The Murderer and The Very White of Love. Born in Wellington, England, he spent his childhood in Eritrea, Paris, and Singapore. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic and has written for publications all over the world, including the Smithsonian, The London Times and Sunday Times Magazine, The Guardian, Harpers, The New Yorker, and the New Statesman.
