For readers of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah who are hungry for a non-fiction account of Nazi-occupied Paris, Star Crossed is an epic true story of love and resistance during WWII from the award-winning author of 999. Part historical portrait of life during the Occupation, part valentine to The City of Light and the resilience of its people, this true love story follows the romance between the Romeo and Juliet of war-torn Paris – a Catholic Resistance fighter and a Holocaust victim who meet at the famous Café Flore before war, prejudice, and disapproving families set them on divergent and tragically inevitable paths.
For readers of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah who are hungry for a non-fiction account of Nazi-occupied Paris, Star Crossed is an epic true story of love and resistance during WWII from the award-winning author of 999. Part historical portrait of life during the Occupation, part valentine to The City of Light and the resilience of its people, this true love story follows the romance between the Romeo and Juliet of war-torn Paris – a Catholic Resistance fighter and a Holocaust victim who meet at the famous Café Flore before war, prejudice, and disapproving families set them on divergent and tragically inevitable paths.
Paris, January 1941
Here is Annette Zelman, just nineteen, celebrating her acceptance into the Beaux Arts, the most famous art school in all of France. She has only been in Paris for a month and already she has found her niche. Her mane of thick, dark blonde hair gleams in the sunlight, pinned in a fashion all her own. Curls akimbo. A headband hauls them back off her face, almost. Still a teenager, the baby fat has not yet fallen from the cheeks of her face. Her eyes squint in the winter light and crinkle in a full-on smile. It is cold out, but today is a day for photos. A day to celebrate. Annette is starting her first semester at the Beaux Arts. She is going to be an artist!
The announcements have been made. They are artists! Another of the newly accepted students, Salvatore Bacharice, has a camera and has coaxed Annette to pose with the sculpture she drew for the entrance exam. He has a roll of film he wants to develop, and a few frames left to spare, and is eager to preserve the memory. He already has a crush on the vivacious Annette.
The courtyard of the Beaux Arts was a forest of classical Greek and Roman sculptures. Annette quickly discards her woolen coat and climbs onto the pedestal of the Discobolus statue, and swings her arm around the thick marble neck, presses her head against his and arches away as if she is a bow being drawn into his embrace. She had never drawn anything so complicated before. Her parents are tailors, so she is more versed in patterns than physique, but she smudged and shaded his rippled washboard abs, his swollen biceps, dimpled butt. His penis. She had never drawn a penis before. She looks as if she might be in love with him. Perhaps she is. He is the reason she is here. Now. The reason for her success. She is laughing. Always laughing. Linked in this pas de deux, her partner frozen in time, the camera clicks. Salvatore winds the film.
Your turn! We can almost hear Annette say to her new friend, Yannick Bellon.
Sixteen-year-old, dark-haired beauty, Yannick, hugs the Discus thrower and smiles down at the newly named artist, as Annette looks up at her friend, beaming. There is another metallic click, then a plastic whoosh as Salvatore winds the film forward to the next frame.
When he looks up again Annette has her coat back on again and is already buttoned up to defend against the bitter air. Some say this is one of the coldest winters in living memory, but for the moment Paris is free of snow. Hands half in and half out of her pockets, Annette stands as if at attention. Feet placed firmly together, wearing pale tights and heavy socks with her sensible shoes, nothing can move her from this moment. She tilts her head, a quizzical puppy. What’s next? Her eyes ask. Where to now? Her face holds a secret amusement; a joke is brimming in her eyes.
Hold it!
Salvatore focuses his lens and her gaze changes in that instant to one of adoration. She looks out of the moment, loving it, loving everything about this day and all its possibilities. It as if everything that is happening in her life is meant to be, even the friend who is memorializing it all on black and white Agfa film, just as a curl falls across her cheek.
Perfect.
They are all laughing now. What is not to laugh about? They are the crème de la crème. They belong here. And even though Annette is a new arrival to the capital—a refugee in fact—Paris has opened her arms to embrace her. You are mine, now, Paris whispers. You’re an artist. It is all Annette has ever wanted.
Let’s go to a cafe. Perhaps, it is Yannick who suggests the idea. Her famous mother, surrealist photographer, Denise Bellon, frequents the Café de Flore, and they are just a few blocks away. Perhaps it is someone else’s suggestion.
Tucking her portfolio under her arm and swinging a hefty black purse over one shoulder, Annette sets off down Rue Bonaparte with a growing group of fellow art students. Yannick and she link arms hurrying ahead, until they are nothing but the click of heels syncopated by staccato laughter. Curls bee bop off their scarved necks, swing with the sway of shoulders, the sashay of hips. Ooh La La.
Passing an 11th century church and its wartime worse-for-wear garden, the girls pause on Boulevard Saint Germain. This is the heart of the Latin Quarter, the hippest part of Paris, where smoky music clubs are still allowed to play American jazz and lust, if not love, is always in the air. Annette can still hardly believe that she has arrived here, a student in the city of light.
Café Deux Magots has “Green beans” as the Wehrmacht soldiers are known because of the color of their uniforms, and “grey mice,” their female counterparts standing outside. You can always tell Germans because they look like they own even the sunshine on the street. Annette is not interested in sharing the watery winter sun with the enemy. Yannick’s eyes scrub the ground; suddenly reminded how the war has deprived of her adolescence and absconded with their innocence and youth. She has only recently returned to Paris, after fleeing the capital ahead of the invasion, with her mother and younger sister, Loleh. Annette’s ebullience and confidence is infectious as she big sisters her friend. They turn back to see where their escorts have gone. Like boys do, Salvatore and the others have lagged behind. Sale Bosch, one of them murmurs as they catch up to the girls. Dirty Germans. The rest laugh, daringly.
Since the Germans marched into Paris over eight months ago, there has been an incessant show of military strength along the Champs-Élysées, tanks and goose-stepping to show they own the streets. But today the Beaux Arts students are the parade. In a city whose pride has been battered by the invasion of German forces, the hope and innocence of youth helps the capital’s spirit flicker.
Half a block away the scalloped white and green awnings of the Café de Flore beckon. Named after a statue of the antique goddess of flowers and gardens, the mother of spring the Flore is where the artists and writers hang out. The Communists and anti-fascists. The painters and dancers. The in-crowd. There are no Germans here. As the brass doors open and the students usher each other inside. No one looks up.
It is the hour of the aperitif, and the Flore is jam-packed. Everyone who is anyone or anyone who is everyone is here or on their way. On any given afternoon, Annette might find the smoldering intensity of Picasso, furiously smoking Gitanes with Brancusi and Dora Marr. A particularly elegant, dark-haired woman with her hair turbaned and coifed in a bun sits with a small group of confidantes. Absent is her owlish, bespectacled paramour, Jean Paul Sartre, who is being held in a German Stalag. In another corner, gypsy guitarist, Django Reinhardt, is back in Paris, after being caught trying to escape across the Swiss border. The young sparks flitting into the café are his idea of innocents whose hearts will soon be broken by his love songs.
The boys grab a center table and pull out chairs for the girls, then tussle for the best spot between them. The waiter takes their order. Ersatz coffee and weak beer is all that’s on the menu.[1] There is a “celluloid bell” of macaroons in the center of the table. Annette pops one into her mouth, only to find that is nothing like the macaroons of her hometown. These are barely egg white and sugar; no one can afford coconut or sugar these days. Overhead, six magnificent Lalique chandeliers bathe the brows of the Floristes in soft, yellow light.
There is a good reason students gravitate to Café de Flore. It is the only cafe in the Latin Quarter with decent heat. The large coal stove occasionally belches smoke and flames but it is still the centerpiece of the room. On cold winter mornings, Simone de Beauvoir has been known to arrive before the doors are unlocked to get a seat close to the fire while she writes. Being cold is as common and uncomfortable as being hungry, but the cold is easier to remedy. Students and artists in threadbare corduroy coats lean against it for warmth and nurse their ersatz coffees, forcing the dregs to last for hours in order to postpone the inevitable exodus to the cold streets and icy winds whipping up off the Seine. A survey of faces shows some creased with worry, while others look smooth and confident. Everyone over thirty looks tired. Being occupied is exhausting.
Around the room, debates rage between the Surrealists and Dadaists, anarchists and Trotskyists. Join the Resistance, commit to Pacifism, flee? What is the best way to fight fascism? Art or guns? Should art be political or stay above the fray? Annette picks up on the conversations that interest her: art, jazz, ration cards. Eavesdropping is an art form its own. The voices are as varied as their ages. Some speak with hushed urgency, others with bored superiority. Polish, Czech, Russian and Spanish accented French is as common as the staccato nasal of true Parisians. Annette, herself, has a provincial accent. She should lose it, she thinks. Lose that old Annette who came from far away Nancy in eastern France. She should become a new, shinier Annette—à la Parisienne.
Annette is not the kind of girl to be easily overwhelmed. Sure, she is refugee from the provinces but aren’t they all refugees now? Being occupied makes you feel like a stranger in your own country because you no longer own the laws or the spirit of your homeland. Someone else does.
Here amid the poor students from the Beaux Arts, Annette feels drawn to get up and move closer to the stove where the hubbub of conversation is the thickest. She wants to be in the middle of things, get closer to the heat of conversation. Café de Flore is like a drug. You try it once and you want more. Her initiation complete, Annette watches the animation around her. In the mirror there is a Mise en abyme effect, multiples of herself watch herself, watch herself; each Annette in a separate frame of the same reflection, as if she were stepping back in time or moving sequentially forward into the world around her. She watches the others, being reflected in the mirrored walls. Lost in thought, she thinks of ways to paint this reality, but not in realism. She wants to abstract it, push the boundaries of her mirrored selves. If she can begin to emulate these people, modulate her accent, and grasp the meaning of those more worldly by soaking this place up in all its smoke-filled atmosphere, she can become a new Annette. A different Annette. She wants to be more than simply tolerated or worse ignored. Annette wants to belong. The great feat of walking into a Paris café is to have somebody recognize you, somebody to acknowledge your presence when you walk through the door. It only takes a nod to exist.
[1] Ersatz was the term used for “coffee” served during the occupation, as it was made with mostly chicory and grain, not real coffee.
Star Crossed is, like many other World War II books, difficult to read. The atrocities against the Jews, and the progressive worsening of freedoms across France, is a historical fact that I knew before reading this book. Since I've read a lot of fiction and non-fiction set in different areas affected by World War II, the tragedies were no surprise.
What has really amazed me is how every World War II era book - fiction or non-fiction - that I've read, each new one still manages to share a new aspect with me. In this case, the book provided a deeper look into the experience of French Jews in Paris, which was a country I was less familiar with historically.
The book has a lengthy introduction into Annette, the main character, finally getting into the most serious "Romeo & Juliet" relationship about halfway through the book. That doesn't mean the introduction was wasted, though - it really set the stage for the cultural background of the day, as well as Annette's personality. I also liked the writing style - it was almost as if the author was describing individual snapshots or photographs, which fit the style of the book well.
If I were going to give this book any sort of critique, it would be the fact that there was a lot less emphasis on the "Romeo & Juliet" aspect of feuding families. It's true that it was a Gentile-Jew relationship, and both families weren't entirely supportive, but the families weren't feuding rivals, either. However, the backdrop of Hitler's control over Paris definitely meant that they had a significant challenge to a happy, successful relationship.
I appreciated the primary documents that were highlighted in the book, too - photos, paintings, and letters were included to help bring the book to life. It's an important story to read, to help honor all of those who lived and died during World War II.