“A fascinating, heartrending page-turner that, like the real-life forgers who inspired the novel, should never be forgotten.” –Kristina McMorris, New York Times bestselling author of Sold on a Monday Inspired by an astonishing true story from World War II, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis in this “sweeping and magnificent” (Fiona Davis, … “sweeping and magnificent” (Fiona Davis, bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue) historical novel from the #1 international bestselling author of The Winemaker’s Wife.
Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books when her eyes lock on a photograph in the New York Times. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in more than sixty years–a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.
The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II–an experience Eva remembers well–and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from–or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer, but does she have the strength to revisit old memories?
As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris and find refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, where she began forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.
An engaging and evocative novel reminiscent of The Lost Girls of Paris and The Alice Network, The Book of Lost Names is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of bravery and love in the face of evil.
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I was lucky to have won an ARC from Goodreads.com and read it the Shabbat afternoon before Passover, 2020, when we are all under a Shelter at Home order, because of the Coronavirus. This is my unbiased and voluntary review.
Over 6 million of my people were murder during the Holocaust, and books written about it whether fiction or nonfiction are all horrifying. More so, since almost 100 years later, there are those that teach that it never happened and others who call for it’s repetition, as irrational anti-semitism is again raising its ugly head, from the far left and far right, BDS, radical Islam and mostly useful idiots in Hollywood and on college campuses. This story is inspired from real events, that few people, but those who lived through it and scholars know about.
Widow Eve Abrams is a 86 year old librarian living in Florida, when she spots in a magazine a photo of a book that was very precious to her, stolen by the Nazis 65 years ago. The headline reads: “Sixty Years After End of World War II, German Librarian Seeks to Reunite Looted Books with Rightful Owners”. She immediately decides to go and claim her book. On her journey, she thinks about all that happened from the time she and her parents were living in Paris and she was studying to become a librarian. The French police started doing the dirty work for the German, arresting Jews for the crime of being Jews. When they came for Eve’s family, Eve and her mother happened to be babysitting for a neighbor. Eve’s father had given her instructions what to do if the Germans came, and over her mother’s objections she followed his instructions, managing to create fake ids and dragged her mother to a small mountain town, where she became part of the resistance, discovering she had a talent for forgery. Mostly she is creating forged documents for children, who she fears will forget their identities. Because the Germans goal is to erase the Jewish people. So with the help of her fellow forger, Remy, they create a code in an old 1700 religious book using the Fibonacci sequence to preserve the real names of the children with their new identities.
The book is a beautifully written page turner, bringing the characters to life, the atmosphere real, yet avoiding the gory details that most books on the Holocaust contain. There are many twists, with unexpected bravery and betrayal. I definitely recommend this book.