Culture

Author: Charles Glass
Publisher: HarperPress
3.5/5

 
“What would I have done as an American in Paris under Nazi occupation during World War II?” This was the question that led veteran war correspondent Charles Glass to research the different responses of fellow Americans to the arrival of the Nazis in Paris in June 1940. Prior to WWII, 30 000 Americans called Paris home, of whom more than half remained during at least the initial stages of the Nazi invasion. As the United States did not enter the war until December 1941, Americans held a relatively unhindered and unrestricted position in Paris, subject to curfews and food rationing, but not considered enemy aliens and imprisoned in concentration camps.
Glass follows four main narrators: Sylvia Beach, the owner of the famous Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, where she helped launched the career of James Joyce and mingled with the likes of Ernest Hemingway; Dr. Sumner Jackson, surgeon at the American Hospital and member of the Resistance, who helped smuggle Allied airmen out of France; Countess Clara de Longworth Chambrun, director of the American Library and related to the leading political families of both the United States and France; and Charles Bedaux, a French-American businessman, who was accused of treason and collaboration by the Americans for his liaisons with the Germans.
This is quite a specific take on WWII history. Glass makes the best use of primary sources to provide specific and intimate insights into his main characters and how they respond both negatively and positively to the Nazi invasion, but the narrative can take on a disjointed flow as he attempts to weave together the different stories. To cast his net wider, and to embed his narrators within larger events, Glass also incorporates cameo appearances from other Americans. The cameos almost steal the show, especially the stories from black Americans such as Josephine Baker and Eugene Ballard, members of a thriving jazz scene in Paris who have made Paris their home to escape oppression in segregationist America. This book presents a personal and morally complex portrayal of life under occupation, but I was left wondering how representative and selective these personal experiences were for the majority of Americans in Paris.