Within hours after the Reichstag burned and the Nazis took over in 1933, my grandfather Kurt Wolff fled Germany. He spent most of the next eight years in France, a time and a place that each of these books--some fiction, some biography, some literary history--captures so well.
Without the help of Varian Fry, subject of these two biographies and the novel The Flight Portfolio, Kurt never makes it to the US, and isn't able to send for my father in 1948--and of course he would never have met my mother.
Meantime, I'm very hopeful that my step grandmother Helen Wolff's novella, Background for Love, will appear in English soon!