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Françoise Frenkel (1889–1975)
Author of A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman's Harrowing Escape from the Nazis
About the Author
Works by Françoise Frenkel
A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman's Harrowing Escape from the Nazis (2000) 499 copies, 28 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Frenkel, Françoise
- Birthdate
- 1889-07-14
- Date of death
- 1975-01-18
- Burial location
- Nice, France
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- France
- Birthplace
- Lodz, Poland
- Place of death
- Nice, France
- Places of residence
- Berlin, Allemagne
Nice, France - Education
- Sorbonne, Paris, France
- Occupations
- libraire
bookseller
autobiographer
Holocaust survivor - Short biography
- épouse de Simon Raichenstein.
Juive polonaise, tient une librairie française à Berlin, rentre en France en juillet 1939. Se cache en France jusqu'à passer en Suisse. Publie un livre racontant ces événements tout de suite après la guerre. Ce livre a été redécouvert et publié en 2015 par Gallimard.
Françoise Frenkel was born Frymeta Idesa Frenkel in Lodz, Poland, to a Jewish family. She studied music in Leipzig and French literature in Paris. After earning a doctorate at the Sorbonne, she founded the first French bookshop in Berlin in 1921 with her husband Simon Raichenstein. She organized lectures by French authors visiting Berlin, including André Gide, Colette, André Marois, and Aristide Briand. Following the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany in 1933, Rachenstein fled to Paris, while Françoise remained in Berlin until a month before the outbreak of World War II in 1939. She went to Paris, but it's not known whether she was reunited with her husband, who was arrested in 1942, sent to the Drancy detention camp, and deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed. When Germany invaded France in 1940, Françoise hid from the Nazis for two years. She was arrested and imprisoned while attempting to cross the border from France into Switzerland, and finally managed to escape to Switzerland in 1943. There she wrote the autobiographical Rien où poser sa tête (No Place to Lay Her Head), published in 1945 in Geneva. She returned to France after the war and died in Nice in 1975. Her book received little notice until a copy was found in an attic in southern France in 2010, and republished by Gallimard in 2015 with a preface by Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano.
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Statistics
- Works
- 2
- Members
- 500
- Popularity
- #49,493
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 28
- ISBNs
- 33
- Languages
- 10
- Favorited
- 1
The French title of this book translates to "No place to lay one's head", which is a more accurate representation of the contents than the English title. Only chapter 1 really told you about the bookshop, which was Frenkel's dream, and which she ran from 1921 to her leaving in 1938. The rest is about her life in France from 1939 and through the German occupation, showing how her life grows more and more restricted. Though the threat of deportation is always present, her day-to-day life is at times rather boring. And yet, she manages to convey a generally positive attitude and love for French people and literature, despite the way she's treated as a refugee by the government and some of the townspeople. In fact, she's much more forgiving of their human foibles than I would be. Many books have been written about the awful events in World War 2, but it's still powerful to read a memoir about it, especially one written so close to her experiences.… (more)