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Every year for all the thirty they have been married, Louis Begley
and Anka Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In Venice for
Lovers, the couple has fashioned an homage to the City of Water. In
her essay, Muhlstein charmingly describes how becoming friends with
restaurateurs has been an unsurpassed means of getting to know the
city and its inhabitants--Venetians like Ernesto, whose restaurant
they have dinner in every night for many years, and who tells them
of the great flood that nearly destroyed the beautiful city. They
spend blissful hours at Da Fiore, named by The International Herald
Tribune one of the ten best restaurants in the world but which
retains its rustic simplicity.
In his novella, Begley writes a story of falling in love with--and
in--Venice. His twenty-year-old protagonist is lured to the city by
the older woman he adores, only to be left to fend for himself. But
he later discovers a lasting love for Venice itself--not an
uncommon occurrence, as Begley's brilliant portrayal of the city's
place within world literature demonstrates: Henry James, Marcel
Proust, and Thomas Mann were all illustrious predecessors in whom
Venice inspired dreams of love and passion.
Each year of their 30-year marriage, Louis Begley, the
award-winning author of Wartime Lies, and his wife Anka Muhlstein
have spent long, enjoyable months in Venice. They write and live
there and over the decades La Serenissima has become their second
home. The owners of their favourite restaurants have become their
friends and they share the lives of the locals, far off the
welltrodden tourist track. Begley tells the story of how he fell in
love with and in Venice, though as he makes clear when writing on
Venice's pivitol role in world literature, he was not the only one
- Henry James, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann are only three of his
most illustrious predecessors.
In Poland, in 1939, the comfortable, secure world of assimilated
Jews is blown away by the invasion of the Third Reich. Maciek's
father disappears into the war's vortex, leaving the orphaned child
with his acerbic and beautiful Aunt Tania. It is her cool
inventiveness, in their dramatic flight through a landscape of
oppression, that will ensure their fragile survival.
"Extraordinary...Rich in irony and regret... the] people and
settings are vividly realized and his prose is] compelling in its
simplicity."
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
As the world slips into the throes of war in 1939, young Maciek's
once closetted existence outside Warsaw is no more. When Warsaw
falls, Maciek escapes with his aunt Tania. Together they endure the
war, running, hiding, changing their names, forging documents to
secure their temporary lives--as the insistent drum of the Nazi
march moves ever closer to them and to their secret wartime lies.
"From the Paperback edition."
From the prize-winning author of Wartime Lies, an anatomy of the
infamous prosecution of a Jewish officer attached to the French
Army's General Staff, with profound implications for our own time.
In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French
artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was
court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attache
in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The
sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil's
Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years
later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was
completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France
apart, pitting Dreyfusards-committed to restoring freedom and honor
to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by
another-against nationalists, anti-Semites, and militarists who
preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes
committed by ministers of war and the army's top brass in order to
secure Dreyfus's conviction. Was the Dreyfus Affair merely another
instance of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism?
In Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, the acclaimed novelist draws
upon his legal expertise to create a riveting account of the
famously complex case, and to remind us of the interest each one of
us has in the faithful execution of laws as the safeguard of our
liberties and honor.
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