Janina David
Sadly, Janina David was unable to take part personally in these author interviews.
As a Holocaust survivor and bestselling author, her wartime memoir A Square of Sky (the first of three volumes of autobiography), became an international bestseller following its publication in 1964. In 1982 Leo Lehmann adapted the book into a mini TV series for Germany's national broadcasting station ARD. Of the book, Caroline Moorehead of The Independent wrote: "It is more than 400 pages long, and impossible to put down."
Her writing is clearly an important contribution to the canon of literature that documents one of the darkest periods of human history.
Janina's latest book, The Hopeful Traveller, comes out in September, so I thought the least I could do was share the following details about her latest release:
Each story is narrated by a single woman keen to shed her past life and embrace the future. But they are all searching for their anchor in the present. So In France, we are introduced to Mattie who feels 20 again; in Poland Magda revisits her impoverished family; in Uzbekistan, Diana lets a fellow tourist kiss her; and in Germany, Lynn loses her luggage on the Düsseldorf train. These are bitter-sweet moments of freedom in postwar life that involve foreign travel, the rekindling of old friendships and the search for new ones.
These women are self-confident and affluent in an era prior to the birth of the feminist movement, and although they are conventional in their expectations of men, they are nonetheless always a step away from displacement and alienation.
