No Place To Lay Ones Head Francoise Frenkel Stephanie Smee by Francoise Frenkel, Stephanie Smee 9780143784128, 0143784129 instant download after payment.

"A bitter, beautiful and important book."   -  Robert Fisk, The Independent

Franoise Frenkel was a Jewish woman born in Poland and enamoured of all things literary and French. In 1921 she set up the first French-language bookshop in Berlin, recognising the craving for French culture in that city in the wake of the First World War. Her business was a success - attracting diplomats and celebrities, authors and artists. But life in Berlin for a Jewish woman and a foreigner soon became untenable Frenkel was forced to flee to Paris and compelled to keep moving as she attempted to survive in a world disintegrating around her. Her observations of and interactions with the French people, both those who would give her up to the Nazi authorities and those who risked their own lives and families by offering her refuge, show how humanity strives to assert itself even in the darkest times. 

Frenkel's book, written with piercing clarity and sensibility in the immediate aftermath of her escape to Switzerland, was originally published in 1945 in Geneva. But only recently was a copy of this forgotten work discovered and a decision made at French publisher Gallimard to republish it, seventy years later, with a moving preface from Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano.

Françoise Frenkel was born in Poland in 1889. In 1921 she set up a French-language bookshop in Berlin, which Frenkel was forced to flee from after her bookshop was raided by the Nazis in the 1930s. She made a final desperate and successful attempt to reach neutral Switzerland, where this memoir was eventually published in 1945. It was rediscovered in an attic in 2010 and published again by Gallimard in France in October 2015. This is the first English-language edition.