Sins of the Innocent by Mireille Marokvia
Memoir Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1-932961-25-9 / ISBN-13: 978-1-932961-25-6
5½ x 8¼ / 288 Pages / $24.95 / September 2006
Summary | Praise | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Widgets | Bio | Events
Summary
In her first memoir—Immortelles: Memoir of a Will-o’-the-Wisp—Mireille Marokvia described her life growing up in a small village near Chartres, France, in the first decades of the 20th Century. We learned in that beautiful book that the people in her life so long past still live like ghosts in her memory.
This extraordinarily sensitive and assured writer brings that same dear voice and sharp vision to bear in her new book. But Sins of the Innocent covers the most difficult years of her life.
From Paris in 1939, a young Mireille follows her artist husband, Abel, when he returns to Germany to care for his mother. Once Hitler begins his invasions across Europe the displaced couple must find a way to survive the war in a country they both consider foreign. Abel finally takes work, but it requires extensive travel through the war zones, and so Mireille is left essentially alone. With France lost to her, and horribly misfit in wartime Germany, suspected by her neighbors of spying for the Allies, Mireille has to define a life for herself, a life that is as quiet as possible in a dangerous world.
Sins of the Innocent is a lyrical portrait of those harsh years, infused with doubt, anger, and the author’s love of life. These were the years in which Mireille learned the difference between quiet persistence and courage—during WWII in Europe, a time when so many had to find their own small places in history. It was the era that determined who Mireille Marokvia was—and who she still is.
Read Mireille Marokvia’s account of the making of the manuscript in “History of a Story.”
Praise
“For the duration of the war, the couple, who married in a Nazi civil ceremony, lived an existence that lurched wildly between the absurd and the horrific. Mireille Journet, now Marokvia and in her late 90’s, captures it movingly in her precise, beautifully written memoir, a strange tale of two bohemians caught up in a totalitarian nightmare.” -William Grimes, The New York Times
“Mireille, left alone and watched as a possible French spy in Germany, drew on a well of strength to live a quiet, determined life and survive the war. Passionate, straightforward, and enthralling, this new memoir offers a glimpse of the seldom-seen life of a French citizen in Germany during World War II…. Highly recommended …”—Library Journal
“Marokvia follows up her beautiful Immortelles…, with this equally graceful account of her life during and immediately after World War II, beginning in 1939 and ending 10 years later. Although the events she recounts are frequently stark and cruel, her descriptions are elegant and packed with the full spectrum of emotion. And her story of a young girl forced to become a woman before she is quite ready, in the face of oppression and terror, is deeply affecting. Marokvia, who is nearing 100 years of age, has been writing for six decades and with experience has come great depth and passion. This is one of those memoirs you don’t just read, you experience. And you come away having learned a great deal about a person you’ve never met and a time and place not your own.” —Booklist
“Wow! How fortunate we all are to have [Marokvia’s] representative rendition of what it was like for most of the European population. I think I immediately identified with her due to her very strong portrayal of the fear and misapprehensions that she and her husband and their circle of friends and neighbors experienced. Mireille Marokvia is an amazing woman/writer and her book deserves a lot of attention.”—Elly Smith, Parkplace Books, Kirkland, WA
“What do you think you’ll be doing when you’re 97? Mireille Marokvia… has used that year of her life to publish a beautiful, surprising book about her years as a young French woman, mostly alone, in Germany throughout World War II.…One of the joys of this memoir is that while the danger mounts, Marokvia writes about domestic life, adding details that we would never learn from war movies or the memoirs of generals…. The author provides a picture of what it was like to be trapped in a war that [we] would never have imagined. I hope teachers of history and literature will find this book and teach it, besides enjoying it themselves.” —The Durango Herald
“…I just had to thank you for handing me Mireille Marokvia’s magical, memorable book…I didn’t want it to end, it was so beautifully written and so firmly engaged with my heart. What a woman! And what a parable for our times. I’ve never read a book about the ordinary people of Germany during Hitler’s years, and there I found endless portraits of people just like everyone else everywhere, who see the world through the various and imperfect lenses of their lives. It was heartbreaking, hopeful, tender, wonderfully restrained at the right moments, and absolutely unforgettable. I’m so glad to have her story in my own memory files now….” —Catherine Dees, writer and book lover
“While both [Mireille and her husband] hated the Nazis and refused to collaborate actively, neither felt able to do anything against the regime. Abel avoided the military by…traveling throughout the Reich sketching for various government publications, while Marokvia variously worked as a weaver, translator and subsistence farmer. They considered themselves innocent of Nazi atrocities, yet sullied by the passive sin of complicity. At times they contemplated suicide or murdering Hitler, but then went on with finding housing, food and work, like other citizens…. illuminating.” —Publishers Weekly
“In the midst of World War II, Mireille Marokvia was a young French bride, trapped with her artist husband in Nazi Germany. While her parents and other relatives and friends fought with the French resistance, Mireille found her own ways to cope and her own artistic ways to rebel. In a German weaving school, she quietly wove a garment inspired by the French flag. After she was expelled from the group, a sympathetic friend found her an isolated post in northern Germany, where she befriended a young Jewish woman who was hiding her identity. Marokvia has reconstructed the tales of those dangerous days in an engrossing memoir…When her anti-Nazi husband went to visit his widowed mother in Germany, the two were not allowed to leave the county. Even when she had a Gestapo officer’s family as housemates, she managed to continue her quietly subversive activities until the final days of World War II, when she was arrested and interrogated by German authorities.”—Las Cruces Sun-News
Bio
Mireille Marokvia was born in a village near Chartres in 1908. Her first essay appeared in France over 60 years ago, and her first publication in English, a children’s book, was released in 1959. She is the author of a previous memoir, Immortelles: Memoir of a Will-o’-the-Wisp (1996). Marokvia has studied in France (French Literature and Philology at the Sorbonne); Stuttgart (hand weaving at the Kuntsgewerbeschule); and the United States (English at Columbia University); as well completed a writing fellowship at The MacDowell Colony. She has lived in France, Italy, Germany, Mexico and the United States. Since 1975 she has lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico,and is working on her third memoir. She turned 98 on December 7, 2006.
Excerpt
Then the horse chestnut trees burst into bloom; the dizzy Parisian spring took center stage. I was on my way to a party one evening with a group of art students when one of them—I had known him in my father’s classroom—whispered that this was not the kind of party I should go to. Anyway, our group was becoming too boisterous for my taste. We were passing a Russian bar. I went in and slipped behind the black marble counter. The bartender only smiled. (These were the blessed days when bartenders, policemen, concierges and the like still knew how to smile.)
After some time I ventured to peek over the counter and stared into a handsome, tormented face, young yet lined, blue eyes smiling but veiled with melancholy.
“I am sad tonight,” he said. “Come, drink vodka with me.”
I did.
He spoke with a foreign accent, was whimsical, charming. I never remembered what he said.
Like most French, I was fascinated and awed by the Russians, their literature, their history, their fate. I met them daily, the taxi drivers, bartenders, musicians, waiters and waitresses who had, in another life, been generals, grand dukes, grand duchesses, princes and princesses. Proud, romantic, sometimes arrogant, they were the White Russians, who could laugh and cry and sing all at once.
I also knew the other Russians, the Red Russians. A friend—a model—had taken me to the studio of Lavroff, the sculptor. A man as quiet and powerful as a tree, a fervent communist, he had an unlikely obsession with Pavlova, the famous ballet dancer and idol of the White Russians. There were only sculptures of Pavlova in Lavroff’s studio, in bronze, marble, and plaster.
Thin, shabby students came, drank tea and talked, and talked, and preached in bad French about the new faith that was conquering the world. Did they ignore the sculptures for the sake of a talk, a cup of tea, or a bowl of borscht?
Shortly after Pavlova died in 1931, the White Russians sponsored a gala in her memory in the Paris opera house. For one night out of a dream, Russian generals wore their uniforms and their medals, princesses and grand duchesses their grand couturiers dresses, their tiaras and their diamonds. I watched from the upper galleries in the company of Lavroff’s model and some communist students. The sculptor’s bronze Pavlova stood in a place of honor in the lobby. Was Lavroff among the Red or among the White Russians that night? I never knew. What I knew was that the Russians were too enigmatic for me.
So was the handsome Russian I had met in the spring of 1935.
I avoided the Russian bar vicinity, the artist’s quarter. Twice, from far away, I saw him. Twice, I fled.