In Michele Zackheim's The Last Train to Paris, an 87-year-old woman tending her garden in upstate New York decides to go through her notes from the 1930s, when she was a foreign correspondent in Europe.
R.B. Manon (Rosie to her friends) writes a column for the New York Courier until she gets a chance to cover the fear and insanity gripping Paris and Berlin. Rosie is the only woman in the Paris newsroom, and though she was raised by a mother who was determined to deny her half-Jewish heritage, that heritage leaves her vulnerable. Her situation is further complicated by her mother's unexpected arrival and by her discovery of the secrets of her lover, a Jewish engraver controlled by the Nazis. Based on a true-life abduction in 1937, the action centers on Rosie's glamorous, cousin Stella, a Jewish actress who disappears in Paris after dating a handsome German who speaks perfect English.
The Last Train to Paris is a densely populated short novel with dozens of colorful characters crowded into its pages--a vicious managing editor, an alcoholic, suicidal fellow reporter, an exiled Chinese poet, a distressed elderly aunt, a black American saxophonist and even the famous French author Colette.
As it progresses, the novel becomes more and more the story of a mother and daughter given a last chance to connect. In the confusion as the last train for Paris pulls out of Berlin, Rosie will be forced to choose between her mother and her lover. Zackheim's honest and melancholy story about the brutal psychological and physical toll of war leaves a lingering sense of regret and loss. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.