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    The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe
    The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe
    The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe
    Ebook130 pages1 hour

    The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe

    By Paula Fox

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In this elegant and affecting companion to her "extraordinary" memoir, Borrowed Finery, a young writer flings herself into a Europe ravaged by the Second World War (The Boston Globe)

    In 1946, Paula Fox walked up the gangplank of a partly reconverted Liberty with the classic American hope of finding experience—or perhaps salvation—in Europe. She was twenty-two years old, and would spend the next year moving among the ruins of London, Warsaw, Paris, Prague, Madrid, and other cities as a stringer for a small British news service.

    In this lucid, affecting memoir, Fox describes her movements across Europe's scrambled borders: unplanned trips to empty castles and ruined cathedrals, a stint in bombed-out Warsaw in the midst of the Communist election takeovers, and nights spent in apartments here and there with distant relatives, friends of friends, and in shabby pensions with little heat, each place echoing with the horrors of the war. A young woman alone, with neither a plan nor a reliable paycheck, Fox made her way with the rest of Europe as the continent rebuilt and rediscovered itself among the ruins.

    Long revered as a novelist, Fox won over a new generation of readers with her previous memoir, Borrowed Finery. Now, with The Coldest Winter, she recounts another chapter of a life seemingly filled with stories—a rare, unsentimental glimpse of the world as seen by a writer at the beginning of an illustrious career.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 17, 2006
    ISBN9781466802384
    The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe
    Author

    Paula Fox

    Paula Fox (1923-2017) is the author of the memoirs The Coldest Winter and Borrowed Finery, six novels, and a number of children's and young adult books, including the Newberry Award-winning children's book, The Slave Dancer. She lived in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for The Coldest Winter

    2.5/5

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    • 1/5
      I asked library to reserve The Coldest Winter, a book about the Korean War, and they sent me this one. Same title but this one, a pallid, bloodless wandering memoir covering a 22 year old's travels in Europe post WW2. Best feature--it's short. How could someone who went thru those times remember only the inane. Or maybe she thought someone had already written everything else.
    • 5/5
      This is a perfect book. Quiet, exquisitely lean choice of exactly the right word and image and thought and feeling at exactly the right time, evocative
    • 2/5
      I wanted to really like this, but had a hard time. It was perhaps too spare, the writing distilled a little too much for my taste. I found it interesting the things that made impressions on her. They seemed somewhat random. I wish she had added photo credits, identified photo contents and used captions. I found myself curious to know when exactly she had written this, recently, many years after the actual experiences, or closer in time to 1946 and just recently published it.

    Book preview

    The Coldest Winter - Paula Fox

    New York, New York

    I was born in New York City, and I have lived in or around it for a good part of my life. Some neighborhoods, although altered nearly beyond my recognition, are charged for me with the emotions of long-past events—at least during those moments I pass through them.

    For what seemed one hundred years, I paid rent to landlords for wildly differing lodgings in various sections of the city. I was always trying to find a way to get out of New York during that time, a time when I imagined that if I could only find the right place, the difficulties of life would vanish.

    The first time I recall glimpsing New York as a whole was from the deck of a Hudson River Dayliner when I was four or five years old. But perhaps I found the view of Riverside Drive and its towers oppressive, for I remember I soon returned to a spot near a railing from which I could stare down at the heads of the musicians of a band, two decks below, sitting on camp chairs and playing Hail Columbia for the pleasure of the passengers. Seventeen years later, in 1946, a year after the end of the Second World War, I saw the city again—from the outside—as I stood on the deck of a partly reconverted Liberty Ship on which I was sailing to Europe. I didn’t look at it for long that second time either. I was getting away at last!

    By then I had come to know New York well, the way you know a city where you’ve had jobs—most of them pretty awful—that keep you more or less fed and out of the weather. No matter what my circumstances were, I always found the city hard to live in. But there were moments of vividness and promise, even of glamour. It is startling to recollect them. As Cesare Pavese wrote in his diary, The Burning Brand, Real amazement comes from memory.

    People, some of them now names on headstones, were walking around the city in the days of my youth, and you might run into them in all sorts of places. I met Duke Ellington on a flight of marble steps leading down from an exhibit by the painter Stuart Davis. I heard Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter play his guitar and sing The Midnight Special at a party in Greenwich Village for a cause I’ve forgotten. In a jazz club on 52nd Street that was called, I think, Kelly’s Stable, Billie Holiday turned from the bar as I was passing and asked me—Darlin’, would you mind?—to pick up her fur coat, which had fallen from her shoulders to the floor behind her bar stool.

    Bettmann/CORBIS

    Later that same evening, the club doors were shut and I was among the people who stayed inside, sitting around a table, listening to her sing far into the night. I was escorted to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem by a boyfriend, where I watched dancers bend and circle and hurl their partners into the air and, miraculously, catch them, to the music of two bands led by Cootie Williams and Lucky Millinder and then was, myself, drawn into the dance, wondering when the floor would give way and then not caring whether it did or did not. From Charles Street, where I borrowed a one-room apartment for a while, I could walk a couple of blocks to a bar on Seventh Avenue and hear Art Tatum play the piano for the price of a glass of beer, one dime.

    One evening I went to Lewisohn Stadium to hear Paul Robeson sing. Planes flew overhead, and searchlights played against the sky. Quite suddenly, Robeson walked out onto the stage in a navy blue suit. He was so splendid in appearance, his profound basso so exalted, that the audience itself, I among them, seemed to feel an answering exaltation.

    I met him twice after that concert, once in San Francisco during the run of Othello and a second time in New York City a few weeks after I had returned from Europe.

    Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

    Memory often seems to begin in the middle of some story. I had a friend who was a friend of Robeson’s. Robeson was spending time with his son, Pauli, who had come to the city from his prep school, somewhere to the north. I recall the four of us in a taxi, but not where we had met before catching it. We were going to a nightclub, Café Society Uptown, to hear a French chanteuse, Lucienne Boyer. There was conversation but I don’t recollect saying a word, though I must have done so for I remember Robeson looking at me and speaking, smiling. I stole a quick glance at his hands. Someone had told me that when he played football at Rutgers, his own teammates had deliberately trodden on his hands during practice sessions.

    The doorman of the club and the maître d’hôtel who hurried toward us through a shadowed foyer, both recognized Robeson, at whose request we were taken to a small room with a balcony that overlooked the café’s main space. Lucienne Boyer was singing in French as we sat down. She stood in a shower of light in a gold dress. She sang a few songs in English; one of them was The Man I Love. Robeson hummed along with her, filling our little room with his plangent voice, though it was inaudible to the people sitting below. He whispered to me suddenly to sing too. I quavered out a few lines but then fell silent, overwhelmed at the thought of singing with Paul Robeson—well, almost singing.

    Afterward we all went to Grand Central, where Pauli was to take a train back to school. It must have been nearly midnight. In those days, railroad stations were often deserted at such an hour. As we walked down the broad staircase, our footsteps echoed throughout the vast reaches of the terminal, where not even a single late traveler could be seen, hurrying to the last train home. The four of us could have been alone.

    Then, from every corner, silently flying toward us like swallows, came the baggage porters in their red hats, converging on Robeson and his son as they reached the bottom step. He stood among them for several moments, talking and listening, laughing at something that one of the redcaps said to him. That is where the memory ends: Robeson on a step, laughing, his head thrown back, his son standing next to him, one of the porters gesturing toward a platform entrance as though Pauli’s train was about to leave and they must run now to catch

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