The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe

The Coldest Winter is one of Paula Fox's earliest books, and I had meant to read it years ago. It is a memoir of a year spent traveling through Europe when she was twenty-two. The year was 1946. World War II had ended just a year earlier, and much of Europe still showed the ravages of war--heaps of rubble, food rationing and other shortages, a somber and depressed citizenry wherever she went, a gray sky and freezing cold weather to match the mood of the people. She visited London, Paris, Warsaw, Barcelona, Madrid and many smaller villages in the surrounding countryside. When I first read about this memoir, I knew I wanted to read it. I, too, had wanted to travel through Europe as a young girl, so I was eager to read what happened to her as she ventured forth into unpredictable, precarious situations without itinerary or plans, living each day as it comes, willing to be a stranger in a strange country with few, if any, acquaintances and little knowledge of its laws, traditions and customs. I was born in Germany. Though I came to the States at a young age, I often wondered how my life might have been had my family been able to remain in Europe. I often dreamed of returning, to make a trip as Fox had done, to see if perhaps I might feel more at home there than in my adopted country, and might even prefer to live there. I identified with the author and read her stories, her many impressions and observations as though they were my own. Fox had little money for her trip. I also would have had limited funds. She stayed with friends of her parents or distant relatives, took what jobs she could find such as reading scripts for small sums or writing a few articles for a small British news service. I turned every page, wondering what would happen next to this wandering young woman. In her inimitable writing style, Fox relates a somewhat harrowing experience in London one afternoon when she was in her small room reading a manuscript. There was a sharp knock on the front door. I looked through the mail slot, and saw dark cloth. I opened the door with my gut clenched. A bobby towered over me, or maybe it was only his helmet that made it seem so. He touched it with two fingers, addressed me as miss, and asked me if I held a work permit. I shook my head no. He said I'd need to come to the police station with him. Once there, I filled out a form that required me to swear not to take employment that a British citizen could do and, further, to work only at part-time jobs. I had heard that one needed a work permit but had not taken the requirement seriously. Perhaps it was myself I did not take seriously. For a moment I grasped at the shadowy nature of reality; of how one moves through it like a mist, forever thinking of what comes next and how impalpable the present is. I made my way back to my apartment chastened. I held the work permit in my hand, consoled by its meaning: The government protected its citizens and took my presence in England seriou

I am addicted to memoires of all types and this is one of the most touching in its honest, sparse style. I also enjoyed Fox's memoire "Borrowed Finery." I didn't like her novels -- Poor George, Desperate Characters, and The West Coast -- all that much. They, too, are sparse, but somehow in a novel I find the lack of detail and concrete information more troubling.

Those who did not like this book must not have read any of Paula Fox's other books. Her sparse, unsentimental style may not appeal to anyone, but to those who know and love her writing, of which there are many, this book is representative of her work and highly recommended. Many of the vignettes are profoundly moving.

Paula Fox's impressionistic memoir of her year in Europe immediately after the war in 1946, "The Coldest Winter," paints small scenes that evoke larger feelings, much like her earlier memoir, "Borrowed Finery." In both books Fox shifts, sometimes abruptly, from one experience to another, moving through the memories that stuck in her mind through the years. She was only 23 at the time of her European trip, a willing, but not lighthearted soul. "The Coldest Winter" benefits from a reading of "Borrowed Finery," the 2001 award-winning memoir of her childhood, now out in paperback. The impressions of a fairly impoverished American innocent, alone and quiet, though by no means meek, among the war worn people of London, Paris, Warsaw and Spain take on greater heft when you know the trauma and rootlessness of Fox's own childhood. The daughter of glamorous, feckless, disturbed parents, Fox had been left at a Manhattan foundling home days after her birth, "by my reluctant father, and by Elsie, my mother, panic-stricken and ungovernable in her haste to have done with me." Her parents were Hollywood screenwriters and her father was an alcoholic of the impulsive type who might insist his daughter visit then leave her with friends - or forget to go the railway station to pick her up at all. Her mother remained consistently hostile and terrifying. There was, however, love in her life. Reverend Elwood Amos Corning, a Congregational minister in a poor, rural upstate community, took her in at five months old and provided unconditional love and safety. What he could not do, however, was protect the child from the erratic claims of her parents. Each week after the comforting ritual of his church service she would have a moment of panic. "My unquestioning trust in Uncle Elwood's love, and in the refuge he had provided for me...would abruptly collapse. In an instant I realized the precariousness of my circumstances. I felt the earth crumble beneath my feet. I tottered on the edge of an abyss. If I fell, I knew I would fall forever. "This happened too every Sunday after church. But it lasted no longer than in takes to describe it." Eventually the day she dreaded arrived. After a horrific year in Malibu with her parents, from which she was rescued by Uncle Elwood, her Spanish grandmother, Elsie's mother, shows up to claim her once and for all. "She is of my blood," Candeleria tells Elwood. "It was far worse than a fairy tale enchantment. My parting from the minister was an amputation." Two of Elsie's four oddball brothers live with Candeleria. One of them is almost as terrifying as Elsie while the other is kind and playful. He lifts her out of the depression that has crept over her. But nothing can make her world safe again. "The Coldest Winter," has a melancholy, almost desperate aura that readers who have not read the earlier memoir will find perplexing, having no way of knowing that Fox is running off to Europe to escape her New York life and the searing me

This is what a memoir should be. The Coldest Winter does not purport to be a history of the immediate post war countries that she visited but, rather, a story of herself, a frightened young woman with ambitions that she didn't understand and her struggle to reach up to a higher calling that was driving her. The writing is exquisite, this is as much about the cold that enveloped Europe that winter as it is about the people or the politics that lurched along uncertainly after the holocaust. Anyone expecting to read a study of the post war European condition should look for another book. This a small gem by one of our best writers and a true national treasure.