Arcadia Public Library

"The timely, powerful memoir of a man unjustly charged with a crime for helping his relatives, refugees from Syria. For trying to save his in-laws, who were fleeing certain death in Syria, Stéphan Pélissier was threatened with fifteen years in prison by the Greek justice system, which accused him of human smuggling. His crime? Having gone to search for the parents, brother, and sister of his wife, Zéna, in Greece rather than leaving them to undertake...

"Even though Mila is no longer 9 years old, her childhood memories sometimes overtake her. What happened there, halfway between dreaming and insomnia, continues in other forms here, twenty years later. Whether it's seeing a very old photo taken by her father, a red balloon rolling at her feet, or just lining up at a wicket, something still trembles in her. If the clouds sometimes remind her of where she came from, she guesses that they can also teach...

"Élisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, Irène Némirovsky , a once popular novelist, a Russian émigré from an immensely rich family, a Jew who didn't consider herself one and who even contributed to collaborationist periodicals, and a woman who died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger....