Description
"Sigrid MacRae's wonderful family memoir is set in the turbulent time of WWII. Her mother, who married a Russian exile in the late 1920s, wound up a widow with six children after her husband was killed fighting for the Germans. After finding a long-unopened box of love letters between her parents, MacRae set out to discover the father she never knew, and in the process came to understand the extraordinary, bi-continental and multigenerational history of her family"--Provided by publisher.
Read More
The extraordinary love story of an American blueblood and a German aristocrat—and a riveting tale of survival in wartime GermanySigrid MacRae never knew her father, until a trove of letters revealed not only him, but also the singular story of her parents’ intercontinental love affair. While visiting Parisin 1927, her American mother, Aimée, raised in a wealthy Connecticut family, falls in love with a charming, sophisticated Baltic German baron, a penniless exile of the Russian revolution. They marry. But the harsh reality of post–World War I Germany is inescapable: a bleak economy and the rise of Hitler quash Heinrich’s diplomaticambitions, and their struggling family farm north of Berlin drains Aimée’s modest fortune. In 1941, Heinrich volunteers for the Russian front and is killed by a sniper. Widowed, living in a country soon at war with her own, Aimée must fend for herself. With home and family in jeopardy, she and her six young children flee the advancingRussian army in an epic journey, back to the country she thought she’d left behind.A World Elsewhere is a stirring narrative of two hostages to history and a mother’s courageous fight to save her family.
Read Less