133 pages. Picador. $18.00
Reviewed by Abigail Holstein
12.29.06

In her memoir, The Coldest Winter – A Stringer in Liberated Europe, Paula Fox captures history on a human scale. Written without a hint of reflective sentimentality and with the presence and perspective of the twenty-three year-old journalist she once was, Fox recreates her year reporting for a British wire service in post-war London, Paris and Warsaw, through the characters and moments that have remained clear in her memory for over sixty years. Recalling a drunken Churchill in London, weeping, with mascara running down his face, or playing cards in Paris with a Holocaust survivor whose rolled sleeves expose her faded tattoo, Fox finds the knots of incongruity, violence and beauty that catch our imagination, and together, convey a panoramic view of the recovery of Europe after WWII. Fox appears in her memoir as a character more than as a reminiscent author, reliving more than retelling her story. This approach brings 1946 Europe and young Fox to life, preserving the essential uncertainty of the time, of her own life at the time, that made the year ripe for such remarkable stories and experiences. What we see of Fox, though, is someone changed by that year, by seeing “something other than myself.” Her memoir is also her own history on our scale, written so that we may see the very same thing.

At twenty-two, Paula Fox departed New York for London, hoping, “if I could only find the right place, the difficulties of life would vanish.” Fox is never specific about what she expects to find across the pond, or what fantasy she might be after—as she says, she felt she was “barely a walk-on in my own life.” She stayed a few weeks with one couple, a few months with another, all friends of friends or of her father’s, until she met through one of her hosts, Sir Andrew, a “British peer,” who operated a small wire service. For a bit of money, he would send her to Paris and then on to Warsaw to report on, in his words, “life lived among the ruins.”

Fox’s rendering of the three cities is conjured through her encounters with their memorable characters, from which she creates three vastly different visions of post-war life. Amongst her wealthy hosts in London, Fox reveals a class structure that even the blitz couldn’t dissemble. She recalls the arrogance of one conversation between her host’s affluent friends backstage at a play about “the difficulties of middle-class marriage,” discussing the “servant problem” in ridiculous anecdotes about unreliable help, dinner parties, the plentiful “fresh fruit and vegetables, hard to come by in those days of some rationing and much scarcity.” The vibrant life of the rich in London was in stark contrast to Paris, which looked “muted and…bruised and forlorn,” but is more poignantly revealed in the paranoia of her card partner at her pension—a Holocaust survivor who “was the only boarder who tied a string around her bottle of wine because, she told me, if someone else…drank from it, she wanted to know. Just that. To know.” But it was in Warsaw and Poland, the most devastated places she visits, the most desperate to resurrect themselves, where nothing is as it seems that Fox reveals the complex heart of the war’s debilitating destruction. Warsaw itself, in The Coldest Winter on record in twenty years, hides its corpses, Fox is told, under the snow. Or the Jews, whom many speculated were still hiding in the city. In Warsaw, she meets Mrs. Grassner, a Midwestern housewife reporting for a women’s Jewish organization. Mrs. Grassner seemed out of place among Fox's group, and yet while unable to reconcile her place among the journalists, she fit within the aftermath of the war, as a Jew who was devastated that she had lost no one to the Nazis. Simultaneously looking for enemies of her people and an answer to the feeling that, without this loss, she was “a ghost,” the foolishness, absurdity, and tragedy of Mrs. Grassner typifies the turmoil that grips Warsaw.

While the author never exerts any serious influence on any of the people around her, they all inspire significant reactions in her. Remarkably, this balance of influence seems accurate to what actually happened. For Fox, each memory represents a perspective that contributed to her understanding of any given place. More than an eloquent literary device, though handled as deftly as if that were its sole purpose, Fox’s translation of time and place into character and memory is also a re-enactment of how she herself explored the complexities of London, Paris, and Warsaw. She writes, “I was at the center of the world…Then I wondered if any place a person stood did not seem the center.” Her amusement, befuddlement, disgrace, is delivered to us with its original sincerity.

Most captivating, though, is the context of that sincerity. The sense of uncertainty that Fox so masterfully maintains by pulling back from reflection and keeping each recollection neatly tied to its place in time is the electrical current of the memoir. It is how Fox lived that year, and how most Europeans, struggling for survival, lived that year. Even as she returns to America, she writes, “I was afraid of the past, I was afraid of the future…I could only conceive of events over which I had no control.” The way Fox captures the uncertainty of her life and her time lights her memories with a living energy that is completely unique to The Coldest Winter.

In the years that follow her journey, Fox realizes that her travels had “shown me something beyond my own life,” and she has arranged her memoir to illuminate the vastness of this single year in her life and in post-war Europe’s. It is worth noting though, at times, she is too far into the past to come out and guide us and, in turn, there is an occasional disconnect between individual recollections. Although this is jarring, it pulls you closer to text, to see where she had seen a connection that perhaps you had not. Nevertheless, in its initial read or reconsidered, The Coldest Winter is a transporting read, and its reward is a feeling of a journey completed.

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