Obsessed with Valy’s story, Wildman began a quest that lasted years and spanned continents. She discovered, to her shock, an entireworld of other people searching for the same woman. In the course of discovering Valy’s ultimate fate, she was forced to reexamine the story of her grandfather’s triumphant escape and how this history fit within her own life and in the process, she rescues a life seemingly lost to history.
Years after her grandfather’s death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters in a file labeled ‘Correspondence- Patients A-G.’ What she found inside weren’t dry medical histories; instead what was written opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family’s prewar Vienna. One woman’s letters stood out- those from Valy-Valerie Scheftel-her grandfather’s lover, who had remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed Austria.
Valy’s name wasn’t unknown to her-Wildman had once asked her grandmother about a dark-haired young woman whose images she found in an old photo album. ‘She wasyour grandfather’s true love,’ her grandmother said at the time, and refused any other questions. But now, with the help of the letters, Wildman started to piece together Valy’s story. They revealed a woman desparate to escape and clinging to the memory of a love that defined her years of freedom.
Obsessed with Valy’s story, Wildman began a quest that lasted years and spanned continents. She discovered, to her shock, an entireworld of other people searching for the same woman. In the course of discovering Valy’s ultimate fate, she was forced to reexamine the story of her grandfather’s triumphant escape and how this history fit within her own life and in the process, she rescues a life seemingly lost to history.
‘This elegant and moving memoir tells the story of the author’s search through Eastern Europe for Valerie Scheftel, the lover her grandfather left behind when he fled Nazi persecution, in 1938. Scheftel seems to have vanished into the Nazi machine, but Wildman obsessively tracks down any record she can find in the hope of piecing together the story. In doing so, Wildman, who belongs to the third generation of Holocaust writers, and the final generation to have contact with survivors, turns a family story into a universal, historical one, and answers questions about how we can find new ways to talk about the Holocaust and its memory.'The New Yorker
'InPaper Love, Sarah Wildman isn’t only on a quest to discover the fate in Nazi Germany of a young and brilliant woman whose moving letters she finds among her beloved grandfather’s papers after his death-though that quest is fascinating and suspenseful. She also draws narrative drama from wrestling with the genre itself- as she knows, and as the many guides whom she gets help from remind her, the pursuit of family Holocaust 'stories that have no ending’ has become something of an American staple. Wildman’s prose bristles with ambition and ambivalence, as she challenges the myth of her grandfather’s triumphant odyssey, yet also can’t resist looking (in vain) for a ‘happy Holocaust story’ in the girl left behind.‘ The Atlantic
'A hidden trove of letters sparks Sarah Wildman’s feat of historical detective work,Paper Love, which probes her family’s 'myth of a spotless escape’ from Europe in 1938-and recaptures the voice of a young woman doctor caught in a tightening web, and the textures and emotions of her vanished world.‘Vogue
'Wildman meticulously pieces together the brave and tragic life of the woman her grandfather left behind when he fled Austria on the eve of World War II.'O, The Oprah Magazine
