Leslie Maitland, AB'71
Author

In Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed, journalist Leslie Maitland tells the dramatic story of her mother's life, set against a deeply researched historical portrait of Jewish life in Germany, occupied France, a little-known Cuban detention camp, and within the refugee community of New York City's "Fourth Reich." The story starts in 1942, taking the reader from a pier in Marseille, France. There, an 18-year-old German Jewish girl, pried from the arms of the Catholic Frenchman she yearned to marry, was compelled to board one of the last ships to escape the country before the Nazis choked off its ports. As the Lipari carried Janine and her family to Casablanca on the first leg of a perilous journey to Cuba, she would seek comfort in Roland's parting vow that "whatever the time we must wait, you will be my wife." Five years later—her dreams obstructed by war and then by her family—Janine started anew with an American husband. Yet she never ceased mourning her lost love, and her daughter Leslie eventually set out to find him, with surprising results.