In 1946, Paula Fox boarded a converted Liberty Ship and sailed to Europe, following a well-worn trajectory of young Americans seeking to find themselves. This 22-year-old’s journey took on an added layer of meaning, however, as she was heading toward a continent still in ruins after the war. The stories of what she found are told in The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe, the follow-up to her well-received first memoir, Borrowed Finery.
Fox, a writer with six novels and a Newbery Award-winning children’s book to her credit, maintains a sparse, steady tone throughout The Coldest Winter, whether writing about good times or painful memories. Her short chapters go by like scenery through the window of a moving train as she rapidly recounts experiences in Paris, London, Warsaw distilling each into remarkably acute images.
Before turning to Europe, she writes briefly of her life in New York, alternating between a world-weariness that belies her then-tender years, but not the life chronicled in Borrowed Finery ("For what seemed one hundred years, I paid rent to landlords"), and sheer delight at life in a city where she could happen upon the likes of Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday. As she puts it: "People, some of them now names on headstones, were walking around the city in the days of my youth, and you might run into them in all sorts of places. I met Duke Ellington on a flight of marble steps leading down from an exhibit by the painter Stuart Davis." Her meetings with ordinary people overseas are no less interesting. After listening to a Holocaust survivor during a tram ride through a frigid Prague night, she writes: "I was unable to take in the meaning of his story except suddenly, and then for only a few seconds at a time. When I did, it was as though I grasped broken glass in my hand." Yet, in spite of the devastation, despair and shock she encounters, Fox returns to the U.S. with a new sense of self. She has had the proverbial experience of an American abroad after all.
