Author Biography

Sigrid MacRae is the coauthor of Alliance of Enemies, about the undercover collaboration between the American OSS and the German Resistance to end WWII. She holds a graduate degree in Art History from Columbia. She lives in New York City.

Review

"A World Elsewhere is a literary masterpiece, fully realized, and a perfect work of art, a daughter's eloquent monument to her courageous mother. It is also a reminder that war spares no one but wounds everyone it touches."—Edmund White, author of Inside a Pearl

"This is family history as story, carefully researched, beautifully written, and impossible to put down."—Blaine Harden, New York Times bestselling author of Escape from Camp 14

"A World Elsewhere is extraordinarily brave and intensely disturbing....MacRae had access to a cache of letters than any family historian would kill for, and she does a superlative job of combining the most intimate familial details with the sweep of big, convulsive history."—David Laskin, author of The Family

"Only a person of superb literary gifts and exquisite sensibility could have done justice to this great story. The excitements and horrors of wartime are brought vividly to life, and the reader remains spellbound with each turn of the von Hoyningen-Huene family saga. The heroic mother, the romantic, idealistic father, the band of beautiful spunky children—I will never forget any of them."—Sigrid Nunez, author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag

"This subtle, beautifully crafted book tells a moving story of love, exile and survival from the frozen Neva river to the Loire valley, from Hitler's Berlin to the shores of Maine. A vivid family memoir and an unforgettable portrait of a woman who braved all to bring her family to safety."—Caroline de Margerie, author of American Lady

"Sigrid MacRae manages to find a window into Germany during World War II we've never looked through before, an unputdownable true story of courage and love, beautifully realised on the page, and a reading experience that will break your heart in a good way."—Mary-Rose MacColl, author of In Falling Snow

"In this compulsively readable telling of an American mother's escape with six children from wartime Germany, Sigrid MacRae brings to life the struggle faced by refugees everywhere, as well as acts of kindness that redeem the atrocities of war. I rooted for Aimee's ingenuity and courage all the way home!"—April Smith, author of A Star for Mrs. Blake

"Deftly fashioned....MacRae does a fine job of portraying the fear and uncertainty felt by her mother, living in a strange land and torn by loyalties."—Kirkus

"Readers would have to have the proverbial hearts of stone not to sympathize viscerally and be moved by Aimée and her story."—The Washington Times

Review Quote

" A World Elsewhere is a literary masterpiece, fully realized, and a perfect work of art, a daughter's eloquent monument to her courageous mother. It is also a reminder that war spares no one but wounds everyone it touches."-Edmund White, author of Inside a Pearl "This is family history as story, carefully researched, beautifully written, and impossible to put down."-Blaine Harden, New York Times bestselling author of Escape from Camp 14 " A World Elsewhere is extraordinarily brave and intensely disturbing....MacRae had access to a cache of letters than any family historian would kill for, and she does a superlative job of combining the most intimate familial details with the sweep of big, convulsive history."-David Laskin, author of The Family "Only a person of superb literary gifts and exquisite sensibility could have done justice to this great story. The excitements and horrors of wartime are brought vividly to life, and the reader remains spellbound with each turn of the von Hoyningen-Huene family saga. The heroic mother, the romantic, idealistic father, the band of beautiful spunky children-I will never forget any of them."-Sigrid Nunez, author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag "This subtle, beautifully crafted book tells a moving story of love, exile and survival from the frozen Neva river to the Loire valley, from Hitler's Berlin to the shores of Maine. A vivid family memoir and an unforgettable portrait of a woman who braved all to bring her family to safety."-Caroline de Margerie, author of American Lady "Sigrid MacRae manages to

Excerpt from Book

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2014 Sigrid MacRae Prologue The box was beautiful. My mother had bought it in Morocco many years ago, and as a child, I admired it in secret, stroking the tiny pieces of mother-of-pearl inlay on the surface, its patterns conjuring faraway places. Its ivory keyhole held a key with a striped ribbon attached. Turning the key always produced a soft pling-plong, but never opened the box. After many decades, my eighty-five-year-old mother was tired of Maine winters and was moving to Arizona. Parceling out her possessions and the memories they held to her five surviving children, she now held the box out to me, saying simply, "Your father''s letters." I had always suspected that the box held them. Exotic and mysterious, it was the perfect receptacle for the treasured relics of a husband long dead and a father I had never known. It contained a chapter of my mother''s life that she had closed long since, one I was reluctant to re-open. The moment was freighted with feeling; her expression suggested things that I was afraid I could respond to only with tears. Neither of us felt comfortable in such emotional territory, and we cut it short. I stowed the box tenderly in the car along with the other pieces of her life she had designated for me: a miscellany of books, pictures, rugs, silver. As the car pulled away, she stood, small and contained, the enormous firs by the garage dwarfing her as she waved good-bye. Behind her, morning sunlight skittered across the bay. At home the box sat--still beautiful, but still steadfastly, stubbornly locked--keeping its secrets. Though my mother had given it to me, I felt that breaking this family reliquary open by force was wrong. Besides, I was reluctant to discover what the box held. Inside was the person who had changed the shape of my mother''s life, whom my older brothers and sisters loved and remembered, a real person to everyone in the family except me, the youngest. For years his mythical presence had loomed large, but as an absence--an immense absence. Time had gradually healed my mother''s wounds, but I was wary of causing pain by asking about him. In fact, I realized that I bore some resentment toward the man I had held responsible for many miseries. My mother had moved on, but for me he remained unfinished business. Opening the box--resurrecting him--would mean finding not only the man who became my father, but also the man responsible for the "Nazi!" a first-grade classmate had yelled at me as a six-year-old, newly arrived in the States from Germany. I didn''t know then what that was, but whatever it was, I knew it wasn''t good. The taunt stayed with me. It was thrown at me in many other guises, and eventually I blamed my father. I always felt different growing up. My family was an anomaly in rural Maine--a clan of outsiders. There was my unfamiliar, unpronounceable last name: von Hoyningen-Huene. Even just von Huene was bad enough; I longed to be Linda or Susan, Smith, Jones, or Brown. There was the language, and there was the taint of being German. And in spite of my mother''s tireless efforts to always provide a beautiful place to come home to, my sense of dislocation never budged. There was nowhere that felt unmistakably like "home." My father''s parents, Baltic Germans exiled from Saint Petersburg to Germany after the Bolshevik Revolution, had suffered exile bitterly, feeling displaced, lost, and alien--an awareness that also left an indelible mark on my father''s life. His younger sister once told me that the only place she ever felt homesick for was Saint Petersburg, a city she had last seen as a twelve-year-old, more than seventy-five years before. Such feelings and memories were endemic; they came with the territory, demanding the lion''s share of space in the exile''s little bundle of belongings. Maybe for us, as for so many, they ran in the family. My persistent hunt for home began long before my mother gave me the Moroccan box, and much of it circled around my father. He had always been a presence, if iconic, and I was hardly ignorant about him. His portrait hung in our living room along with one of my parents as a young couple in Paris in 1929, by a celebrated photographer cousin, George Hoyningen-Huene. Assorted forebears kept them company on the walls. I knew about his past; stories about him were family lore. There were letters, diaries, and poems from his turbulent early years. I had read his letters from France as an officer in Hitler''s army, where an occasional passage sounding alarmingly like Nazi propaganda had made me squirm, yet his awareness of history, his wide learning, his sympathy for people, and his enviable optimism shone from every page. His brief diary from the Russian front had also made me question what his being in Hitler''s army really meant. Still, for me, he remained buried in the uneasy murk of history. I had read about the backdrop to his life in his father''s elegiac memoir. Spinning a magical lost world, it detailed life in tsarist Russia--a civilization that disappeared like Brigadoon beneath the Bolshevik mists. Typed by my father''s younger sister, with annotations and a genealogy, it had been privately printed and distributed to all far-flung family households. Along with memoirs by other ancestors, aunts and uncles, and many letters, it was part of a jumble of suggestive ephemera: portraits; poems; a small double-headed imperial Russian eagle in diamonds, once part of a tsarist medal presented to some forebear. Individually, these items all spoke, offering pieces of a puzzle, spurring my imagination, but providing little narrative. Together, they acted as a mute chorus, nudging me to become their amanuensis. It occurred to me that putting the pieces together might help me find where home lay. My mother died about ten years after she gave me the box of letters, and not long after, turning the key opened it. Inexplicable, I thought, magical, until my husband confessed that he had tinkered with the lock. After all these years, my father revealed himself quickly. Always dating his letters, numbering pages, he sometimes noted the day of the week, even the time of day. He had been a trained historian after all, yet this was not mere record-keeping; he was also truly sharing his days. His was an ordered mind and a giving nature. The voice of my mother''s young lover, so long silent, emerged from his letters like a genie out of a bottle. From the pages of one letter slipped silken, nearly transparent poppy petals of the palest salmon pink--the tender gesture of a long-ago love. So this was the person who had lurked inside the box all those years: no bland Hartford, Connecticut, swain, no dull future captain of an insurance empire. Small wonder my mother was bouleversée when they met in France; more than seven decades later, he was charming me. His habit of enclosing flowers in letters was one she later adopted, but here, though she would have foreseen my eventual intrusion, I still felt I was prying. A flurry of envelopes, addressed to Hartford in June, July, and August of 1928, was meticulously dated in my mother''s h∧ this batch was clearly important. My mother was ushering me into their young love. I began to read. As I came to grips with his loose, generous hand, the father I had never known came spectacularly, breathtakingly alive. Finding sleep after such an introduction was nearly impossible. In the dark, I grappled with this vivid interloper I had known only as a kind of household god. His letters destroyed that status completely, shifting the emotional landscape I had established over a lifetime as the child of a single parent. This was the other side of the parental equation. It changed everything, demanding a revision of my views of my mother and a rearrangement of the family constellation. One letter stood out. Postmarked London, February 11, 1928, it was addressed to my mother in Paris. Their young romance is blossoming quickly. If she will meet him, . . . your great wish will be fulfilled: You shall put on your best clothes . . . and we shall go and do something grand and brilliant. Do you insist on my wearing full dress? Won''t this be an historic night: Miss Mayflower flirting with the "Hun." Apart from shattering his remoteness completely, the letter put its finger squarely on my own puzzling provenance. Clearly the man who had left me his name and his profile was no cliché Hun at all, no bellicose militarist with monocle and bristling moustache, not even absolutely German--as his Russian diary attested. Young, lively, fully aware of the label history had affixed to him, and with an acute sense of humor, he was demolishing all my preconceived notions. The Miss Mayflower he was referring to in impeccable English, though of Mayflower stock, was obviously not my worn, hard-pressed, ever-practical mother, but a carefree spirit, wanting, as she had written him, "to put on my best clothes and go on a bat with you," adding, "It must be most romantic to have a young and ravishing female creature, head-over-heels in love and following you all over Europe." The pieces on my mother''s side of the puzzle were varied too, if less exotic. An American cousin spent many hours interviewing my mother, meticulously transcribing the resu< another put together a comprehensive genealogy. Late in her long life when she woke early, my mother often spent those mornings writing recollections on a pad propped against her knees in bed. After she left Maine for Arizona, I tried to make sense of her scrappy, loose-leaf pages, but with a continent between us, distance, my own reticence, and life intervened, leaving me with regret

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