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In this haunting memoir that reflects on the Holocaust and its legacy, award-winning author Sandell Morse discovers stories of bravery and resistance enacted during WWII in southern France. In the course of six years at a writing residency in France, during which she met with survivors and historians, she painstakingly pieces together the puzzle that had been beguiling her over the years: what was the real story of the French Jews under the Vichy government during the Second World War? Driven by her dogged curiosity and determination to uncover the truth, and with a fossilized shell she'd found in the wall of the Jewish quarter in Paris as a talisman, she seeks deeper meaning and understanding of her own Jewish heritage. By gradually gaining the trust of those she interviewed, Sandell reconstructs incidents of the civilians' extraordinary courage in resisting the Vichy regime and Nazi occupation. From the survivors' harrowing tales of escape, ingenious subterfuge, and just plain luck, she learns of a nunnery that was a safe-house for refugees; a rabbi who gave his life to save hundreds of Jewish children; the local gendarme who, endangering his own life, tipped the Resistance off to the upcoming Nazi roundups. In this year that marks the 80th anniversary of the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Auschwitz, this memoir reflects on a crucial time in our world's history that still reverberates today and provides a moving tribute to those who resisted oppression and fascism.

Author Biography

Sandell Morse is a non-fiction writer whose works have appeared in several major literary magazines, including Ascent, Ploughshares, and Solstice. She has received a Notable Mention in the Best American Essays 2013, and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She lives in Maine.

Review

" The Spiral Shell is an evocative, probing, heartfelt memoir, as rich in character and detail as the best fiction. There are all kinds of reckonings here: personal, historical, spiritual. There is a vivid present as well as a vividly imagined past, a voice that is at turns charming, grieving, outraged and wry. Sandell Morse illuminates with wisdom and grace Eli Wiesel's timeless injunction that, 'For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.'" Alice McDermott , Author, A Bigamist's Daughter , Charming Billy
"Stories of political resistance from previous eras have become especially urgent to me to read now. So it was a pleasure to read my friend Sandell Morse's debut memoir, out today. It's a sort of that family detective story so many of know, in one wayof someone trying to find out more about a family's heritageand then stumbling into another story, found across the world, in France, while on a writing retreat, that provides much more than just answers. Elegant, erudite, passionate, I congratulate her on seeing this book through to print." Alexander Chee, Author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
" The Spiral Shell' s strength lies in what Morse pieced together about a village under occupation....Stories such as the remarkable ones she has unearthed are really the only way of doing it." Thomas Urquhart, The Portland Press Herald

Long Description

April 2020 will mark the 80th Anniversary of the fall of France to Nazi Germany, and the establishment of the provisional government of the Vichy state, a puppet of the Axis regime, to carry out the arrest and deportation of all Jewish civilians. In the course of her writing residency over a three-year period in the village of Auvillar, the author learns of acts of bravery and rebellion on the part of several of the Jewish families and individuals who risked their lives to save innocent refugees and children orphaned by the Holocaust, and gradually gains their trust enough for them to share the details of their harrowing experiences of rebellion and resistance. The author in turn discovers truths about her own life and Jewish heritage in America, which she now sees in the light of the bravery and selflessness of those who elected to act and not stand by idly in the face of oppression and genocide.

Review Quote

"The story Morse tells teaches the importance of empathy and connection. Like all accounts of the Holocaust, it looks at the struggle for justice and the challenge to retain our humanity in dark times." Rose City Reader

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