Recently I had the good fortune to receive an advance reading copy of
Charles Kaiser’s new book, The Cost of Courage, the story
of the Boulloches, a French
family living in Paris under Nazi occupation. The book is a knockout on every
level: as history; as a wise and insightful meditation on human nature; and
most of all, as the gripping true tale of three fascinating siblings who had to
make the most difficult decisions under the most dire of circumstances,
decisions with lifelong and even generational costs. I cried more times reading it than I care to admit (bad for my brand, I
know)—especially at the beautifully resonant last line and the final photograph.
Part of what
makes the story so compelling is how long it has remained untold, and how
personal it is to the author. It’s not an exaggeration to say that if Kaiser
hadn’t met and fallen in love with this remarkable family in 1962—through an
uncle, Henry Kaiser, who stayed with the Boulloches as an American army
lieutenant stationed in Paris in 1944—the details of what André, Christiane,
and Jaqueline Boulloche achieved and suffered as part of the French resistance
would never have been known. The siblings were determined not to speak of it, instead
silently commemorating their losses with a private ceremony every year at the
family plot at Père-lachaise, Paris’s largest and most
celebrated cemetery, a ceremony that always included their children and
grandchildren but also left the new generation feeling like outsiders, unable to really grasp
the mystery of what André,
Christiane, and Jaqueline had sacrificed and endured. But Kaiser’s long presence in the Boulloches’s lives and in particular his close relationship with Christiane won out, and the result is a
Tiresias-like tale, told by someone with the access of an insider and the
perspective of an outsider.
I have to add
that Kaiser’s publisher, Other Press, has packaged
the book beautifully. The cover art, jacket copy, photographs…everything
distills, amplifies, and resonates with the story itself. In my experience,
publishers tend to get these things wrong more
often than they get them right, but when it happens this well, it’s really a
pleasure.
I finished the book a week ago, and
it’s been on my mind ever since. Sometimes consciously, where I’ll find myself
thinking of certain scenes— André, shot by the Gestapo and unable to access his
cyanide pill before he’s captured; several heart-stopping narrow escapes; a
beautiful moment at the end, where Kaiser…well, you should read it yourself.
But other times it’s more just a lingering sense, a presence you feel even
if you’re not consciously aware of it. It’s a lovely feeling, and for me, one
that only happens with the really great books. This isn’t a long story, yet
upon completion it carries the resonance of something epic. I highly recommend
it.