Winter kept us warm

de Anne Raeff, Anne Raeff

Ulli is a young woman squatting in a dismal, empty Berlin apartment, one year after the war has ended. She's scraping together a living as an interpreter between American GIs and the wide-eyed local girls eager to meet them. One night, Ulli meets two soldiers who will change her life: Leo, handsome and ambitious and desperate to escape his small-town upbringing; and intellectual, asthmatic Isaac, whose refugee parents had fled Russia for New York. Winter Kept Us Warm follows Ulli, Leo, and Isaac through the next six decades of their lives--from Berlin to postwar Manhattan, 1960s Los Angeles, and contemporary Morocco. A marriage. Two children. And yet only one parent. At the core of this novel is the mystery of how this came to be: a twisting narrative that explores the dark corners and lantern slides of these characters' lives, revealing in pieces and fragments what became of their long-ago love triangle set against the brutality of postwar living. Winter Kept Us Warm is an evocative story of family, strained by the cruelty of war and its generational repercussions. A novel of the heart, filled to the brim with unforgettable characters stitching together the deep threads of love, friendship, loyalty, and, of course, loss.