A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York

“Schiffrin evokes the bittersweet tang of émigré life in New York.”
—The New York Times Book Review

André Schiffrin was born the son of one of France’s most esteemed publishers, in a world peopled by some of the day’s leading writers and intellectuals, such as André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. But this world was torn apart when the Nazis marched into Paris on young André’s fifth birthday.

Beginning with the family’s dramatic escape to Ca…