The Coldest Winter is a wonderfully different sort of memoir. Paula Fox at twenty-two decided to leave New York and sign on as a “stringer” for a small British news organization. What is different about this memoir has everything to do with who the young Paula Fox must have been, starting with the unlikely enlistment in going to Europe a year and a half after the end of World War II. Let's face it, it wasn't just an ordinary job; minus the scrambled borders, the devastation, the extreme lack of infrastructure and most of the common conveniences we take for granted the world was also terribly different, big and extreme. “The cold was so intense that like many others I took to wearing sheets of newspaper under my coat. There was hardly any public transportation, a few streetcars to whose sides people clung like flies on a lump of sugar, two or three buses, a few tiny cars with no windshield wipers and perpetually fogged windows, and some motorbikes with wooden seats strapped on the front, from which after the shortest ride, one toppled like a stone.”


There is compact observation but this slim book is not so much about the places this young woman goes: London, Paris and by December of that year Prague, then on to Warsaw and Spain, as much as the “characters” she meets along the way. Something in the tone of voice, the photographs sprinkled throughout, brought to mind the best writing managed by W.G. Sebald. There is an immediate veracity, an unsentimental view. The characters are what this book is all about: the Corsican politician who she interviews and falls in love with, the man waiting in the French autumn garden who wants to ask the young American woman about her country, Mrs. Helen Grassner with her tight grey hairstyle covering the Warsaw elections for a mid-western Jewish women's organization back in the States, and the orphaned boy with the peg leg selling newspapers outside the Hotel Polonia's entrance. Everyone appears at face value with opinions, questions and behaviors intact. Fox has an uncanny ability to convey (and obviously remember) the way the adult world appears to a young person, each adult one big inscrutable mystery after another.


There is a lot of brilliant writing here: “At some point, the conversation turned to les mutilés. I was startled to learn that in French it meant the wounded. Mutilated has a powerful sense of malice aforethought, the infliction on another savagery and torture. Though the war had ended a year earlier, the trains still returned these soldiers to Paris. After that evening I watched for them, walking with canes or splints or bandages wrapped around their heads like turbans. For a few days, the English meaning of the word refused to give way to the French.”


There is no forced closure, revised psychological sense, summing up or contrived significance. This book is about a young woman traveling. The trip is war ravaged Europe—extreme, bombed-out, and stark. It is a collection of deft sketches, vignettes of the people she met, worked alongside, traveled with, and befriended. The narrator rides the form of the travelogue. The main character acts as our guide, roughing it and trying to make sense of it all. This is not a romantic revision; it is a spare, realistic visitation of the young self and the old world. It is marvelously done. The resonance of this particular understated memoir is amazing.