Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The German Girl
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.armandolucascorrea.com/
CITY: Manhattan
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.armandolucascorrea.com/bio-1.html * http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Armando-Lucas-Correa/523665630 * http://www.themillions.com/2016/10/where-fiction-heralds-facts-on-armando-lucas-correas-the-german-girl.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2010024489
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2010024489
HEADING: Correa, Armando Lucas, 1959-
000 00534nz a2200133n 450
001 8175957
005 20100212060526.0
008 100211n| acannaabn |n aaa c
010 __ |a no2010024489
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca08392656
040 __ |a IlMchBWI |b eng |c IlMchBWI
100 1_ |a Correa, Armando Lucas, |d 1959-
670 __ |a His En busca de Emma, 2009 |b t.p. (Armando Lucas Correa) cover p. 4 (b. GuantaÌnamo, Cuba; journalist; editorial director of People en Español; lives in New York)
670 __ |a Personal website, Feb. 10, 2010 |b (Armando Correa; b. 1959)
PERSONAL
Born 1959, in Guantánamo, Cuba; immigrated to the United States, 1991; partner of Gonzalo Hernandez; children: three.
EDUCATION:Studied at Instituto Superior de Arte and University of Havana.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and editor. Tablas, Cuba, editor, 1987-91; El Nuevo Herald, Miami, FL, staff writer, 1991-97; People en Español, New York, NY, senior writer, 1997-2000, senior editor, 2000-03, assistant managing editor, 2003-06, executive editor, 2006-07, editor in chief, 2007–.
AWARDS:Outstanding achievement awards from National Association of Hispanic Publications and Society of Professional Journalism.
WRITINGS
Contributor to Time.
SIDELIGHTS
Armando Lucas Correa is a journalist and editor. Born in Cuba in 1959, he immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s and continued his work as a journalist. Correa eventually became the editor in chief for People en Español. He published the memoir En busca de Emma: Dos padres, una hija y el sueño de una familia in 2009, recounting the process of having, with his male partner, a daughter through surrogacy.
Correa published his first novel, The German Girl, in 2016 through a translation into English by Nick Caistor. Eleven-year-old Hannah lives in her home in Berlin in 1939 in ignorance of the dangers posed by the impending Nazi threat. She and her family are able to board the M.S. St. Louis and sail for refuge in Cuba. Despite having prior approval, most aboard the ship are denied the right to come ashore and are sent back to Europe. In a parallel story, eleven-year-old Anna worries about her despondent mother after her father disappears in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City.
Interviewed by Martha Anne Toll for Bloom, Correa discussed how he first came to know about the story of the M.S. St. Louis. Correa recalled: “My grandmother, the daughter of Spanish immigrants, was pregnant with my mom when the St. Louis arrived in Havana. What happened there—and after they left the port of Havana—deeply impacted her, and she never tired of telling me throughout my childhood that for the next one hundred years Cuba would pay dearly for what it had done to the Jewish refugees.” He also talked about the reasons for modeling Hannah and Anna’s voices after his own daughter, Emma, who was the same age as the characters when Correa was writing it. He admitted: “I wanted the story’s drama to be told from the perspective of a young girl, in a young girl’s voice. It seemed more powerful to me that way.”
In the same interview, Correa talked about his intentions for writing the story of the M.S. St. Louis in such a way that it draws parallels with present-day issues. He stated: “I wanted the tragedy of those refugees to read like a drama we are living today. I avoided direct references to Jews, Hitler, Fidel Castro.” Correa acknowledged that there is a connection between his novel and his first book, En busca de Emma. In particular, “there are chapters that intertwine. There’s a dream that is repeated, almost like a leitmotif in both books. It’s a recurring dream where the protagonist finds himself in the middle of the ocean, lost, and finds himself back on an island.”
Writing in Library Journal, Catherine Coyne called the novel “an engrossing and heartbreaking Holocaust story.” Coyne noted that Correa’s “listing of the passengers’ names at the end of the book adds to its power.” In a review in BookPage, Hope Racine opined that even though it “is heartbreaking, the novel never wallows.” Racine concluded that “Correa’s characters and details are beautifully crafted, creating an insightful and poignantly timed exploration of the refugee experience.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly suggested, “Though the novel covers an important piece of history, the story of the Rosenthals never quite comes together.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor similarly mentioned that “the Cuban scenes seem a little flat and drawn out, and the ending … is unexpectedly maudlin.” The reviewer concluded by conceding that the novel is “a mostly well-told tale that sheds light on a sorrowful piece of Holocaust history.”
Reviewing the novel for the Millions Web site, Toll observed that Correa “writes with a political agenda as well—to out Cuba not only for denying sanctuary to most of the St. Louis’s ill-fated passengers, but also for erasing the crime from Cuba’s history books.” Toll pondered: “Given Correa’s professional credentials, might this book have packed more punch as nonfiction? Perhaps a futile inquiry, but Correa’s journalistic instincts are apparent not just in his clear reporting on the voyage of the St. Louis, but throughout the book. For example, he introduces Jehovah’s Witnesses to make the very important point that the Nazis singled this group out for torture and brutality due to their refusal to accept totalitarian authority.” Toll later claimed, “Through fiction, Correa has captured not only the unspeakable anxiety of protecting a family while fleeing for one’s life, but also the endless pain of deracination, emotions from which Hannah is never released.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, November, 2016, Hope Racine, review of The German Girl, p. 36.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2016, review of The German Girl.
Library Journal, October 15, 2016, Catherine Coyne, review of The German Girl, p. 71.
Publishers Weekly, August 1, 2016, review of The German Girl, p. 46.
ONLINE
Armando Lucas Correa Home Page, http://www.armandolucascorrea.com (May 8, 2017).
Authors Guild Web site, https://www.authorsguild.net/ (May 8, 2017), author profile.
Bloom, https://bloom-site.com/ (January 18, 2017), Martha Anne Toll, author Q&A.
Millions, http://www.themillions.com/ (October 27, 2016), Martha Anne Toll, review of The German Girl.
THE GERMAN GIRL
LA NIÑA ALEMANA
EN BUSCA DE EMMA
BIO
MEDIA
THE GERMAN GIRL
ARMANDO LUCAS CORREA
THE GERMAN GIRL HAVANA NAZI NOVEL JEWISH HOLOCAUST
With 20 years of experience in Hispanic media, award-winning journalist and author Armando Lucas Correa is the Editor in Chief of PEOPLE EN ESPAÑOL, the top selling Hispanic magazine in the U.S. with more than 7 million readers every month. In his role, he oversees the editorial content of the magazine, PeopleEnEspanol.com and its digital editions for tablets and mobile.
He also oversees the brand's social media strategy and events like 50 Most Beautiful (New York), the 25 Most Powerful Women (Miami), as well as Festival
People en Español (New York).
In Cuba, and entered the world of print journalism in 1988 when he was appointed the editor of Tablas, a national theater and dance magazine based out of Havana, Cuba.
Correa is the recipient of various outstanding achievement awards from the National Association of Hispanic Publications and the Society of Professional Journalism. He is the magazine's primary spokesperson and regularly appears on national Spanish-language television programs discussing celebrity news and scoops.
His book En busca de Emma (In Search of Emma: Two Fathers, One Daughter and the Dream of a Family) was published by Rayo, Harper Collins in 2007 and for Aguilar, Santillana (Mexico) in 2009. His first novel The German Girl will be published in October in Enlgish and Spanish by Atria Books, a division of Simon and Schuster.
He currently resides in Manhattan with his partner and their three children.
With 20 years of experience in Hispanic media, award-winning journalist and author Armando Correa is the Editor in Chief of PEOPLE EN ESPAÑOL, the top selling Hispanic magazine in the U.S. with more than 6 million readers every month. In his role, he oversees the editorial content of the magazine, PeopleEnEspanol.com and its digital editions for tablets and mobile.
He also oversees the brand's social media strategy and events like 50 Most Beautiful (in NYC), and the 25 Most Powerful Women and Star of the Year (both in Miami), as well as Festival People en Español, an annual 2-day, 2-night live consumer event held in San Antonio, TX.
He is an innovative leader with deep knowledge of the U.S. Hispanic market and experience in creating initiatives focused on the growth of the brand. As an editor and content creator, Correa has developed programs focused on the profitability of People en Español across different platforms.
Under his tenure, the magazine has enjoyed unprecedented growth and was named in Adweek's "10 Under 50" Hot List in 2007 and 2009 and has been recognized by GLAAD for its coverage.
Correa is a familiar face on national television and radio shows, both in the U.S. and Mexico, where he shares his expertise on Hispanic media and entertainment stories.
Prior to being named editor, Correa served as the magazine's executive editor charged with supervising the development, reporting and writing of celebrity profiles and human-interest stories. Under Correa’s watch, Peopleenespañol.com's unique visitors has increased 84% in the past year, making it the most exciting Hispanic destination on the web for Hispanics looking for the latest celebrity news, photos, gossip and up-to-the-minute fashion and beauty trends.
Before joining PEOPLE en Español, Correa was a staff writer at El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language spin-off of The Miami Herald, where he profiled personalities from Gloria Estefan to Peruvian ex president Alberto Fujimori. He began his career as a dance and theater critic in Cuba, and entered the world of print journalism in 1988 when he was appointed the editor of Tablas, a national theater and dance magazine based out of Havana, Cuba.
Correa is the recipient of various outstanding achievement awards from the National Association of Hispanic Publications and the Society of Professional Journalism. He is the magazine's primary spokesperson and regularly appears on national Spanish-language television programs discussing celebrity news and scoops.
His book En busca de Emma (In Search of Emma: Two Fathers, One Daughter and the Dream of a Family) was published by Rayo, Harper Collins in 2007 and for Aguilar, Santillana (Mexico) in 2009. He currently resides in Manhattan with his partner and their three children.
Patience and Obsession: Q & A with Armando Lucas Correa
Posted on January 18, 2017 by BLOOM Leave a comment
by Martha Anne Toll
Armando Lucas Correa grew up in Havana, established himself in Cuba as a journalist with a focus on the arts, and emigrated to the US in the 1990s. He is now editor of People Magazine en Español. Correa’s debut novel, The German Girl, is a fictional retelling of the passage of the S.S. St. Louis, which left Hamburg in 1939 filled with Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Everyone on board had landing permits in Cuba, but the Cubans refused them entry. After being subsequently denied entry by both the US and Canada, the ship was forced to return to Europe, resulting in the murders of at least a quarter of it passengers, and untold suffering by many more.
The German GirlCorrea brings a deep humanity to his work. The German Girl is narrated from the perspective of two young girls, Hannah and Anna, one in the 1930s and one in the present, each dealing with struggles that reflect the greatest humanitarian and political challenges of their day. Kirkus Review called the novel an “ambitious debut” spanning seventy-plus years “as two girls tell their gripping stories.” Publishers Weekly found Correa’s novel to be “a timely reminder of the plight of refugees, and the real consequences of denying them aid.” It was my privilege to interview Correa about the sources of his inspiration, and what drives his artistic vision.
Martha Anne Toll: Would you tell us a bit about your life in Cuba and how you came to emigrate?
Armando Lucas Correa: Mine was a matriarchal family. I grew up in Havana with my grandmother, mother, and sister in the Vedado neighborhood, in a house I used as a basis for the Cuban house in The German Girl. In college, I studied drama analysis and journalism and I began my professional career as a theater and dance critic. I was the editor of Tablas, an arts magazine. In the 1990s, I was invited to participate in a conference at Pratt Institute in New York, and stayed in the US.
MAT: How did you establish your journalism career here in the US?
ALC: I arrived in Miami in 1991 and started working as a freelancer at El Nuevo Herald, The Miami Herald’s Spanish-language sister publication. I worked for El Nuevo’s entertainment section. I also wrote various dance critiques. Eventually, I was hired full time as a reporter and covered it all: from elections, to politics to crime.
MAT: How did you come to writing fiction after a career in journalism?
ALC: I’ve always written, ever since I was a child. The first thing I ever published—other than essays—was a play, “Final Exam,” that won an award in Havana. I then started working on a novel about 1980s Cuba that I will never publish. It’s about a group of young people wandering around an imaginary Havana. It was more of an experiment, to play with language. I haven’t re-read it since I put it away almost twenty years ago. Years later, an editor for Rayo/Harper Collins approached me and asked me to write about how I became a father via surrogacy. That book was called In Search of Emma [En Busca de Emma]. Johanna Castillo, now my editor at Simon and Schuster, read the book in 2009. From the day it was published, we’ve been in talks about me writing a novel.
MAT: How did In Search of Emma inform your writing in The German Girl?
ALC: There are chapters that intertwine. There’s a dream that is repeated, almost like a leitmotif in both books. It’s a recurring dream where the protagonist finds himself in the middle of the ocean, lost, and finds himself back on an island.
MAT: Can you tell us how you learned about the story of the St. Louis, and why you decided to write about it?
ALC: My grandmother, the daughter of Spanish immigrants, was pregnant with my mom when the Saint Louis arrived in Havana. What happened there—and after they left the port of Havana—deeply impacted her, and she never tired of telling me throughout my childhood that for the next one hundred years Cuba would pay dearly for what it had done to the Jewish refugees.
MAT: Can you talk about your choice of using the voices of the two girls, Hannah and Anna, to tell the story? Were there specific challenges in writing from these perspectives?
ALC: My daughter Emma, who is the same age as Hannah and Anna, gave a voice to my novel. When I started writing it, she was a nine-year-old girl who was about to turn ten. My characters’ ages grew at the same rate that Emma grew in real life. I wanted the story’s drama to be told from the perspective of a young girl, in a young girl’s voice. It seemed more powerful to me that way. The main challenge was to make that tone credible. At times, I had to diminish the intensity so that despite the fact that Hannah lived in a turbulent time in history and Anna was living in the middle of a family crisis—making them more mature for their age—I didn’t want either to sound too adult. In any case, whoever knows my daughter Emma, knows she speaks like Anna and Hannah.
MAT: Do you feel there are issues or themes from the story recounted in The German Girl that are relevant in today’s world?
ALC: That was my objective. I wanted the tragedy of those refugees to read like a drama we are living today. I avoided direct references to Jews, Hitler, Fidel Castro. It’s sort of a fairy tale told by two girls who grew up in difficult times. I’ve just now received a video from a Congresswoman in Spain who cited The German Girl in Congress to reference the genocide in Aleppo.
MAT: 9/11 figures prominently in The German Girl. Can you talk about your decision to set that as a backdrop?
ALC: It’s a backdrop now, but in reality, when I started writing the novel it was front and center on the news. A man who leaves his house on a Tuesday never to return. A wife who begins to look into his past and there is the Saint Louis. The ship ended up being the spinal column for the story. But yes, I wanted to include September 11th, I wanted the Cuban parallels. I didn’t want the reader to think it was a story that happened years ago, one we were not responsible for today. Yes, we are all responsible. And we all tend to turn away from tragedies like the ones that are playing out right now in Syria.
MAT: You are the editor of People en Español. Could you tell us about your work at the magazine, and how what impact it has on other parts of your writing life?
ALC: My job as an editor consumes all of my time. Whatever free time I have is for my children. My job’s real impact isn’t so much on my writing time or style as it has on the time I need to spend marketing the book. Being an editor, I have a strong social media presence and a strong presence in different media, especially Spanish-language media. That has helped me promote the novel.
MAT: You write in Spanish; The German Girl was translated into English by Nick Caistor. Why did you make that decision and how did the process work for you?
ALC: I’m a Cuban writer who lives in New York, who writes in Spanish for the U.S. market. That’s one of the main differences between my novel and the translations that are published in the U.S. For example, when my editor buys a novel from a Spanish author, she ends up changing the book’s title and, in the majority of the cases, adapting certain elements for the U.S. market. My case is different. I worked directly with Nick, who is an excellent translator. When I conceived the title of the novel, even when I wrote its opening line, I wanted it to work in both languages. That’s how we handled all the translation work. What didn’t work in one language, I changed and vice versa.
MAT: Our readers are particularly interested in writers who publish their first books after age forty. Do you have advice for them?
ALC: The good thing about writing after forty is that there is maturity that comes through while you’re editing. When I look over texts I wrote in my twenties, they’re impulsive, pretentious. My advice is to be patient. You have to have a lot of patience. After forty, you also tend to listen more, and that helps.
MAT: How did you react to President Obama’s normalizing ties with Cuba?
ALC: I’m all about eliminating borders. Cuba will rapidly change the day it opens up to the world.
MAT: What’s your next writing project?
ALC: My obsession with the Saint Louis is just getting started. Or maybe it’s my preoccupation with our humanity, how at times it’s almost part of our DNA to reject others, those who think differently, those who believe in a different God, who have a different skin color or sexual preference, or simply speak with an accent. If I were to condense the story of The German Girl in a phrase, I would say the book is about the Saint Louis passengers who were allowed to disembark in Havana. My second novel, The Silence Between Us, will be about the passengers who ended up in France. The third will be about those who were never even allowed to board in the first place, the mischlings.
Bloom Post End
Martha Anne Toll’s essays and book commentaries have appeared in The Millions, NPR, Heck, [PANK], The Nervous Breakdown, Tin House blog, Bloom, Narrative, and Washington Independent Review of Books. Her fiction has appeared in Vol.1 Brooklyn, Yale’s Letters Journal, Slush Pile Magazine [forthcoming], Poetica E Magazine, Referential Magazine, Inkapture Magazine, and Wild. Her recently completed debut novel, represented by the Einstein Literary Agency, has been short listed for the 2016 Mary Rinehart Roberts fiction prize. She is the Executive Director of a social justice foundation. Please visit her at marthaannetoll.com; and tweet to her @marthaannetoll.
Armando Lucas Correa
Author of The German Girl/La niña alemana and En busca de Emma. Editor in Chief of People en Español brand at Time Inc.
Greater New York City AreaPublishing
Summary
With 20 years of experience in Hispanic media, award-winning journalist and writer Armando Lucas Correa is the Editor in Chief of PEOPLE EN ESPAÑOL brand. In his role, he oversees the editorial content and budget of the top selling Hispanic magazine in the U.S. with more than 7 million readers every month, PeopleEnEspanol.com and its digital editions for tablets and mobile. He also oversees the brand's social media strategy and events like 50 Most Beautiful (in NYC), and the 25 Most Powerful Women and Star of the Year (both in Miami), as well as Festival People en Español, an annual 2-day, 2-night live consumer event held in New York.
He is an innovative leader with deep knowledge of the U.S. Hispanic market and experience in creating initiatives focused on the growth of the brand. As an editor and content creator, Correa has developed programs focused on the profitability of People en Español across different platforms.
Under his tenure, the magazine has enjoyed unprecedented growth and was named in Adweek's "10 Under 50" Hot List in 2007 and 2009 and has been recognized by GLAAD for its coverage.
Correa is a familiar face on national television and radio shows, both in the U.S. and Mexico, where he shares his expertise on Hispanic media and entertainment stories.
His book En busca de Emma (In Search of Emma: Two Fathers, One Daughter and the Dream of a Family) was published by Rayo, Harper Collins in 2007 and for Aguilar, Santillana (Mexico) in 2009.
His first novel The German Girl will be published in English and Spanish by Atria Books, a division of Simon and Schuster by the end of 2016.
He lives in Manhattan with his partner and their three children.
Experience
Time Inc.
Editor/People en Español
Time Inc.
December 2007 – Present (9 years 6 months)
Editor of PEOPLE EN ESPAÑOL.
Time Inc.
Executive Editor/People en Español
Time Inc.
2006 – 2007 (1 year)
Work directly with the magazine’s editor to define the editorial focus of the publication. Simultaneously identify and pursue exclusive stories, edit the main features of the magazine. I am also responsible for promoting the magazine on radio and in television. Every week I participate on CNN en Español and NY1 to promote the different stories we will feature in the magazine. I handle the Satellite Media Tours (SMT) each month to promote the upcoming issue. I also appear frequently on national television shows like El Gordo y la Flaca, Primer Impacto. Escándalo TV and Cotorreando, as well as on national newscasts to discuss entertainment-related topics.
Time Inc.
Assistant Managing Editor/People en Español
Time Inc.
2003 – 2006 (3 years)
Report and write the majority of the cover stories and manage a reporting team of eight staffers at bureaus in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Mexico. Part of my job is to ensure People en Español’s signature style. Among the accomplishments we have attained: a one-on-one interview with Celia Cruz – the first and only one she granted upon taking ill; covering the romance between crooner Luis Miguel and Myrka Dellanos – ours was the first story with photos that confirmed their romance; the jailhouse interview with Gloria Trevi; the divorce of television anchor María Celeste Arrarás and the only interview with Luis Miguel during his latest tour. These are some of the exclusives that broke sales records.
Time Inc.
Senior Editor/People en Español
Time Inc.
2000 – 2003 (3 years)
Manage the staff of reporters/writers, maintain the editorial and style integrity of the magazine, identify and pursue exclusive interviews and write the cover story for each issue. Writer and host of the weekly People en Español radio spots that are taped in New York and distributed to local and national radio stations via HBC.
Time Inc.
Senior Writer/People en Español
Time Inc.
1997 – 2000 (3 years)
Write the cover story for each issue of People en Español as well as the human interest stories that appear in the magazine.
Reporter
El Nuevo Herald/Miami
December 1991 – October 1997 (5 years 11 months)Miami/Fort Lauderdale Area
Cover local and national politics, crime and police blotter, identify and write investigative pieces and human interest stories for the front page as well as for the inside pages of the newspaper.
Editor
Tablas/Theater and Dance Magazine (Havana, Cuba)
1987 – 1991 (4 years)
Theater and Dance critic
Languages
Spanish
English
Education
Instituto Superior de Arte/Havana, Cuba
Licenciate in Dramatic Art, Theatrical Art and Dramaturgy
1977 – 1982
University of Havana
Graduate course, Journalism
1987 – 1987
Correa, Armando Lucas. The German Girl
Catherine Coyne
Library Journal.
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p71.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Correa, Armando Lucas. The German Girl. Atria. Oct. 2016. 346p. tr. from Spanish by Nick Caistor. bibliog. ISBN 9781501121142. $26.99;
ebk. ISBN 9781501121241. F
Hannah Rosenthal enjoys a privileged existence in 1930s Berlin, but the escalating actions of the Nazis, called "the Ogres" by Hannah and her
friend Leo, force her family to flee to Cuba. Hannah's life in Berlin alternates with that of Anna, a fatherless 12-year-old in present-day New York
City who receives a package of photographs from Havana. Once safely aboard the ocean liner St. Louis, Hannah and the other refugees are
treated well by the German captain and crew. On arrival in Cuba, hopes of freedom are dashed when only 22 of the Jewish passengers, including
Hannah and her mother, are allowed to disembark. Hannah's father and Leo are among the 907 refugees denied asylum who return to Europe to
face certain death. Hannah's life in Cuba is difficult, and two decades after leaving Germany, she again faces danger with the rise of another
dictator. The narrative concludes in 2014 as Anna and her mother travel to Cuba to meet her father's Great-Aunt Hannah. VERDICT People en
Espanol editor-in-chief Correa bases his debut novel on the real-life account of the ill-fated 1939 voyage of the St. Louis, delivering an
engrossing and heartbreaking Holocaust story; his listing of the passengers' names at the end of the book adds to its power. [See Prepub Alert,
7/18/16; an ALA Buzz Book.]--Catherine Coyne, Mansfield P.L., MA
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Coyne, Catherine. "Correa, Armando Lucas. The German Girl." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 71. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466412945&it=r&asid=8d10020b32c47b371411efd010dfedd8. Accessed 10 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466412945
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The German Girl
Hope Racine
BookPage.
(Nov. 2016): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2016 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE GERMAN GIRL
By Armando
Lucas Correa
Atria
$26.99, 368 pages
ISBN 9781501121142
Audio, eBook available
DEBUT FICTION
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Set against the backdrop of World War II, award-winning journalist Armando Lucas Correa's The German Girl follows 12-year-old Hannah
Rosenthal, who is attempting to flee Nazi Germany with her family and her best friend, Leo Martin. After many refusals, the Rosenthals are
overjoyed when they are given the chance to escape to freedom aboard the SS St. Louis, a floating fairy tale making its way toward Cuba. But the
outlook soon becomes grimmer for the desperate family. Hannah and Leo promise to stay together--and are forced to make impossible decisions.
4/10/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Alternating with Hannah's story is that of Anna Rosen, a 12-year-old girl in present-day New York. Anna is coming to terms with the death of her
father when she receives a package from the mysterious great-aunt in Cuba who acted as a mother figure to Anna's late father. Searching for
answers and a deeper understanding of her father, young Anna and her mother set off on their own journey to Havana's shores.
Correa, the editor-in-chief of People en Espanol, successfully weaves a profoundly emotional coming-of-age tale, based on the real-life journey
of the St. Louis from Hamburg to Havana, and the 900 refugees aboard. Despite this heavy subject matter, Correa's impeccably researched
historical details shine through, grounding the novel and honing its point.
Though at times The German Girl is heartbreaking, the novel never wallows, and readers can often feel joy and excitement emanating off the
young narrators. Correa's characters and details are beautifully crafted, creating an insightful and poignantly timed exploration of the refugee
experience.
--HOPE RACINE
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Racine, Hope. "The German Girl." BookPage, Nov. 2016, p. 36. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469503133&it=r&asid=17f9948530ddf7f53c03947ff4bf7484. Accessed 10 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469503133
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The German Girl
Publishers Weekly.
263.31 (Aug. 1, 2016): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The German Girl
Armando Lucas Correa. Atria, $26.99 (384p) ISBN 978-1-5011-2114-2
In 1939, the German ship St. Louis set sail from Hamburg for Havana carrying more than 900 passengers, most of them German Jewish refugees,
escaping from the Nazi regime. Correa's debut novel follows one of those passengers, a 12-year-old girl named Hannah Rosenthal, as she and her
rich, influential family hope to start a new life in Havana. But when they arrive, the St. Louis and its passengers are refused entry. Hannah and her
mother manage to debark, but most of the other passengers--including Hannah's father and her best friend Leo--are forced to stay aboard. The
ship's passengers were refused entry into America and Canada as well, eventually forced to return to Europe. Seventy years later, Hannah's
grandniece receives a package from her elderly aunt, who is finally ready to tell her family's story. Correa's novel is a timely reminder of the
plight of refugees, and the real consequences of denying them aid, but the story itself is lukewarm--a tragedy that never complicates or deviates
from its expected trajectories. Hannah never stops pining for Leo, and she and her mother shun other Jewish people while simultaneously
isolating themselves from Cuban life. There is also a noticeable lack of detail concerning Jewish culture. Though the novel covers an important
piece of history, the story of the Rosenthals never quite comes together. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The German Girl." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 46. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285662&it=r&asid=92dbd128d62690b202cd389c050ab7d6. Accessed 10 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285662
REVIEWS
Where Fiction Heralds Facts: On Armando Lucas Correa’s ‘The German Girl’
By MARTHA ANNE TOLL posted at 12:00 pm on October 27, 2016 1
cover
The German Girl (in Spanish, translated by Nick Caistor), is a novel with a purpose: To expose the atrocity of the S.S. St. Louis, whose 1939 voyage from Hamburg to Cuba exemplifies the fatal consequences of closed borders and failed humanity, of hope gone horrendously wrong. Armando Lucas Correa, raised in Cuba before emigrating to the United States, writes with a political agenda as well — to out Cuba not only for denying sanctuary to most of the St. Louis’s ill-fated passengers, but also for erasing the crime from Cuba’s history books. Cuba is not the only country with a selective memory. The United States, too, played a key role in the horrors that transpired, and was very late in coming to a public admission of guilt.
coverCorrea is a journalist. Among other professional activities, he is editor-in-chief of People en Espanõl. His first book, En Busca de Emma (In Search of Emma: Two Fathers, One Daughter and the Dream of a Family) is a memoir about the arduous and emotionally fraught journey of starting a family with his male partner. The German Girl is his debut novel.
The novel alternates chapters between two narrators. The first is Hannah Rosenthal, a Jewish girl who is 12 in 1939, having lived a bourgeois existence in Berlin before the Nazis’ rise to power. Hannah experiences the world through smell. Two women on the S-Bahn give “off waves of sweat mixed with rose essence and tobacco.” Berlin after the November pogrom (Kristallnacht) — “a stench of broken pipes, sewage, and smoke.” Hannah’s childhood nanny, recalled through “the fragrance of her lemon-bergamot-cedarwood cologne mingled with the smell of sweat and spices.” Hannah also experiences the world through her beloved friend Leo Martin. Together they travel Berlin, hiding from the “Ogres” — her parlance for Nazis — and sharing a passion for adventure.
The second narrator is Anna Rosen, an American girl living in 2014. She and her bedridden, widowed mother are enshadowed by 9/11. They live a sober existence in New York. Hanna’s sections are written in the past tense, Anna’s in the present.
The parallels between the girls are many, sometimes tipping their similarities toward the contrived. Both have suffering mothers with whom they appear to have a strained emotional connection. Both idolize their absent fathers, each missing for different reasons. Both are only children. Both have a male friend their own age, though Hannah is much closer to Leo than Anna with Diego.
Hannah lives with her parents: an anxious, self-centered opera singer mother named Alma Strauss Rosenthal (faint homage to Alma Mahler, perhaps?) and her father, Max Rosenthal, an esteemed university professor. As Berlin becomes increasingly dangerous, Hannah’s family — desperate to leave — secures passage on the St. Louis. Leo’s widowed father, too, manages to book passage for himself and his son. The voyage appears to bring escape and deliverance, but instead, it is their terrible misfortune to have set sail on a doomed ship.
At the end of the book, Correa provides these facts — on May 13, 1939, the St. Louis sailed for Cuba from Hamburg with 900 passengers, the majority German Jewish refugees. It docked two days later in Cherbourg to pick up 37 additional Jewish passengers. All refugees had landing permits from the Cuban Department of Immigration, as well as U.S. entry visas. Cuba was intended as a transit point; passengers were to await emigration to the United States. A week before departure, Cuban President Federico Laredo Brú invalidated the landing permits.
The St. Louis arrived in Havana early morning May 27. Only four Cubans, two non-Jewish Spaniards, and 22 refugees were ultimately permitted to land, despite efforts by relatives, and protracted negotiations with offers of payment by Lawrence Berenson, lawyer for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Ordered to vacate Cuban waters, Captain Gustav Schroeder made heroic efforts to find a non-German port to accept the refugees. He sailed for Miami, but the United States denied entry. A similar refusal came from Canada. Forced back across the Atlantic, the ship stopped in several European countries that agreed — following another intense set of negotiations — to take the passengers. Great Britain accepted 287; France, 224; Belgium, 214; and the Netherlands 181. In September 1939, Germany declared war. Other than the 287 taken into the relative safety of Great Britain, most of the rest of the passengers suffered the terrors of war. At least a quarter were exterminated by the Nazis.
In The German Girl, Anna and her mother are shaken from their depressing existence by a set of photos they receive from the 87-year-old Hannah Rosenthal, who turns out to have been one of the “lucky” passengers permitted a landing in Cuba. Having spent her whole life there, she has now reached out to her great-niece (Anna’s father was her nephew). Anna and her mother travel to Cuba, where Hannah reveals her life story in a series of largely expository chapters. Sharing her great loves and tragic losses, she generously roots Anna in her father’s family and puts Anna’s mother on a path forward.
coverIn a recent review of Affinity Konar’s Mischling, Lisa Zeidner wrote:
The morality of fictionalizing the Holocaust has been a subject of scholarly discussion since philosopher Theodor Adorno famously declared “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Do the scaffolding of plot and invention, the linguistic embroidery, deny the actual victims their more authentic voices? Conversely, might fiction have “the power to take the narrative to places that survivor testimony cannot?” [citing Anna Richardson]
The German Girl begs a different question. Given Correa’s professional credentials, might this book have packed more punch as nonfiction? Perhaps a futile inquiry, but Correa’s journalistic instincts are apparent not just in his clear reporting on the voyage of the St. Louis, but throughout the book. For example, he introduces Jehovah’s Witnesses to make the very important point that the Nazis singled this group out for torture and brutality due to their refusal to accept totalitarian authority.
coverIn Crossing the Borders of Time, journalist Leslie Maitland set out to find her mother’s teenage lover, lost to her when her family fled Nazi-occupied France. Her mother’s family was able to secure passage to Casablanca, and then to Cuba on the San Thomé in 1942. Describing the horrors of the St. Louis, Maitland notes the “infighting among unscrupulous officials,” Cuba’s corrupt immigration director, and the fruitless “frantic telegrams to President Roosevelt” and other world leaders.
Scholar Peter Gay describes his Berlin childhood under the Nazis in My German Question. Like many other highly assimilated and non-religious German Jews — including Hannah Rosenthal’s family — in 1933 “We had suddenly become Jews.” Deeply interested in the psychological ramifications, Gay says he cannot write autobiography, his has to be memoir. His past has proven “to be a mosaic with central pieces missing.” He recounts his father’s daring maneuvers to secure passage to Cuba. Finally obtaining visas and tickets for the St. Louis, his father, having an eerie sixth sense, took a harrowing risk to fake documents for passage on the Iberia, which sailed April 27 (two weeks earlier than the St. Louis).
The German-Jewish refugee community in Havana, numbering over three thousand, clung together and talked Germany: who was still caught up in the Nazi trap and what one could do to help….
Our ties to our former homeland…remained intimate and inescapable, a cause of wrenching anxieties.
Anxiety coupled with deracination’s fallout. A Longing in the Land, poet Arthur Gregor’s memoir of being forced as a teen to flee Vienna post Anschluss, makes clear the longing never ends:
The crack of displacement — irreparable, as I have learned — also affects our most personal relationships, often shapes or destroys them. It makes our need for them so urgent — for who but the object of one’s love can soothe this rift? — and this urgency works against them….
The anguish of this rift is not appeased.
The truth — documented — can be more powerful than fiction. And yet, doesn’t fiction provide the ultimate truth? Here’s Peter Gay:
That my mother loved me as much as she could seems to me beyond doubt, but her ability to give voice to her affection for me was compromised by her anxieties and her ailments.
Such a description fits perfectly both Hannah and Anna’s mothers in The German Girl. They are sleepless, ailing women, suffering from grief and worry. Through fiction, Correa has captured not only the unspeakable anxiety of protecting a family while fleeing for one’s life, but also the endless pain of deracination, emotions from which Hannah is never released. Speaking of her life in Havana, toward the end of the book she muses:
I can wander one last time among the colorful croton bushes, the poinsettias, the rosemary, basil, and mint herbs in the neglected garden of what has been my fortress in a city I never came to know.
Correa deploys facts to honor his fictional subjects. In a heartbreaking appendix, he lists every passenger on the St. Louis. If this ship’s manifest is insufficiently potent, Correa writes to remind us of the deadly consequences of closed borders, neglected refugees, and maligned and forgotten immigrants.
Set in Berlin, New York, and Havana, this ambitious debut novel spans 70-plus years as two girls tell their gripping stories in alternating chapters.
We meet Hannah Rosenthal in 1939 Berlin. A lively 11-year-old, she likes to roam the city with her best friend, Leo. But the Nazis—Leo and Hannah call them the Ogres—are closing in, forcing Jewish families like the Rosenthals to flee. Anna Rosen, also 11, lives in contemporary New York City with her mother, who has become increasingly despondent since the death of her husband, Anna’s father, on 9/11. His life was shrouded in mystery, and Anna is desperate to know more about him. Back in Germany, the Rosenthals set sail on the SS St. Louis, bound for Havana. The (real-life) St. Louis carries 937 passengers, most of them Jewish refugees, whom the Cuban government has promised to take in. But the Cubans renege, allowing only 28 people to come ashore. Those remaining are forced to return to Europe, where many perish. Hannah’s father is among those turned away, but she and her mother, Alma, are allowed to emigrate. Havana, though, never feels like home; Alma, in particular, finds the heat—as well as the political climate—oppressive. Eventually, the Hannah and Anna narratives intersect with both characters getting at least some of what they long for. The parts of the book set in Berlin and aboard the St. Louis are powerful and affecting; the Cuban-born author (who hints the novel is based on his own family history) is particularly good at showing the despair of German Jews like Alma, who considered themselves profoundly German. By contrast, the Cuban scenes seem a little flat and drawn out, and the ending—with Hannah now an old woman—is unexpectedly maudlin.
Still, this is a mostly well-told tale that sheds light on a sorrowful piece of Holocaust history.
Pub Date: Oct. 18th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2114-2
Page count: 384pp
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 27th, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15th, 2016