The Paris Photo by Jane S Gabin
Have you ever stumbled upon a photograph that transported you to another time? Maybe it was an old sepia-tone picture — carefully preserved, but curly at the corners nonetheless — surfacing from another time and place, from another world before you were born. Perhaps you find yourself imagining what it would have been like to be there when it was taken. Who are these people? How did they come to know one another? What were they talking about right before the camera shutter closed?
Going through her father’s old pictures after his passing, Judith Gordon finds herself in such a situation when she discovers a puzzling WWII-era photo taken on the streets of Paris. But instead of just wondering and imagining, she decides to put her academic research skills to the test with nothing more to go on than the name Guy Daval scratched in pencil on the back of the photo.
Jane S. Gabin’s The Paris Photo (Wisdom House Books), takes readers on an adventure through not one, but two stories — that of Sergeant Ben Gordon, Judith’s father, during his deployment with the US Army Postal Service in WWII, and that of Judith in the present-day, piecing together a part of her father’s life he had never talked about to anyone.
A FAMILY BROKEN BY WAR
The first half of the novel follows Ben as he leaves his home in New York City to do his part in the war. His travels will take him from London to Paris and then into Germany. An empathetic reader’s heart will break along with Ben’s as he discovers for the first time the atrocities of the Nazis we have all come to know from our history books. Equally heartbreaking are the lasting effects of German occupation on the people of France, even after the Americans have liberated them from their invaders.
Perhaps there is a silver lining to it all when Ben begins visiting with a Jewish family in Paris who has lost their father and grandfather. What remains of the Davals — the grandmother, mother and young son — are weary and broken from the war. The mother, Simone, has bravely hidden her son Guy from both German and French officials, fearful he will be sent away like his father and grandfather. But this isolation has come with a price.
As Ben gets to know the family better, he begins to act as a much-needed father figure to Guy. His willingness to help in any way he can brightens the mood of everyone. Maybe there is even a bit of attraction between Simone and Ben. But with the uncertain circumstances of Mr. Daval’s disappearance, not to mention Ben’s American fiancée waiting back home, will Ben have the courage to do anything about it?
A DAUGHTER DISCOVERING HER FATHER’S PAST
Fast forward to 2008, and Ben has just passed away. Now Judith and her brother, Michael, are left to pack everything up. When Judith finds the crate of her father’s old photos — in particular, one showing her dad with two women and a boy in Paris in 1945 — she finds herself wondering how well she really knew him.
Was he happy with his wife and two kids in New York after the war? Or even later when he retired to Florida? Or was there something more to him than she ever knew? Unable to ask him herself anymore, she sets out to track down the boy from the photo. She’s willing to cross oceans and learn new languages to find the missing piece of her father’s past. In the process, she’s liable to find out a bit more about herself as well.
The Paris Photo is an intergenerational novel with compelling characters that you grow to care deeply about. Gabin pulls readers into scenes from different times and places with sensory descriptions. Without many high-action plot points, the novel has a quiet subtlety about it and yet it’s difficult to put down. The story seeps into you as you gather little scraps of information that form a picture of a character who was there from the beginning, uncovered one piece at a time. You’ll find yourself leaning in until the very end.
