Resonance

Author(s): Daniel S Chertoff, Michael S Tobin

Location(s): Paris

Genre(s): Historical, Fiction

Era(s): 20th Century

PARIS, 1971

In the basement of Shakespeare and Company, Sophie Hadad—a restless Wellesley student from Charleston, West Virginia, motherless and adrift—uncovers a forgotten valise. Inside lies the diary of Anna Grinberg, a Jewish sculptor born in Warsaw in 1900, orphaned when her father is murdered in a pogrom and her mother is claimed by the Spanish flu.

PARIS, 1922

Anna arrives in the city with nothing but her will to create. Her diary is fierce, intimate, and unsparing—alive with the pulse of Les Années Folles, when Montparnasse cafés throb with painters, sculptors, and expatriate writers reinventing art and language. She fights to carve a place among Pascin, Bourdelle, and Frenkel; finds allies in Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier; and collides—dangerously—with Ernest Hemingway. Even in those incandescent years, she senses the gathering shadow over Europe and writes as if time itself were fragile.

Half a century later, Sophie bends over Anna’s words and feels them press against her own life. The diary refuses to remain merely historical. It exposes her evasions, unsettles her defiance, and forces a reckoning with identity, inheritance, and the past she has tried to escape.

Resonance unfolds in two distinct voices: Anna’s impassioned diary, lyrical and immediate, and Sophie’s sharp, searching, contemporary narrative. Together they tell a story of art, exile, and Jewish survival—passed not through monuments or archives, but from one woman’s hand to another—across time.

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