The Art of Resistance by Justus Rosenberg: book review

The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground (2019) is the memoir of Justus Rosenberg from 1921, his birth, to 1946 his arrival in America. He focuses on his time in Europe.

Rosenberg is writing his memoirs at the age of 98, after teaching literature at an American university for fifty years. He begins briefly with his early years, born in Danzig on the Baltic Sea, before leaving home to study in Paris in 1937 at the age of sixteen.

Part II is the Paris years, the impending Second World War, and his evacuation to Marseilles, where he joins the American Emergency Rescue Committee as a courier in 1940. By the beginning of 1942, he is in Grenoble participating in the Resistance, where he assisted intellectuals escape – such as Marc Chagall and Andre Breton.

Part III is his internment in a detention camp near Lyon, the centre of the French Underground. He goes to great extremes to escape.

He was waiting for the Allied troops at the Landing at Normandy on 6 June 1944 for the liberation of Paris from the occupied Germans. Rosenberg’s intention was to return to Paris, but he applied for a visa to America.

These Paris years described in this memoir are brief but intense, leaving behind his parents and sister Lilian – finally reuniting with them 16 years later.

Rosenberg’s life is full of skills and luck, taking advantage of windows of opportunity in times of adversity and uncertainty. He calls it ‘a confluence of circumstances’ that enables him to endure captivity, and help others to freedom.

The book also includes black and white photographs that are also interesting.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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