Every Friday for the last 25 years of her life, I had lunch with Charlotte and each week she told me more of her extraordinary story. To all appearances, she was a strong and dignified survivor, with old-world courtesies, a twinkling sense of humor, and a lilting Austrian syntax. Yet deep within, she'd been scarred by a profound personal trauma.
Finally, just before she died at the age of 91, she chose to entrust me with this profound secret, and all at once I understood how it had affected her entire adult life. This is a story of friendship and strength, of courage and betrayal. It is an epic tale set against the backdrop of history.
Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / GeneralLunch with Charlotte has sold over 1,300 copies since publication, and is quite popular in the UK and Canada (where Charlotte lived). On the US/CA Amazon site, the book has 16 reviews and a 4.6 rating. In the UK, it has 9 and 4.4, respectively. It also holds a 4.59 rating with 27 ratings and 16 reviews on Goodreads. Further, interesting to note about this book is that many of Charlotte's personal effects were donated to the Montreal Holocaust Museum, and the publisher donates a portion of the proceeds from the book to the Holocaust Museum of Houston.
Grey Gecko Press is particularly interested in having this title translated into French (Canada).
Prologue
“How’s the coffee?”
“It’s good, thanks.”
“Is it strong enough? I don’t know, what do you think?”
“No, it’s excellent.”
“You sure? I thought maybe it wasn’t strong enough.”
This was how it was whenever I went to visit my good friend Charlotte. Often, she’d go out of her way to purchase some special item, like Viennese-blend coffee, then fret that she hadn’t prepared it to my taste. At ninety-one, she was still stubbornly independent, yet she was always searching for praise—and this was just one of her many contradictions.
Friday lunch was our usual time together, at least when I wasn’t traveling. Although I lived just twenty minutes from Char-lotte, my consulting business occasionally took me away from Montreal, either to nearby New York or distant Beijing, but when-ever I was in town, I’d call to say I was on my way.
Each time I’d arrive, she’d already have covered half the dining room table with the kind of items I only seemed to consume with her. They were a reflection of her more traditional fare from the old world—hard-boiled eggs, pickled cucumbers, herring in brine, black bread and cream cheese.
We’d supplement this with ethnic staples that were more North American in origin, like the poppy-seed bagels and Pacific lox that I’d pick up en route, but these were for my own benefit. She wasn’t so keen on them herself. Sometimes, to add variety, she would struggle out to buy chicken livers and a pound of onions and then spend her afternoon chopping it all by hand, the way it used to be done.
As if that wasn’t enough, she’d follow up by laboring through the evening to bake a deep-dish apple cake for dessert.
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