4. Sylvia Beach
Sylvia with injured Ernest Hemingway after the war, and with James Joyce in her younger days
When Paris was occupied in 1939, Sylvia chose to remain in Paris, for it was home. Along with their fellow Parisians, Adrienne and Sylvia endured cold winters and fuel shortages, food rationing and long lines during the occupation. There were blackouts and censorship of books and letters. Sylvia’s courage during this time was astonishing. She describes her encounters with Nazis:
“The Gestapo would come and they’d say “You have a Jewish girl – you had – in the bookshop. And you have a black mark against you.” I’d say “Okay, okay.” And they said, “We’ll come for you, you know.” I always said okay to them. One day, they came.”
On another occasion, a **** officer stopped by the store to buy a book, which Sylvia refused to sell him. When he stopped by the second time, Sylvia enlisted her friends to move all of her books out of the shop and dismantle the bookshelves within hours. She even painted over the sign, leaving no indication that a bookstore ever existed.
Shortly after that, she was taken in the first round up of American women in September of 1942. More than 300 women were interned at the zoo, where they were treated fairly well. Sylvia found some humor in this situation, as the women were kept in the Monkey House, and friends who wanted to see her simply paid admission to enter the zoo and conversed with her across the hedges.
Within the month, Sylvia was moved to another camp in Vittel, France, where she stayed until the spring of 1943 with other American and English women. This was a much longer internment, and Sylvia pleaded with friends to help secure her release. She finally returned to Paris to wait with Adrienne for the war to be over. It was a dismal time, with few friends, and poor food rations. The books were still hidden in the apartments above the street on rue de l’Odeon and the shop was closed.
When Paris was finally liberated in August of 1944, rue de l ‘Odeon was one of the last quarters to be freed. On that remarkable day, her old friend Ernest Hemingway found his way to that old cobblestone street. As Sylvia remembers:
“I heard a deep voice calling: Sylvia!” And everybody in the street took up the cry of Sylvia!” “It’s Hemingway! It’s Hemingway! Cried Adrienne. I flew downstairs: we met in a crash. He picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people on the streets and in the windows cheered.”
Hemingway stayed long enough to make sure that Sylvia was safe before he headed onto the Ritz to celebrate the end of the long war.
The bookstore never opened again, but Sylvia stayed in Paris until her death on October 5, 1962. She died in her small upstairs apartment in rue de l’Odean, the street where she had lived most of her life, where she had watched the twentieth century unfold, and where she found “her three great loves”: Adrienne Monnier, Shakespeare and Company, and James Joyce. She was 75 years old.
Sylvia’s courage lives on through a bookstore with the same name, opened by another American, George Whitman, in 1947. Shakespeare and Company is located at 37 rue de la Bucherie, near the Sienne, with a view of Notre Dame. Whitman’s daughter, named Sylvia Beach Whitman, now runs the store. Readers, writers and book-lovers from all over the world still make the journey to this bookstore in honor of the quietly radical woman named Sylvia Beach, whose influence continues far beyond her own lifetime.
https://www.thehemingwayproject.com/2018/08/22/in-praise-of-sylvia-beach/