Saturday Book Discussion

From an award-winning historian, the story of World War II artists, intellectuals, and refugees, and one famed Paris hotel.

Since its opening in 1910, the Hotel Lutetia has been a grand Paris institution, a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. But the hotel has a darker history, too—from the years before, during, and after the second World War. In this short period, the Lutetia witnessed some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history.

A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Hotel Exile is about what happens at the edges of a war, passing through the doors of a normally functioning hotel, a site under occupation, and, finally, a shelter and place of healing. Jane Rogoyska’s extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events.

Copies of Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War, by Jane Rogoyska, are available to order at the Richmond Heights Branch Reference Desk, or by calling 440.449.2666.

Registration is not required to attend.