AN ADDRESS IN AMSTERDAM by Mary Dingee Fillmore & GIVEAWAY

 She Writes Press’ continues Fall Reading Challenge 2016 with Mary Dingee Fillmore’s, AN ADDRESS in AMSTERDAM.

“An Address in Amsterdam was born in 2002 in our second apartment, when our landlord revealed that Jewish people had been hidden in an attic just above us.  They were last seen trying to escape over the rooftops as the police shot at them.  I felt their presence, and imagined who they might have been and what had brought them there.  My heroine, Rachel Klein, and her parents began to come to life, first in faint pencil sketch lines and slowly filling in.  I hungered to learn more about their world.  Somehow, I had been placed in the midst of it, and it was my obsession and duty to find out what their lives had been like, and what had configured their choices.”

             Mary Dingee Fillmore, Author, AN ADDRESS IN AMSTERDAM (She Writes Press)

Mary Dingee Fillmore, spent thirteen years researching, writing and rewriting  AN ADDRESS IN AMSTERDAM, the fictional story of a young Jewish woman, Rachel who joins the underground to fight against the Nazis. The book is also an expression of her love for the city – its canals, centuries-old houses reflected in the water and so much more. But, as any lover learns, beauties also hold other truths. Eighty percent of its Jewish population was deported and murdered by the Nazis during WWII.

After writing AN ADDRESS IN AMSTERDAM, Mary has definitive thoughts about why it was important for her to write this story. “I could well have been a colluder or collaborator, watching my neighbors being rounded up – or a resister. But it’s also my story because it’s that of everybody who has ever been hated. Each of us has hated, and been hated. The book is about where that hatred can lead, and how one young Jewish woman found the courage to resist. So can we.”

Very well shared, especially in these very unsettling times.

MARY DINGEE FILLMORE’S BACKGROUND:  After a lifetime of private creative writing, I was seized by a subject too important to hide in my journal or a letter to friends. Living in a house where Jewish people were hidden inspired my novel, AN ADDRESS IN AMSTERDAM. Since my first lengthy stay in Amsterdam in 2001, I have been visiting, researching, writing, and talking about the Holocaust and resistance in the Netherlands. No, I’m neither Dutch nor Jewish, just a lover of the city of Amsterdam and its people, living and dead. I would have been a neighbor of the deported citizens had I been alive at that time, and I will always wonder whether I would have colluded passively, collaborated, or resisted as I would hope.

For more information about Mary Dingee Fillmore, check out her websites at http://www.maryfillmore.com  and   http://www.seehiddenamsterdam.com

Thanks to She Writes Press for providing a copy of AN ADDRESS IN AMSTERDAM for an honest review. We have one copy to giveaway. (USA only) Just tell us which one of the many novels about the Jewish experience during WWII you have enjoyed reading the most. We’ll announce a winner next Monday, December 5th.