Heat of Paris follows a 26-year-old white man and a 24-year-old Negro woman who cross paths, pulling them into a world of art, politics, race, class, love, and self-reinvention. What first drew you to 1951 Paris as the setting for this story?

My parents were refugees from WW2. My father was in a leftist anti-Hitler group in Germany before the war and was wanted by the Gestapo. He fled Germany for Belgium in 1936 and met my Jewish mother. When war broke out, he was imprisoned by the Belgian/French as an enemy alien and sent to an internment camp in Southern France. He eventually escaped from the camp and rendezvoused with my mother. On the run and evading capture (my father to a forced labor camp and my mother to Anschutz extermination camp), they fled to neutral Spain and with the help of Jewish organizations embarked on one of the last ships leaving Europe in 1942. Hearing the stories of their life and escape from Europe defined the view of my parents as a child. When I was sixty years old, I found out that my father, deceased at that time, had left a daughter in Germany. I tracked her down and wrote a book – My Sister: A Journey to Myself.

Helping my parents send food parcels to her and her family in communist East Berlin to help them survive near starvation defined my childhood. I knew I had to write about that period. And Paris, the city my wife and I loved and visited repeatedly after the war, became the setting for the novel I wanted to write. Paris had not yet experienced the post war prosperity and was a melting pot of ideas about the post-WW2 world and how it would be organized. Self-determination, sexual freedom, and identity were the themes I wanted to explore.

How does being out of America reshape Christie’s and Franz’s understanding of themselves?

Christie was an intelligent, ambitious Black woman seeking to escape the confines of her family and community. For her masters thesis, she chose a summer in Paris to research the French writer George Sand as her entry into the larger white world. Freed from the restrictions of her Harlem community, she was able to initiate new relationships previously considered unimaginable.

Franz was not a newcomer to Paris and France. For him, as a former soldier, it represented the reliving of his wartime trauma and loss of his best friend. But the moment he saw Christie disembark from the ship, his world changed. If he had seen her in New York, it would have been the mere adoration of a beautiful Black woman. But the racial freedom of Paris allowed this adoration to express itself into a meaningful relationship.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in the book?

Race, Culture, and Identity. From my own experience of being married to a Black woman for 58 years, I reached into my own feelings to uncover how I was able to transcend the racial boundaries during the period when I met my wife. For Christie, who lived a generation before mine, it was an enormous jump into the unknown. She never thought of herself as a romantic, but more realistically as an ambitious Black woman striving to be somebody. In Paris, the first time, she experienced the power of love, and she had to process this power against the rules of her upbringing in a segregated society. She loved her family, church, community, friends, and life in Harlem. That life was incompatible with her love for Franz.

Franz’s view on race was different. Living as a white man, yet cognizant of his Negro ancestry, he was seeking absolution for the lie he was living. Yet, he could not confess his Negritude to Christie, wanting her instead to love him as the white man he perceived himself to be. He knew his marriage to Christie would ostracize him from his community and force him to live in a Black neighborhood. He wanted Christie to make the same sacrifice and not fall back on the fact that he looked white but was really black. In those days, one drop of black blood defined your blackness.

Where do you see your characters after the book ends?

Heat of Paris is the first book in a trilogy. The saga of Christie and Franz continues in Ring of Deception to be published in several months and finally in Sugar Hill to be published early next year. Their saga brings Franz back to Paris, then colonial Algeria and the Mohican reservation in Wisconsin, and Christie to her childhood in segregated Mississippi. Through it all, they are separated, yet together, and must each undergo an unveiling of who they are and then a rebirth to allow their love to flourish.

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