Enemies in Love: A German POW, a Black Nurse, and an Unlikely Romance

by Alexis Clark Narrated by Allyson Johnson

Overview

This is a love story like no other: Elinor Powell was an African American nurse in the US military during World War II; Frederick Albert was a soldier in Hitler's army, captured by the Allies and shipped to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Arizona desert. Like most other black nurses, Elinor pulled a second-class assignment, in a dusty, sun-baked-and segregated-Western town. The army figured that the risk of fraternization between black nurses and white German POWs was almost nil.



Brought together by unlikely circumstances in a racist world, Elinor and Frederick should have been bitter enemies; but instead, at the height of World War II, they fell in love. Their dramatic story was unearthed by journalist Alexis Clark, who through years of interviews and historical research has pieced together an astounding narrative of race and true love in the cauldron of war.



Based on a New York Times story by Clark that drew national attention, Enemies in Love paints a tableau of dreams deferred and of love struggling to survive, twenty-five years before the Supreme Court's Loving decision legalizing mixed-race marriage-revealing the surprising possibilities for human connection during one of history's most violent conflicts.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

04/02/2018
In this engaging yet unfulfilling narrative expanded from a New York Times article, journalist Clark narrates the almost inconceivable romance between Elinor Powell, an African-American army nurse, and Frederick Albert, the German prisoner of war she met during World War II. Where this book shines is in its stark depiction of racism in pre- and post-war America. Elinor, who finished near the top of her nursing school class, comes face to face with racial prejudice in the South, a sharp contrast to her privileged Northern upbringing. While serving in Arizona, she meets Frederick, a jazz-loving painter who, though a soldier and a member of the Hitler Youth, “was never indoctrinated into Hitler’s racist system.” Clark excels at placing this unlikely interracial romance in context as a shocking rarity, but her depiction of Elinor and Frederick’s relationship feels lacking—undoubtedly due to their “private, even reticent” natures and Clark’s inability to access firsthand material. Interviews and research paint a picture of a couple stoically coping with racism, financial difficulty, and even infidelity, but they’re depicted only on a surface level. The book founders as a portrait of a marriage, but it has plenty to say about race relations and cultural change in mid-20th-century America. Agent: Howard Yoon, Ross Yoon Agency. (May)

From the Publisher

Praise for Enemies in Love:
A “New & Noteworthy” selection of The New York Times Book Review

“[Clark] poignantly lays out the history of racial discrimination in WWII America, describes prejudices and injustices in the wartime US Army, and tells an intriguing love story of two unlikely people.”
—America in WWII magazine

“Enemies in Love expands beyond the beleaguered couple to examine some of the lesser-known aspects of the war, from the discrimination faced by African Americans in the military to the interaction between German prisoners of war and the communities that reluctantly housed them. A powerful tale of love against all odds. ”
—Booklist

“In this compelling and original work, Alexis Clark has given us an absorbing narrative of an unlikely love in an unlikely place between unlikely protagonists. An African American nurse and a German POW, brought together by the winds of war in an Arizona desert: it is an irresistible human story that evokes perennial themes. Clark's voice is engaging, and her tale universal.”
—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power and American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“Alexis Clark's astonishing and necessary love story is not only a valuable document about time past, but a prescient look at the ways in which miscegenation changed the world and changes the world. Written with compassion and clarity, Clark's necessary history illustrates the ways in which love and the personal are always political. A tour de force.”
—Hilton Als, staff writer at the New Yorker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and author of White Girls

“Clark's unlikely love story of a World War II German POW and African American army nurse mercifully yanks us from a world of staid stereotype and racial acrimony into one of possibility and transcendence. A tonic for weary souls.”
—Pamela Newkirk, author of Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, winner of the 2016 NAACP Image Award

“Alexis Clark illuminates a whole corner of unknown World War II history in a U.S. prisoner of war camp and the postwar American suburbs, full of expected racism and intolerance—sweetened by unexpected love, unusual pockets of racial harmony, and genuine romance.”
—Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci

“A powerful testament to our shared humanity, Enemies in Love is sensitive, audacious, and inspiring. It challenges stereotypes and ignites hope. Indeed, love is both fragile and enduring, defiant and comforting—just like this remarkable book.”
—Janet Dewart Bell, author, Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement

Kirkus Reviews

2018-03-05
An African-American nurse experiences racism in two nations driven apart by war.Elinor Powell earned a nursing degree in 1943 and joined the U.S. Army the following year, determined to do her part for the war effort. She was sent to Arizona to complete her basic training and then posted to a German prisoner-of-war camp in the desert south of Phoenix. There, Elinor met Frederick Albert, an English-speaking German with a learned interest in the jazz music that had been banned by the Hitler regime. Frederick, writes freelance journalist Clark, was a man of many parts, an artist and intellectual who opposed Hitler but joined the army all the same. He claimed to have been a combat soldier captured in Italy, but the paperwork Clark turns up suggests that he was instead a medical corpsman taken prisoner in North Africa. "The most reasonable explanation was that in an attempt to impress his children, Frederick told them that he was an elite paratrooper," writes the author. Whatever the case, those children resulted from the ardent romance Elinor and Frederick struck up in that Arizona camp and continued after the war, moving a step ahead of Jim Crow laws and finally, after marrying in New York, returning for a time to Germany, where their young children experienced a racism of a different kind and degree from that they would have to endure back home. "Focusing on prejudice could have destroyed their relationship," writes Clark, "since it seemed that the world was against them." Yet their relationship prevailed even when it developed that Frederick had a different notion of faithfulness from Elinor's, and they did what they could to shield their children—one of whom grew up to be a professional jazz trumpeter—from the worst of the bigotry they encountered in two lands.A footnote in the vast literature of civil rights, but a resonant one.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171734275
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	05/15/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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