Thirty years after a Jewish widow and her children are kept safe by their loyal housekeeper after the Nazis take over Latvia in 1940, she begs her estranged granddaughter to find out what happened to her son.

"Coming of age in 1960s Paris, Bernard Appelbaum exists in the hazy shadow of the Holocaust and on the electric cusp of the French New Wave. We find the narrator of Wide awake as he wanders the city streets in search of signs of his father, who was deported by the Nazis in 1942. Bernard's chance encounter with a former acquaintance who has become filmmaker François Truffaut's assistant leads to a spot as an extra on the set of Jules and Jim--setting into motion a series of discoveries and lost memories that crack open a hidden past. On seeing Jules and Jim, Bernard's mother is moved to divulge the secrets of her own past as a Jewish-Polish immigrant to France, which curiously mirrors that of the film's heroine. When revelations about his mother's two loves lead Bernard on a fateful journey through Paris, to Germany, and then to Auschwitz itself, he must plumb haunting depths in order to recover his own identity."--Publisher's description.

Esther, seventeen years old, wild and rebellious, is sent from Israel to Cameroon to stay with her hardheaded uncle Sicourelle, who is charged with straightening her out. But Esther resists her uncle's plans for her future-which include marriage to a cousin-and in the privileged indolence of postcolonial Africa, she looks to the past instead. Using sepia portraits and scraps of letters, Esther pieces together the history of her family, a once-grand Egyptian-Jewish clan, and its displacement from Cairo in the 1950s to Israel, West Africa, and New York. As the worn photographs yield their secrets, Esther uncovers a rich tale of wives and ex-wives; revolving mistresses and crushing marriages; intrigues and disappointments; poignant contrats between the living past and the dead present. In sensuous, inventive prose, Matalon penetrates the mysteries of cultural exile and family life to produce a first novel that is mature, authentic, and deeply moving.