Bliss, Remembered by Frank Deford (2011)

What a great way to start the new reading year! This was a Christmas gift from a colleague. She knows I like historical fiction, and this was a good one. this is the story of one American girl, who goes to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a swimmer and falls in love with a German boy. Sounds simple, but it is not. First, I liked the detailed description of the depression in the U.S. and this girl - Sydney - starts intensely swimming in the river off the Chesapeake Bay (on the Eastern Shore), when her father dies. She sorta stumbles into swimming, but turns out she is very good, and with some coaching becomes one of the best back stroke swimmers in the U.S. Sydney (our fictional character) is befriended by Eleanor Holm (a real historical swimming champ.)

Sydney ends up in Berlin with the U.S. swim team and we now get a close description of the Olympics in Berlin, including a meeting with Hitler and Goebbels. We also meet Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's film director, who did all sorts of innovative things to film the Olympics. My interest in the Berlin Olympics is great, as my father attended those with the Latvian delegation. He wasn't one of the athletes, but Hitler had invited men who organized athletic activities in their home towns to come to Berlin a week before the Olympics for a conference of sorts on encouraging athletics. My father was active in his town of Valka. He ended up marching past Hitler in the opening ceremonies. I also am trying to understand what Germany was like before the war broke out, and how people viewed them. They put on a great show, a positive propoganda blitz, but as the author points out, the signs were there. I also was not aware that the 1940 Olympics were planned for Japan. How ironic.

This story is well told, so I don't want to spoil anything for other readers, but Sydney does return home, trains for the next Olympics, writes to her love in Germany, but the war gets in the way.

The format of the book is interesting, as Sydney tells her story to her son in the last months of her life. The son has come to help his mother out, as she is ill, and they watch the summer Olympics in Athens on TV, and she tells him her story. At times this subplot got in the way a bit, but at others it gave some relief from the intensity of the main story. I loved the spunk of the elder Sydney, as she shocked her not too young son with too much information at times, and as she used outdated phrases, and often commented on them. Swell, coffin nail (cigarette), unmentionables (underwear) and then trying out today's terms, like whack. To avoid having all of the story told in this mode, she had written up her story and gave it to her son midway, so we get the written form of much of the tale after Germany. This moved the story along more quickly, though it too was interspersed with the son's thoughts and comments. The last part of the story Sydney again narrates to her son. Surprising, heart-warming, intense.

In the acknowledgements the author states that he actually met Eleanor Holm and Leni Riefenstahl as old women, but he could see how amazing they were. He also explains that he has kept to historical fact as much as possible and just inserted his character Sydney in actual events. Definite winner.