The Secrets of the Notebook: A Woman's Quest to Uncover Her Royal Family Secret - Hardcover

Haas, Eve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1611459060 ISBN 13: 9781611459067

Publisher: Arcade, 2013

Synopsis

“The beautiful owner of this book is dearer to me than my life – August your protector.” This one sentence was the key to a mystery involving some of the greatest and most infamous figures in European history, from Frederick the Great to Napoleon and Hitler—and solved by the author of this book.

Eve Haas is the daughter of a German Jewish family that took refuge in London after Hitler came to power. Following a terrifying air raid in the blitz, her father revealed the family secret, that her great-great grandmother Emilie was married to a Prussian prince. He then showed her the treasured leather-bound notebook inscribed to Emilie by the prince. Her parents were reluctant to learn more, but later in life, when Eve was married and inherited the diary, she became obsessed with proving this birthright. The Secrets of the Notebook tells how she follows the clues, from experts on European royalty in London to archives in West Germany and then, under threat of being arrested as a spy by the Communist regime, to an archive in East Germany that had never before opened its doors to the West. What she unearths is a love story set against the upheaval of the Napoleonic wars and the antiSemitism of the Prussian court, and a ruse that both protected Emilie’s daughter and probably condemned her granddaughter—Eve’s beloved grandmother, Anna—to death in the Nazi camps.

When first published in the UK, The Secrets of the Notebook was an Irish Times bestseller. A movie based on the book is in production. 

About this title

About the Author

Eve Haas was born in Breslau, now Poland, in 1924. She and her family fled Germany for London when Hitler came to power. She pursued a writing career, married, and raised a family, continuing to write children’s books and contribute to magazines and newspapers in the UK. Her book The Secrets of the Notebook recounts her lifelong quest to find and document the truth about her family's link to the lineage of Frederick the Great and to the British Royal Family. She lived in North London, England, until her death in January 2019, at the age of ninety-four.

Reviews

Not everyone tracing family roots discovers a connection to one of the wealthiest and most powerful royal families in history. Haas was born in Breslau, Germany, in 1924. At age 10, she fled Berlin with her assimilated Jewish family to escape the Nazis, but her beloved fragile grandmother, Anna, would not leave, and she later perished in transport to the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt. But was Anna really Jewish? From London, Haas is obsessed with tracing her family’s history right back to the Napoleonic Wars, poring for years with her husband and sons through files, documents, letters, libraries, archives, and graveyards across Europe; she was sometimes in danger of being arrested as a spy during the Cold War. Descriptions of the slogging do get, well, boring at times, but readers exploring their ancestry will recognize the authenticity of the dense detail and many dead ends. The astonishing discoveries lead to more questions, and the climax makes you go back to the beginning. What else is missing from the history books? --Hazel Rochman

Edition details

• Publisher: Arcade
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1611459060
• ISBN 13: 9781611459067
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280