Read The Postmistress for Free Online Page A

the slant of the older woman’s shoulders. Like a seamstress, Harriet Mendelsohn had gathered scraps of news about what was happening to Jews as the Nazis swept country after country into their pile, and she had been doing it since the Nazis had taken Poland the year before. She wrote of the thousands of Jews from Warsaw and other Polish cities seeking refuge in Latvia and Lithuania who were turned away at the borders. The suicides in Warsaw, the expulsions, the mass arrests: what she heard she typed up and sent out on the wires. It was Harriet who’d first reported Hitler’s proposal to the Reichstag in 1939 that Germany establish a Jewish reservation within the Polish state, modeled—Hitler had assured his audience—after an American Indian reservation. When Harriet sewed the scraps together, it seemed as if the Nazis were trying to set the Jews moving, set them on the run, set them off—above all else, get them out of Germany.
    But was it organized? That was the question. And was it credible? That was the worry. There had been so many sensational and fake atrocity stories written about Germany during the First War, much of the press was chary of a story about deliberate, ominous action against the Jews now. That hadn’t seemed possible until the beginning of this year when the Vatican confirmed that the Nazis were moving Jews—from Austria, Czechoslovakia, and all parts of Poland—into ghettos. But were they being gathered for a reason? the Times of London had gently wondered aloud, a couple of weeks ago. Yes, Harriet had begun to believe, they were. The story here was a story about some kind of organized assault. And Harriet parsed scraps and lines of Nazi policy otherwise buried in large speeches to tell that story, though it beggared belief. She had cousins in Poland, and when their letters appeared on the front hall sideboard, along with their news came the unmistakable relief that they were still there in their house, on their street. Still there.
    For now, Frankie poured two whiskeys and put one on the sill beside Harriet. For now. For now. Those were the words that built the dread. And how to write that story? Murrow’s three questions, which formed the basis for every broadcast— What is happening? How does it affect Americans? What does the Common Man say— didn’t cohere in the face of this one. The scraps added up to a terrible time for the Jews, any man at home could see. Terrible, it was terrible. But war was terrible. God knows, War was hell. And what were we supposed to do about it?
    Pay attention —Frankie tipped her glass against Harriet’s— and then write like hell . She took her drink and threw herself into the curve of the white club chair in the front room. A Smithy, class of ’32, she had returned to New York after graduation, presenting herself, to her mother’s bewilderment, at Max Prescott’s office at the Trib the following morning. He had taken one look at the impatient, coltish flash of female in front of him, and directed her back out the door to bring him what she found. Her satchel swinging off her hip, she walked without knowing what she looked for, down West Fourth Street into the chaos and maw of Broadway and farther east, toward the tenements hulking along the river. She walked, and found to her bemusement she could go anywhere with a notebook. Not only that, but people would talk to her. People were suckers for a listening ear. And so she collected the scraps she saw or heard and wrote them down. After six months, Prescott had set aside two column inches—without a byline—for her “City Pulse.”
    Right through the end of Hoover and out the other side into the New Deal and the great broad teeth of Mrs. Roosevelt, Frankie covered the city, uptown and down, in satin heels and loafers, Summa cum , as her mother insisted on introducing her, proudly, hopefully, even still, to a prospective husband. Summa cum lucky, Frankie would mutter, watching, reveling in taking