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Publication Date: 9/6/22
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781639930463
Retail Price: $26.99
Page Count: 352
Historical Fiction
Cover art: ©Ildik
Based on the true story of the Cook sisters, who smuggled valuables out of 1930s Nazi Germany to finance a daring, secret operation to help Jews find hope for a new life in England
British sisters Ida and Louise Cook enjoy their quiet, unassuming lives in south London. Ida writes romance novels, and Louise works as a secretary. In the evenings, the sisters indulge in their shared love for opera, saving their money to buy records and attend performances throughout England and Europe, becoming well-known by both performers and fellow opera lovers.
But when Hitler seizes power in 1933, he begins targeting and persecuting German Jews, passing laws that restrict their rights and their lives. The sisters continue their trips to the German opera houses, but soon, Jewish members of the opera community covertly approach the sisters, worried that they will be stripped of their wealth and forced to leave their homes and the country. Danger looms on the horizon, threatening to spill across all of Europe’s borders.
Ida and Louise vow to help, but how can two ordinary working-class women with limited means make a difference?
Together with their beloved opera community, the sisters devise a plan to personally escort Jewish refugees from Germany to England. The success of the plan hinges on Ida and Louise’s ability to smuggle contraband jewelry and furs beneath the watchful eyes of the SS soldiers guarding various checkpoints. But how many trips can they make before someone blows a whistle? Or before the final curtain falls on Germany’s borders?
The Opera Sisters is a riveting and inspiring novel of two unlikely heroines whose courage and compassion gave hope to many Jews desperate to escape Nazi persecution.
LONDON, SUMMER 1934
Ida’s lace-up Oxfords echoed on the long tile hallway as she fell into step behind others leaving the Foreign Office at workday’s close. She concentrated on a woman’s reasonable black pumps progressing in an orderly fashion ahead of her and forced herself to slow down. Steady, Ida chastised, as she gripped her purse tighter in frustration. Be sensible. She drew a deep, calming breath, fighting against the urge to leap all the way down the hall.
You’re nearly thirty years old now and should be able to contain yourself, the mature part of her brain lectured, but the secret beating its way through her brain wanted nothing of restraint. Forcing her steps to slow once more, she told herself to be calmer. More practical—more like her sister.
Ida made her way outside, down the steps, and around the corner, to the meeting spot where her sister waited. With a rounder face, smooth hair, and wider eyes, her older sister had always been considered the prettier one, and Ida thought Louise looked a picture wearing a tweed polo overcoat and pintucked gray gloves as she leaned slightly against the limestone base of the Lord Robert Clive statue.
In the last twenty meters, Ida could hold back no more and practically skittered across the walkway.
Louise looked up in surprise. “You all right?”
Ida clutched her arm. “Louise,” she said. “Take a deep breath. Prepare yourself. You may be unable to control yourself at this news.”
Louise laughed. “Rather doubtful, that. You’re the one who has a difficult time containing yourself. Whatever is it?”
Ida inhaled with the pleasure of anticipation. “Over lunch, I walked by Albert Hall. They had just posted the concerts for the new season.”
Louise raised her eyebrows, piqued. “And?”
“On her London debut, Amelita Galli-Curci is coming to sing in concert.” Ida paused to let the news sink in. “Galli-Curci is coming here!”
A smile broke over Louise’s face, her stiff posture melting momentarily in the face of her sister’s enthusiasm. “That’s rubbish!”
“Three performances. Oh, Louise! I’m chuffed to bits! It’s still months off, but do you think if we scrimp on lunches—do you think we can buy tickets—to them all?”
“We must!” Louise pronounced, and Ida was thrilled at her sister’s decisive response, because she knew that if Louise said a thing, it was as good as done.
Ida threaded her arm through her sister’s, and they turned to walk up King Charles Street, toward Whitehall, as Big Ben clanged out the time in the distance. How often had they listened to Galli- Curci’s record in the past year? Over and over again they’d played it, until their mother, father, and younger brothers insisted on anything other than that. The mere thought of hearing Galli-Curci’s voice in person, of seeing in real life the singer whose image they’d admired upon the record label, sent Ida into a paroxysm of anticipation.
“Oh!” Ida stopped mid-stride on the pavement. “Whatever will we wear?”
Louise laughed. “We’ve heaps of time to figure it out, Ides.”
Six months previous, Louise had blown through the back door, rain and wind gusting in with her, removed her hat, and announced to the kitchen at large: “I simply must have a gramophone.”
She’d wandered into a lecture by Sir Walford Davies over lunch, she explained. With his gramophone beside him, he’d discoursed on the beauty of music and the modern possibility of enjoying concerts in one’s very own parlor.
“They’re no longer only for the wealthy,” Louise said, quoting from the lecture.
Ida laughed. “I doubt very much Sir Walford was speaking of civil servants earning three pounds fifty a week.”
“Nevertheless,” Louise replied. “I must have a gramophone. I’ve just received a cost-of-living alteration I can use for the deposit.”
Ida had never known the likes of Louise for obstinacy, but she didn’t see how even she might manage it. Still, she wasn’t going to miss seeing the marvel, so she went with her sister to a showroom full of H. M. V. gramophones.
When the shop assistant dropped the needle down upon a record, violins and cellos filled the shop with sound. “Oh!” Ida exclaimed, touching the polished walnut case and hand crank. “Suppose I chip in my cost-of-living increase too? We can share it and some records to boot.”
“Ten records are on offer right now,” the assistant said, pleased by their reaction.
“We ought to have some Beethoven and Mozart, I’d think,” said Louise. “And Bartok and Stravinsky, according to Sir Walford.”
“I would suggest vocal records as well,” said the assistant. “Rosa Ponselle’s La Forza del Destino is one I think you might enjoy. And there’s a new Amelita Galli-Curci record out.”
They exchanged blank looks.
He held up the Galli-Curci record, and they both studied the proud woman on the cover, swathed in embroidered fabrics.
“Ida,” Louise asked coyly as the attendant moved away. “What does her outfit remind you of?”
Ida blushed. “I know what you’re thinking of, but I doubt she’s wearing draperies nicked from her secondary school.”
“Are you certain?”
Ida rolled her eyes. “Do you remember that Christina Rosetti poem that says, ‘There is no friend like a sister’?”
“Of course.”
“I doubt very much she ever had one.”
Louise laughed. “We’ll take the records,” she told the assistant when he returned.
They left the shop that day clutching ten records, with the gramophone promised to follow in a few days’ time.
When the lovely creation was unpacked in the front parlor beside the Chesterfield, Mum, Dad, and their brother Bill gathered round for the occasion and waited as Louise drew a record from its packaging, laid it carefully upon the spin table, and dropped the needle upon the lined surface of the disk.
Louise had chosen the Ponselle record at random, and the flat filled with the soaring tones of an incomparably beautiful voice. In response, Ida sank down upon the hard floor in stunned silence. “Oh, Louise!” she managed. “You’ve cut open a hole to heaven and let it drain directly into our parlor!”
“Imagine that,” their father said, stroking his chin and fiddling with the handle on the gramophone, pretending to understand how it worked. “Imagine that. It’s a concert hall in our front room.”
“Shall we walk and save the bus fare for concert tickets, then?” Louise asked, bringing Ida back to the streets of Westminster.
Ida nodded. “We can bring bits from home to eat for dinner and save on that as well.”
Since the day the gramophone had arrived, it had been much easier for Ida to ignore the lack of interest she felt as she set off for the good-and-solid-job-with-a-pension she knew she ought to feel grateful for, especially in the middle of an economic depression.
The twenty-three pounds had been paid off now; and somehow, the music made it easier to forget that many of their grade school friends had found love and had babies of their own now, though plenty remained single given the shortage of men their age alive after the Great War. Like so many others, Louise had fallen in love in her teenage years with a boy who fell on the battlefield. And though Ida loved dreaming of all the ways she might find romance, she had not met anyone whose reality could contend with the fantasies her mind could conjure or the plots of the romance novels she hid under her bed.
Both their brothers, Jim and Bill, would soon be married to women Ida and Louise deemed nearly worthy of them, and more and more they were gone from home. Day after day, Ida returned to her copy typist desk, taking dictation and typing careful notes, though her eyes often strayed to the window where the rays of a westering sun turned the clouds pink along the edges.
Perhaps, she sometimes thought, perhaps reality would be easier to accept if only her mind didn’t insist on inventing so many stories of all the other impossible ways it could go.
Marianne Monson has worked with books her whole life, as an editor, a passionate reader, and an author. She is the author of nine books and counting, including historical fiction, children's books, and young adult novels. She teaches at Portland Community College, and her two children love writing almost as much as she does.
compassion gave hope to many Jews desperate to escape Nazi persecution.
MARIANNE MONSON received her MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and primarily writes on topics related to women’s history. She has taught English and Creative Writing at the community college and university levels and is the author of twelve books for children and adults, including the novel Her Quiet Revolution and her nonfiction works Frontier Grit and Women of the Blue and Gray.
She is the founder of The Writer’s Guild, a literary nonprofit, and writes from a 100-year-old house in Astoria, Oregon.
Visit her at mariannemonson.com
My Thoughts about The Opera Sisters
The Opera Sisters by Marianne Monson is a story of love, war, and Nazi Persecution of the Jews in Germany and Austria. It's wonderfully researched and written with compassion and empathy for the time.
The story is based on the Cook sisters, Ida Cook was a campaigner for the Jews and an author using the name Mary Purcell. She and her sister Mary Louise was instrumental in aiding 29 Jews to escape the persecution of Jews in Austria and Germany mostly after Kristallnacht.
They both loved opera so they were able to obtain tickets to concerts performed in Germany. These trips to the operas were coverups for what they were really up to. While there in Germany, it became word of mouth about what they could do to help these people that had had everything taken from them. They would take their jewelry and other valuable items back to England with them and keep them for the people. Then they were able to smuggle the people back to England. The only way that they were able to do this is recruit people in England to sponsor the Jews.
In a three-year period, they were able to save 29, men women, and children. Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss and his wife, soprano Viorica Ursuleac originally told them about the plight of the Jews. Ida as an author was able to support the effort with the money she made from the novels.
They had rented a small flat in England for some of these refugees that had nowhere else to go. After the war, the sisters continued their efforts to save as many people as they could from the nastiness that was the Nazis.
I love this book so much, cheered for the sisters and their endeavors, not a fan of opera but I found it very interesting that they were able to use this ruse to free people right under the Nazi guard's noses.
Impeccable research went into this story and it shows. I was the first that I had heard of the Cook sisters and I am glad I read this book. It will stay in my mind for a long time to come.
I give the book 5 stars.
I received a copy of the book for review purposes only.
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