Milly Mogulof

Milly Mogulof tells the fascinating story of Helene Mayer, the champion half-Jewish German fencer of the 1920s and 1930s. Meyer's was a short and tragic life: Olympic champion in 1928, she remained in America after the 1932 Olympics as her position in Germany became ever more untenable. Unwisely she returned to the German team as the "token Jew" for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. A silver medal and a Nazi salute on the podium were not enough to restore their adulation she once enjoyed, and she returned broken to America. She made her way back to Germany after the war, married a baron and died aged 42.

Mogulof recounts the facts diligently enough, but her analysis tends to the superficial, and she judges Mayer in the harsh unforgiving light of hindsight. Enough of the real Helene Mayer--an ordinary German girl who happened to excel at fencing and wanted only to live a normal life--comes through that the reader perhaps has more sympathy than the author for a victim of the terrible times through which she lived.… (plus d'informations)