Author Talk with Anne Whiteside: “The Moon in Splinters”
Join us to hear Anne Whiteside in conversation about The Moon In Splinters with novelist Gregory Galloway.
One moonless night in 1942, a handsome 20-year-old British SOE lieutenant, Maurice Pertschuk, rowed ashore on the Côte d’Azur with orders to report to the French resistance. Three years later he’d be hanged at Buchenwald, just 13 days before its liberation, within earshot of approaching Allied guns. Friends rescued the sheaf of poems he’d scribbled on scavenged paper and published them in 1946 as Leaves of Buchenwald.
What had happened, his young niece Anne Whiteside wondered, to her brave maternal uncle, whom she had never met? A seemingly impenetrable silence hung around the subject.
Only after her mother’s death did Anne dare look for answers. In The Moon in Splinters she revisits Maurice’s haunts, tracks down survivors and interviews their families. A portrait emerges of Maurice as a slight, brilliant, romantic intellectual; of gentle disposition, yet tough, full of “imaginative audacity,” who organized a vast, yet to date largely forgotten, resistance network in southern France.
After the Germans occupied the whole of France, London ordered Maurice’s team to blow up a Toulouse explosive factory, but a double agent caught wind of the plot. Maurice and 16 others were betrayed, arrested, tortured and deported to Buchenwald.
The Moon in Splinters follows twists and turns in the discoveries, the disappointments and the revelations—all interwoven with Maurice’s reconstructed story. It leads to a surprise ending, even more sinister than the one historians tell.
Anne Whiteside divided her childhood between New York and Cornwall. She studied art and anthropology, and has a doctorate in educational linguistics, about which she’s written/edited articles and books. For over 30 years she taught English to immigrants, teachers at San Francisco State University and undergraduates at U.C. Berkeley. She has lectured in Ireland, Spain, Algeria and France, and had a Fulbright fellowship in Mexico. She spent the last 10 years researching her uncle’s work in the French resistance.
Gregory Galloway received an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has published poetry, short stories, essays and novels. His first novel, As Simple As Snow, received the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and Just Thieves was named one of the “best noir novels” of the year.
Registration is required.