Jillian Cantor’s The Lost Letter: A Novel is part mystery, part romance, part history and along the way an introduction to philately.
Katie Nelson is a writer in Los Angeles, currently going through a divorce. Her father, Ted, was a stamp collector but is now suffering from dementia and lives in a memory care facility. While cleaning out their family home, Katie comes across her father’s enormous stamp collection. She takes it to a stamp appraiser, Benjamin, who discovers a rare stamp on a letter that was never sent.
We shift to wartime Austria that has been annexed by Nazi Germany. Kristoff is a young apprentice to a master Jewish stamp engraver, Frederick Faber. He lives with Faber’s wife and two daughters, Elena and Mimi, in a small village on the outskirts of Vienna. Early in the novel, Elena is on her way to to the post office but is presumably captured by the Nazis, since she never returns home.
The chapters switch back between wartime Austria and late 80s and 90s Los Angeles. Cantor skillfully constructs this dual timeline. Fredrick Faber’s wife is captured, he disappears while walking to the nearby village and Kristoff is forced by to engrave stamps for the Nazis.
After Hitler took over Austria, they did a series of stamps to commemorate Austrian buildings and landmarks. This stamp is St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in Vienna. But it’s not supposed to have a flower in the steeple…I doubt it was a mistake…So then how did the flower get there?
Meanwhile, Katie and Benjamin go on a search for the origins of the rare stamp in her father’s collection. Together they travel to Wales to meet Mimi who lives in a retirement home, then to Berlin at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall where they eventually track down Elena who is living in East Berlin.
The story appears complex, but The Lost Letter reads quite clearly. Who is Kristoff and what happened to him after the war? Is Katie’s father really Ted? Why is Elena living in East Berlin? What is in the opened letter and is the stamp of any significant value?
Here I can only pose a few of the questions that make the novel such an exciting mystery. All of them are answered in the end, making The Lost Letter a moving tale of sacrifice, resistance and love.
The stamps were a connection to the past, his past, to this person he once was, this woman he once loved.
