TWO LIVES ON FOUR CONTINENTS

Tonetti Dorra offers a memoir of herself and her late husband that takes readers along on their life journey and shows how their paths came to cross.

The author first details, in her late husband Henri Dorra’s voice, how her future spouse left Alexandria, Egypt, studied engineering at the University of London and Harvard University, and eventually became a director of the University of California, Los Angeles, art museum, meeting his future wife in the early 1960s. Tonetti Dorra’s memoir describes her youth in Texas, her time at Vassar College, travels abroad, and her eventually becoming an Italian language teaching assistant at UCLA and meeting Henri. The use of vivid descriptions brings their experiences to life; reader will be able to easily picture both of their experiences and feel their moments of calm, as when Henri’s father compared the ripples of the waves to “dunes undulating along the coast as far as the eye could see,” or anxiety, as when Henri describes the terrifying moments when he and his mother evacuated from France to Britain during World War II with “hearts pounding and heads held high.” The juxtaposition of the author’s and Henri’s lived experiences can be jolting, especially at the beginning, when Henri’s life is being upended by Nazi invasion while the author’s own story speaks of her family’s Christmas cards. The alternation between the stories also effectively highlights other stark differences in their experiences. Readers see, for instance, how the author is able to easily brush off antisemitic conflicts in her young adulthood, as when her friend Gloria wasn’t allowed to join a sorority because she was Jewish; this was not an option for Henri, whose family was Jewish, as when the dean of Cambridge University told him that “it would be an extraordinary exception to his principles to admit [him].” Readers should be aware that a few reconstructed conversations in the White author’s remembrances of her Texas upbringing recall others using racial slurs, and the narration, at one point, problematically refers to Black people as “the blacks.”

An intricately woven, if sometimes-jarring, tale of two lives coming together.