(Ripp, Victor) Victor Ripp is the author of Moscow to Main Street, Pizza in Pushkin Square, and Turgenev’s Russia. His fiction has appeared in Ontario Review and Antioch Review. He has taught at Cornell University and the University of Virginia. Hell’s Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is his most recent book. In July 1942, the French police in Paris, acting for the German military government, arrested Victor Ripp’s three-year-old cousin, Alexandre. Two months later, the boy was killed in Auschwitz. In Hell’s Traces, Ripp examines this act through the prism of family history. In addition to Alexandre, ten members of Ripp’s family on his father’s side died in the Holocaust. His mother’s side of the family, numbering thirty people, was in Berlin when Hitler came to power. Without exception they escaped the Final Solution. Hell’s Traces tells the story of the two families’ divergent paths. Resolutely unsentimental, Hell’s Traces is structured like a travelogue in which each destination enables a reckoning with the past.
