FOREWORD（第2/3页）

When their fraternity brothers thought it would be fun to send them letters making fun of Hitler; they wrote back and said, "Stop it. We're in danger: These people don't fool around, You could murder one of these Nazis by writing letters to him."

When that incident occurred, it rated only a small article in the news, but it caught EUiott's eye; he brought it home to Kathrine, and it gave rise to their joint idea of using a letter as a weapon. She took that idea and went to work on the story she wanted to write.

I wanted to write about what the Nazis were doing and show the American public what happens to real, living peoples wept up in a warped ideology.

The result was "Address Unknown," a great success about which The New York Times Book Review stated in 1939, "This modern story is perfection itself. It is the most effective indictment of Nazism to appear in fiction." That indictment continued in Kathrine's next book, Until that Day, published in 1942.

Following the war, when further indictment of the Nazis no longer seemed necessary, Address Unknown slipped from public notice and was Jargely forgotten, other than its inclusion in an occasional anthology Elliott Taylor died in 1953, and Kathrine lived as a widow for the next fifteen years, continuing to write and to teach writing, journalism, and humanities at Gettysburg College, in Pennsylvania. Retiring in 1966, she moved to Florence, Italy, where she experienced the great flood of the Arno river in November of that year-which inspired her third book, Diary of Florence in Flood, published to critical acclaim in England andAmerica the following spring.

En route to Italy in 1966 0n the Italian Line's Michclangelo, Kathrine met the American sculptor John Rood. The two felt an immediate attraction, had a shipboard romance, and were married the following year in Minneapolis, where he made his home. ThereaRer, they lived part of each year in Minneapolis and part in the Val de Pea, outside Florence. Even after Rood's death in 1974, Kathrine kept both homes for nearly twenty years, living quietly in each six months a year, simply as Mrs. John Rood.

Then, in 1995, when Kathrine was ninety-one years old, Story Press reissued Address Unknown "to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps" and because, as Story editor Lois Rosenthal wrote, its "significant and timeless message" had earned it "a permanent place on the bookshelves" of America. The book was well received, and Kathrine, happily signing copies and granting television and press interviews, was gratified at its re-emergence, this time with the status of an American literary classic.

Kathrine Kressmann Taylor Rood died in July 1996, late in her ninety-third year, sharp-witted, perceptive, and enthusiastic, even about the end of life. "Dying," she said in her last week, "is normal. It's as normal as being born." And she was ready. She had lived several successful lives: as a wife and mother, as a popular professor, and as the author of three books and a dozen short stories, one of which, Address Unknown, was recognized as a classic while she lived.

Shortly after her death, a copy of the 1995 reissue came into the hands of French publisher Henri Dougier of Editions Autrement, Paris. He saw at once its relevance to the entire European community, both those members who had lived under Nazi domination and those who needed to know what it had been like. He determined that a French translation must be undertaken, and that translation, by Michele Levy-Bram, hit the French bestseUer list in late 1999. Fifty thousand copies sold that first year, and another fifty thousand in the early months of 2000; the book was selling far more than it ever had in the United States. And other Europeans were reading it, calling for its translation and publication in their own languages: Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Hebrew, German, Greek, Norw'egian, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese. This handsome new edition by Washington Square Press is yet another chapter in its ongoing success story I am most gratified that my mother lived long enough to see this little book recognized as the classic it's become.