Pam Jenoff

Before the novels, Pam Jenoff worked for the US State Department in Krakow, handling the restitution of Jewish property to families and communities that had lost it in the war, and the city and that subject have supplied her fiction ever since. The Woman with the Blue Star (2021) puts a Jewish girl into the sewers beneath Lwow and a Polish girl on the pavement above, and takes its situation from what people actually did to survive there. The Lost Girls of Paris (2019) follows the women the Special Operations Executive trained and sent into occupied France, and the ones who did not come back. Jenoff took a master's degree at Cambridge and a law degree at Pennsylvania, worked at the Pentagon as special assistant to the Secretary of the Army, and now teaches law at Rutgers in Camden while writing.