Love in the Blitz

Experience romance and wartime London in the collected letters between two English lovers separated while serving their country during World War II.

On July 17, 1939, Eileen Alexander, a recent Cambridge graduate, writes a letter to fellow student Gershon Ellenbogen. It is the beginning of a stirring correspondence that lasts seven years, through the darkest days of World War II, and spans many hundreds of letters.

Recently discovered and meticulously curated, these extraordinary records that “tell a rich, multilayered story—a wealthy and bright young woman’s day-by-day experience in London during the war, the growth of her love for a young man, and her insider’s view of a fascinating slice of upper-class Jewish life in mid-twentieth-century England,” writes Thomas Rick in the New York Times Book Review. “One of her closest friends is Aubrey Eban, who would later become Abba Eban, the influential foreign minister of Israel. Simply ‘everybody’ she knows from Cambridge University, where she took a first in English just before the war, has gone to work at Bletchley Park, famous nowadays as the headquarters for British code breaking during the war. She lunches with Anthony Eden, dines with Orde Wingate, chats with Bernard Lewis, and argues about politics with Michael Foot.”

Equal parts heartrending and heartwarming, Love in the Blitz is a timeless romance and a deeply personal story of life and resilience amid the violence and terror of war.