Eva and Eve - Julie Metz

Hardcover available now from Atria/S&S. Paperback to come in May 2022.

Julie Metz’s mother Eve was the quintessential New Yorker—steely, savvy, thrifty, pragmatic, brusque. It was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but New York City was in fact her adopted home. She was born in Vienna to a comfortable, middle class Jewish family until Germany annexed Austria on March 12, 1938.

In the two years following the Nazi takeover, her father Julius struggled to find a safe haven for his wife and children. Across the ocean, anti-immigration fervor prevailed as part of the initial America First movement. Miraculously, Julius got his family out of Vienna just in time, thanks to perseverance, a medicine package made of folded paper, a sympathetic American Vice Consul, and good luck.

Shortly after Eve’s death, Metz found a keepsake book her mother had kept hidden in a drawer for over half a century, filled with farewell notes from her childhood friends and relatives. In that secret keepsake book, her mother’s name was Eva. Inspired by this discovery, Metz set out in search of her mother’s lost childhood. The result is Eva and Eve, a real-life detective story that offers moments of grace, serendipity, and lessons for this polarized moment when once again Otherness is the enemy.

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The Third Reich passports with the American visas that saved their lives

Eva at age ten in January 1938, just two months before the Nazi takeover of Austria

Julius and friends hiking in the Hohe Wand, not far from Vienna, May 20, 1928

The Singer children in Vienna: Dolfi, Eva, Fritz, around 1932

Adolf Eisenmann und Sohn's patented “papierkapseln” made of folded papers glued together in a fan shape. Description powder could be inserted into each open channel. The importance of this piece of paper to the Nazi war effort kept Julius Singer from being deported to Dachau

New immigrants Anna, Eva, Julius, at New York City’s World’s Fair, summer 1940

Photo of the patented fan-shaped packaging manufactured by my grandfather’s factory. The design of this piece permitted a pharmacist to dose powdered medicine in a hygienic manner. Each piece of paper is folded and attached to the others to create the channels for the medicine. My mother said that the machinery that made this item was so complicated that the Nazis kept my grandfather alive to run it. I have seen the machine for myself, and it is a wondrous one-off. The machine is still operating today and this item is still being used by homeopathic and custom pharmacies.