'The Tattered Cloak' and Other Stories

First published in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, these searing, evocative stories by the late emigre writer Nina Berberova (1901-1993) are portraits of the lives of Russian exiles in Paris on the eve of World War II. The protagonists range from housekeepers and waiters to shabby-genteel aristocrats and intellectuals -- but all are united in a haunting displacement from their pasts, and all share a troubling uncertainty about the future.