From May to September 1938, one year before the start of World War II, John and Margaret Randolph traveled from the U.S. to Europe. At ages 34 and 27, they were on an adventure, traveling by train, renting bicycles, and sleeping in youth hostels– a typical tour in an atypical time. They traveled to Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, England, and Wales before finding passage home on a freighter. Rebecca McBride’s father, a mathematician who had just spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, kept a daily journal of the trip. After his death, McBride came across the journal. Knowing what took place in Germany in 1938 and what would follow throughout Europe, she began to research the historical context for the trip and ask, how much did they know, and what did they see? The book combines his journal with her historical and personal commentary. It is available from bookstores, Amazon (print or Kindle), and Powell’s Books. Photographs by John F. Randolph.

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“I found the book so engaging that I couldn’t put it down… Aside from the major historical events going on all around the American couple… my interest was also piqued by what was going on personally for them. In the attempt to discover the bigger picture, McBride did such a fine job.”

––Elizabeth Wilen-Berg, Psychologist and Holocaust Educator

“It really is a vanished world McBride’s parents were traveling through–at once so compellingly filled with menace and innocence. Germany especially was filled with what we now know as burgeoning evil, normal and banal—all of it underscored by McBride’s scrupulous annotation. Her father, as the narrator, sees it all and takes it in but nevertheless focuses his steady attention to the calmer and countable parts of life. What an orderly man and what an orderly mind!”

––Elizabeth Stone, Professor of English, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

“Years after her father’s death, McBride found four tiny notebooks in her mathematician father’s distinctive handwriting, detailing her parents’ on-the-cheap steamer, train, and bike tour of Europe before she was born. What was it like to travel through Germany as Hitler rose to power? How much did they know? A fascinating dialogue with a vanished time and place.”

Chronogram Magazine/Books: Short Takes, February 2012

“John and Margaret Randolph’s trip to Europe in 1938 seemed remote from all the political conclusions that might have been expected, and it was just before the Munich Pact, but his writing is an eloquent statement of how little ordinary Americans knew or thought about what was going on in the world at large. John was a mathematician, and became in addition to his research papers, a noted textbook writer.”

––Sanford L. Segal, Mathematicians under the Nazis (Princeton University Press, 2003)

Epigraph Books

 ISBN: 978-0-982644126

Photographs by John F. Randolph, 1938. 

Available from bookstores, Amazon, and Powell Books