RIVERHEAD BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
Copyright © 2019 by Margaret Paxson
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Paxson, Margaret, author.
Title: The plateau / Maggie Paxson.
Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2019
Identifiers: LCCN 2018050747 (print) | LCCN 2019012889 (ebook) | ISBN 9780698408739 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594634758 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (France)—Emigration and immigration. | Refugees—France—Le Chambon-sur-Lignon—History—20th century. | Refugees—France—Le Chambon-sur-Lignon—History—21st century. | World War, 1939–1945—Refugees—France—Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. | Refugee children—France—Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. | Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (France) | Anthropologists—Biography. | Paxson, Margaret.
Classification: LCC JV7990.C43 (ebook) | LCC JV7990.C43 P39 2019 (print) | DDC 362.870944/595—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050747
So much is in a name, but for the sake of their privacy and safety—now and in the future—I have changed the names (and certain identifying features) of the people who appear in the present day in The Plateau, with the exception of public figures and published historians. To mitigate the loss, I have renamed each person with a name, attribute, color, or sound that I love. I’ve also tried to preserve in the spelling something of the languages of the names’ origins. For example, in Chechen, a language with a complex sound system, the consonant transcribed as kh comes in a few forms, but if you hear the Hebrew chai in your head, as in Hanukkah (or even the ch as in the Scottish Gaelic loch), it’s close enough; dzh is more or less an English j; and so on.