Doors to Madame Marie

All children wrestle with the questions of identity. But for a very young Jewish girl who must pass for Catholic in occupied France, the conflicts are doubly complicated. Now an American citizen and French literature professor, Meyers has constructed a poignant and acutely observant memoir of her coming of age as a ""hidden child."" When she moved to the Vendee town of St. Fulgent, she had to convince her provincial neighbors that she left Paris ""because here the food is good and you can get the best Catholic education in France."" In fact, she taught herself so well that at the war's end she was torn between her devotion to Catholicism and the debt she felt to the dead to return to her parents' faith. To make things more complicated, her local priest ""had made it clear that if a Jew so much as entered a Catholic Church, it caused so much spiritual chaos that the parishioners' prayers were derouted from their heavenward course."" In subsequent years, Meyers tried to re-trace her life with varying degrees of success. In the sixties, she tracked down Mme. Marie, the doting concierge who hid her from the police, only to find her both poor and helplessly senile. Her 1985 visit to St. Fulgent, however, was more hopeful. When she disclosed that she was Jewish, one townswoman expressed regrets for the past. ""St. Fulgent has changed a great deal in forty years,"" the townswoman says, giving the credit to television. ""[W]e saw those grim documentaries on concentration camps and also a televised production of Anne Frank's Diary... We didn't know THEN that what we said against Jews could lead to THAT!"" (May)