TRAINS OF THOUGHT: Memories of a Stateless Youth

To adopt Brombert's favorite metaphor, this memoir of life in Europe before and during WWII is not a bullet train speeding toward a single thematic destination but an old-fashioned steam-powered affair prone to unexpected starts, stops and meanderings down one siding or another. As befits the era described, a gentlemanly quality prevails; thus the chapter called "Erotic Fantasies" reveals less about sex and more about how, as a Paris schoolboy, Brombert learned metrics by plagiarizing the love poems of Alfred de Musset in a failed attempt to woo an older girl named Danielle Wolf. Later, Brombert became a professor at Princeton and an authority on Flaubert and other literary figures, but first he and his parents had to make their way through the geopolitical maze that was Western Europe following the Treaty of Versailles, a transit made doubly parlous by the fact that they were Jews. Not all of Brombert's reminiscences are engaging; his mental processes are often, in his own phrase, "a shuttle of words and restless trains of thought." But the story acquires urgency when, following his escape to America, he is drafted and ends up on Omaha Beach, a U.S. master sergeant assigned to military intelligence. After the war, Brombert went on to graduate school and academic distinction, but not everyone was so lucky. Years earlier, he had lost touch with Danielle Wolf, who married and moved to the south of France, and here he can only memorialize her in his imagination as "disheveled, haggard, thirsty, in the airless cattle train on its way to Auschwitz, clutching her two-year-old child." 20 photos. (June)