Little Eden: A Child at War

In writing this wartime memoir, Figes (Patriarchal Attitudes, The Seven Ages revisited the English country town where, as a seven-year-old upper-middle-class Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, she mingled with street-gangs of girls. The shy, withdrawn foreigner learned about boys, anti-Semitism, the servility of ordinary townsfolk before the local gentry. Living through air raids in an impoverished London suburb and going to school in Cirencester, a once-sleepy town invaded by evacuees and soldiers, Figes matured during the single year (194041) covered in these reminiscences. With hindsight she dissects the benevolent paternalism of the town's provincial elite, who envisioned an England ""where nothing would change once the foreign gangsters were disposed of.'' Her crystal-clear prose and gimlet insights render this narrative a compelling journey through time. (July 21)