Victor Brombert grew up in a wealthy Jewish family that fled Russia to seek refuge in Germany, only to have to pack up again to settle in France in the 1930s. But Brombert, a literary critic at Yale and then Princeton, hasn’t produced another prewar tale of terror and impending doom. Instead, “Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth” (Norton) is an elegantly crafted memoir that brings back to life a lost world–and proves that even in the shadow of, to put it in Churchillian terms, the gathering storm, some people continued to savor very full, often joyful lives.
Living in Paris’s chic 16th arrondissement, an oasis of normalcy in highly abnormal times, the teenager Brombert was more concerned with his first visit to a brothel than with the rumblings across the border in Germany or, closer to home, the anti-Semitism that regularly surfaced in less exclusive neighborhoods. His recollections are filled with an unapologetic nostalgia for an era when social life moved at its own languid pace, even when he recognizes that he was hardly enamored with such rituals as his parents’ “interminable” Sunday lunches at countryside restaurants or cafes. He escaped by wandering off. “Those drawn-out, sun-speckled afternoons, in sight of a curtain-row of poplars reflected in the river, or under some opulent chestnut tree, afternoons heavy with dreamy boredom now seem graced by a special glow,” he writes.
While his parents warned him of the anger directed at Jews, Brombert rarely felt it personally. “Even when I felt harassed by my teachers and sorry for myself, I never detected the slightest indication of xenophobia and anti-Semitism on their part,” he recalls. As tensions mounted with Germany, a new wave of Jewish refugees quickly became the target of resentment and suspicion. They were seen as both pushing France toward war with Germany and undermining France’s strength. But in pointing this out, Brombert notes that French Jews, “feeling superior” to the new arrivals, were no more pleased to see them than were the Gentiles.
When France collapsed and Marshal Philippe Petain set up his puppet regime, most people applauded, thinking this would spare them from a worse fate. “Even Jews congratulated themselves,” he writes. But any sense of relief was short-lived. Brombert’s father had the presence of mind to pack up his family, stash a seemingly endless supply of cash into a hidden money belt and take care of the payments and bribes to get everyone to safety. Crammed aboard a banana freighter that charged $1,000 per refugee for the journey from Seville to New York, Brombert recalls a stopover in Bermuda, where “the British police, in their impeccably neat shorts, had contempt written all over their faces” as they inspected the bedraggled 1,200 passengers who had endured the ghastly voyage.
Returning to France as an American GI who landed in Normandy right after the first D-Day assault, Brombert notes ironically that almost everyone he met claimed to have been part of the Resistance movement–and, at the same time, there was “a veritable epidemic of denunciations” as neighbors accused neighbors of collaborating with the Germans. But if he harbors few illusions about the French and is haunted by the memories of an early girlfriend and other Jews who perished, he remains enamored with the first country and language that felt like his own. Unlike other Americans, Brombert is too perceptive and honest to assume an air of smug moral superiority. He had learned “how easy it is to be deceived collectively, how in times of crisis human nature is disposed to hold on to illusions of normalcy, even to develop a new and intense appetite for pleasure.”
In some ways, Brombert’s return to France and then to a defeated Germany, where he interrogated Germans as part of a denazification campaign that he quickly concluded was a joke, brought his life full circle. He prefers to think of the journey as a train ride, where the rider is “always in several places at the same time”–in the present, recalling the past, and thinking ahead to the next stops. “Trains of Thought” skillfully conveys those sensations, weaving back and forth between the various stages of his life and experiences, with a light, deft touch. He strikes a false note only once, when he claims he never took himself seriously. As someone who admits he’s fascinated by mirrors, he knows better. But he also realizes that fate and fallibility are part of the human condition, and that he was lucky to have had parents who guided him to safety and a new life even as he looks back with yearning and heartache at the one he left behind.
