Trains of Thought

May 13, 2002
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 15, 2002
This very personal yet also very political memoir by a self-described "poet of modern life" offers many pleasures. Brombert is a distinguished literary scholar he is Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University whose subjects have included Flaubert, Hugo, Stendhal, and Eliot. Turning his frank, analytic, and often amused gaze on himself, the author considers his life from early youth until young adulthood. This is never a seamless time in anyone's life, but Brombert's coming-of-age was particularly disjointed. The child of Russian migr s, Brombert grew up in Paris during the roiling events of the 1930s; he eventually escaped to America only to return to Europe as a soldier, participating in the final months of World War II. Brombert's sense of dislocation is aptly conveyed by the word trains, which refers to the trains he frequently took with his family as well as the lovely excursions of the mind he now invites us to share with him. Recommended for all libraries. Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2002
Both as a ubiquitous mode of transportation and as a haunting metaphor for the rocking, rhythmic movement of reverie, the railroad train carries Brombert through this memoir of his often turbulent adolescence and young adulthood. Again and again, it is on a train journey that a perplexed youth is initiated into life's mysteries: maternal grief on a train bound for Genoa, anti-Semitism at a railway stop in Cologne, parental resourcefulness during an escape by rails from Vichy terror, masculine bravado on a troop train bound for Fort Dix. Finally, it is a short train stop in New Haven that allows an impulsive young veteran to enroll at Yale and so discover his vocation in literature. Resisting the impulse to reduce the past to rational order, he retraces the tangled episodes of his life without attempting to dispel their ambiguities. Evocative and luminous, a book to be savored.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)