Trains of Thought: Paris to Omaha Beach, Memories of a Wartime Youth

Product Details

In an unforgettable addition to the literature of memoir, one of America’s preeminent literary scholars tells his story of coming of age in France during the buildup to the Second World War.As a Jewish youth in France during the 1930s, Victor Brombert’s heady explorations of sex and love were cut short by the rise of Nazi power and the Vichy Regime. His family narrowly escaped to New York, where Brombert joined the U.S. Army, only to return to Europe to fight on the beaches of Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. As he shuttles between the stations of his life, Brombert’s narrative recaptures the textures of childhood, the horrors of war, and his own discovery of a sustaining passion for literature. By turns melancholy and erotic, his memoir is also a meditation on memory itself, and a Proustian re-creation of a lost time and place.

Customer Reviews ::

A Moving and Elegant Document - Steven M. Wolf - Villanova, PA USA
I first heard of Victor Brombert as a lecturer on Flaubert, Tolstoy, Sartre, Woolf, Conrad and others for the Teaching Company some years ago. His depth and range were therefore first an aural experience for me, rather than one taken from a book. His easy and remarkable way with the English language (by my reckoning at least his fourth, after Russian, German and French) was an experience to be relived again and again. When I read these memoirs, I found them to be at once intimate and self-effacing, while providing a valuable historical lesson as he spun out his early years. I envy those who had the experience, either at Yale or Princeton, to be his student. I also envy someone who can use his fourth language with the musicality and depth of feeling that few can do with their first. Brombert's Trains of Thought succeeds on all levels.