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

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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.

Coming to Colorado: A Young Immigrant’s Journey to Become an American Flyer (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)

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In his acclaimed memoir German Boy: A Refugee’s Story, Wolfgang W. E. Samuel relates his experiences as a child surviving war and the hellish aftermath in occupied Germany. On January 24, 1951, exactly six years after his traumatic flight from Russian tanks, Samuel finds himself standing at the railing of a ship taking him to the land of his dreams—America.

Coming to Colorado, sequel to German Boy, is the story of a refugee from war and deprivation, who at age sixteen, not understanding a word of English and with barely an eighth-grade education, leaves behind all that was familiar. Scarred by the violence, rape, and death he has seen, Samuel must first learn to be a boy again. But every relationship he tries to build must overcome the specter of his childhood experience in World War II and the chaos that followed.

Shortly after his arrival in Colorado, Samuel spends what little money he has on a pair of second lieutenant’s bars that he finds in a Denver pawnshop. These bars, just like those worn by the American pilots he idolized during the Berlin Airlift, reminded him of the airmen and the planes that instilled in him a dream to fly.

That aspiration, however, faces long odds. Struggling to learn the English language and American customs, Samuel begins to lose faith in his abilities, suffers depression, and is haunted by both recurring nightmares of his violent past and survivor’s guilt.

Coming to Colorado charts the path of Samuel’s eventual triumph, despite repeated failures and unusual detours. In 1960, his proud mother saw pinned on his shoulders the gold bars of a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force. It was the end of a struggle for the German boy, who had become, as he wished, the ultimate American.

Customer Reviews ::

Great Book - Crazy_Daisy -
Wolfgang,
You did a very nice piece in your book about my late father Dean Stutz. You were his true best friend for life. I will always read your books.

K. Stutz