Few childhood experiences are as formative as riding the train. My favourite memory is of a stocky stationmaster in my father's birthplace in East Bohemia who heralded the annual arrival of the train that delivered us for our summer vacations with the limerick: From far and near/the train comes here/so be a dear/and have a beer. While my mother thought that inciting a six-year old to alcoholism was a capital offense, I waited all year to hear the stationmaster's hoarse voice repeat that magical incantation. And so, Victor Brombert's evocative, tender memoir of a European childhood and adolescence inflected with the rhythm of the traintracks and the pulse of locomotives felt instantly, intimately familiar to me.
Brombert, an Emeritus Professor of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Princeton and author of major works of literary criticism-Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, and Flaubert are among his subjects-adopts the metaphor of the train to frame the circuitous journey of his early life with its different itineraries, stations, stops in the middle of nowhere, and its many destinations-delightful or nightmarish, always transient. As his memories, much like train travel itself, take form somewhere between sleep and consciousness, Brombert the professor interrogates Brombert the child's impressions and wonders how much is to be read into them later, observing that "the lived experience and the literary one now color each other." Incessantly, as he writes in the prologue to his book, "the shuttle between past and present weaves a network of locomotion, trains of thought crisscross the inner landscape and connect with the child alive."
Born into a prosperous family of Russian Jewish migrs who, after leaving Russia for Germany at the outbreak of the Revolution, eventually settled in the tony 16th arrondissement of Paris, Brombert, or "Vitienka" as he was affectionately called, begins his rail-bound reminiscences with soft, sensuous flashbacks to yearly vacation trips to the French Riviera, Normandy and Alsace, as well as to restorative pilgrimages with his parents to the more distant Czech watering spas of Karlsbad and Marienbad. Brombert's tale of his academically undistinguished, but utterly pleasurable existence of growing up in Paris of the 1930s, is tinged with the taste of blini, the sound of different languages spoken at home, and with erotic teenage fantasies, including one in which he imagines being conceived in a sleeper between two European cities. Happiness is marred only by the early loss of Nora, his five-year-old sister.
The family's moderately observant Jewishness seems safe in the genteel environment of the 16th arrondissement, "too cosmopolitan and bourgeois for any anti-Semitism to be manifested openly or crudely." Even as the cries of sale juif' become increasingly frequent in less pampered neighbourhoods, the author admits: "Of the real Jewish' life in Paris I knew next to nothing." Shrouded in the not-too-distant future, the Brombert family's fate intersects with the collective fate of European Jewry. When they head south amidst the general panic after the Nazi occupation of Paris, the station names, no longer "filled with anticipatory delight" of the earlier trips, have a different, more ominous sound as "the fateful forward motion of the trains" brings Victor and his family first to Bordeaux and later to Nice, in the "zone libre" of Vichy France. Of course, his journey was a lark compared to the irrevocable fate of Dany Wolf, the author's teenage love, deported to Auschwitz in a sealed cattle car with her two-year-old child, never to return.
Brombert's father-an admirer of Anatole France, Emile Zola and Victor Hugo-and a perspicacious and worldly man, eventually secured, for an exorbitant sum, a passage for his family to America. The road to exile continued in the Fall of 1941with a railway journey across Spain to Seville where the Bromberts joined 1200 other refugees in the impossibly crowded confines of the haul of a banana freighter replacing its customary cargo with passengers desperate to flee occupied Europe. (Having calculated the ship's profit-some 12 million dollars in today's currency-Brombert remarks with quiet irony: "No bananas ever proved so valuable.")
The six-week crossing in the dysentery-ridden "floating concentration camp" disabused Brombert of most of his romantic ideas concerning human nature, but it also gave him an insight into the vital importance of books whose company he was deprived of during the long crossing. Perhaps his experience also accelerated the subsequent "transformation of the cancre of the Lyce Janson de Sailly" into the serious, well-adjusted student that Brombert became following the family's arrival in New York-first at the Harrisburg Academy in Pennsylvania and, following the end of the war, at Yale.
Inducted in Winter 1942 and trained as a military intelligence specialist at Camp Ritchie in Western Maryland, Brombert, newly sworn in as a US citizen, returned to Europe and to a Normandy much changed since the summers of his childhood vacations, landing on Omaha Beach with the 2nd Armored Division "on D-Day +2." In a quiet, restrained, yet profoundly affecting way, Brombert parses the difference between a youthful romantic heroism and the terrible reality of the trenches: the paralysis of fear, the sight of burning flesh, and "the [omnipresent] sweetish smell of death." Despite his fear, Brombert, then a twenty-year-old master sergeant, took part in the Normandy campaign, the liberation of his beloved Paris, the Battle of the Hrtgen Forrest and the Battle of the Bulge, before finally reaching Berlin. Following his return to the United States and his enrollment, on a GI Bill, in the class of 1948 at Yale University, his trajectory as a respected and much recognized literary scholar must have seemed rather uneventful. Yet in a life where lived experience has obviously nourished literary inquiry (and vice-versa), it is perhaps not surprising that some of Brombert's literary studies take the anti-hero as their principal theme.
The link between irony and tenderness is characteristic of Brombert's writing and has at least in some measure dictated his choice of literary subjects. Who else but a literary scholar would speak of the way in which "the dactyls or the anapests of that poetic meter of the railway were replaced, but only as a brief transition, by the more stately iambic beat?" Some of the elliptical, repetitive passages in regard to historical events could have surely been eliminated by a more vigilant editor, but the book as a whole is compelling. Ultimately, his memoir bears witness to what Brombert calls "the transforming power of the alchemy of remembrance," the role of the imagination, and the capacity of his "closely watched trains" to convey a sense of adventure and of freedom, as well as of future possibilities.