Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth [Hardcover]

Victor Brombert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2002

"A beautifully cadenced work of art—it will remind some readers of Nabokov's classic Speak, Memory."—Joyce Carol Oates

Paris in the 1930s—melancholy, erotic, intensely politicized—provides the poetic beginning for this remarkable autobiography by one of America's most renowned literary scholars. In Trains of Thought Victor Brombert recaptures the story of his youth in a Proustian reverie, recalling, with a rare combination of humor and tenderness, his childhood in France, his family's escape to America during the Vichy regime, his experiences in the U.S. Army from the invasion of Normandy to the occupation of Berlin, and his discovery of his scholarly vocation. In shimmering prose, Brombert evokes his upbringing in Paris's upper-middle-class 16th arrondissement, a world where "the sweetness of things" masked the class tensions and political troubles that threatened the stability of the French democracy. Using the train as a metaphor to describe his personal journey, Brombert recalls his boyhood enchantment with railway travel—even imagining that he had been conceived on a sleeper. But the young Brombert sensed that "the poetry of the railroad also had its darker side, for there was the turmoil of departures, the terror . . . of being pursued by a gigantic locomotive, the nightmare of derailments, or of being trapped in a tunnel." With time, Brombert became acutely aware of the grimmer aspects of life around him—the death of his sister, Nora, on an operating table, the tragic disappearance of his boyhood love, Dany, with her infant child, and the mounting cries of "Sale Juif," or "dirty Jew," that grew from a whisper into a thundering din as the decade drew to a close. The invasion of May 1940 dispelled the optimistic belief, shared by most of the French nation, that the horrors that had descended on Germany could never happen to them. The family was forced to flee from Paris, first to Nice, then to Spain, and finally across the Atlantic on a banana freighter to America. Discovering the excitement of New York, Brombert nonetheless hoped to return to France in an American uniform once the United States entered the war. He joined the U.S. Army in 1943, and soon found himself with General Patton's old "Hell-on-Wheels" division at Omaha Beach, then in Paris at the time of its liberation, and later at the Battle of the Bulge. The final chapter concludes with Brombert's return to America, his enrollment at Yale University, and the beginning of a literary voyage whose origins are poignantly captured in this coming-of-age story. Trains of Thought is a virtuosic accomplishment, and a memoir that is likely to become a classic account of both memory and experience.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

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 emigres, 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 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (June 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393051153
• ISBN-13: 978-0393051155
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,311,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Moving and Elegant Document, June 29, 2006

By 

Steven M. Wolf (Villanova, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth (Hardcover)

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.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing memoir, May 6, 2011

By 

JMcF's wife - See all my reviews

This review is from: Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth (Hardcover)

Born in Germany to wealthy Jewish refugees from the Russian Revolution, Victor grows up in France. Fluent in Russian and German, he feels most at home in French, but escapes from Vichy France with his parents in a banana boat. After just 2 years in USA he is drafted into Army intelligence because of his fluency in so many languages. Perhaps because I am fascinated by language and words myself, I found this to be fascinating. I couldn't put it down. from John's spouse who shares his Amazon account.

5 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Staggering and illuminating, October 12, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth (Hardcover)

Books, education, thinking, and even history itself, have been collectively buried under. There is too much undifferentiated mush, a constant rush of gabbing plenty at the beleaguered individual. From under the rubble comes Victor Brombert's valiant memoir, a classic of pinpoint remembrance, a fully humane celebration of the potency of, well, something or other. For "Trains of Thought" is profoundly self-deprecating, a miraculous occurence for a fully vested professor of the highest rank. Brombert's magisterial touch with the very act of writing brings the proper lighting to every cinematic scene. "Trains of Thought" is a gift to succeeding generations, to the remaining intelligentsia, and to states whose recent horrid past is so little understood. Scholarly work on World War II, filling ocean tankers by now, cannot approach the vivid yet conflicted remembrances of a participant/onlooker. Surely there is an element of delusion in Brombert's infatuation with the representations of high culture as they apply to immense political events, but all human affairs are conducted with such vainglorious positionings. This is a towering memoir, in a almost literal sense - humanity has the chance, through this book, to look down upon the events of those times, and see what it couldn't see before: itself. Families. Schools. Boys and girls. Social events. Mass political insanity. Fathers and mothers. Death. Survival.