How faraway and long ago Europe’s great past now seems. There were
injustices and inequalities, to be sure, but also diversity, character,
leisure, and liberties, all of which Hitler and Stalin between them killed
off,
to leave a continent of charnel-houses and memories. The mainsprings of
Europe’s social and intellectual life have not recovered. Infinitely dreary,
today’s Europe pretends to a culture and a creativity that it no longer has.
There is no point regretting what cannot be mended; nostalgia is only a form
of self-pity. But it is possible to keep the record for those who are still
curious about the past, or who wonder if things had to turn out as they have
done. And this is what Victor Brombert has done in Trains of
Thought, a memoir of the years when the totalitarian waves were
first breaking over Europe, and nobody could any longer be sure
of the future. He writes with brio and a sense of elegy, in
command of every last scrap of cherished detail. He is a guardian
of the flame, or one of those whom Stendhal called “the Happy
Few.”
Quite representative people in their sophistication and their success, the
Bromberts had prospered in their native Russia. The Bolshevik revolution of
1917 put an end to that. There began what was to be an ordeal, and that was
representative too. They first fled to Leipzig, and there in 1923 Victor was
born, little Vitka, Vitienka to his father, Vicky to his friends. In exile
too was Dyedushka, his grandfather, an engineer who had owned sugar
refineries and railway investments. Every day he ate an omelet for lunch,
and every day he commented, “It was good, but it was better yesterday.”
Grandmother Anna Vassilievna insisted that little Vitka recite Lermontov and
Pushkin in Russian. She taught him the dignity and self-respect with which
to avoid raspushchinast, an untranslatable word for moral anarchy. Other
members of the family came too, Aunt Anya, Cousin Sascha, Cousin
Yula, and others. At his first school in Leipzig, Herr Oberlehrer
Prager and Herr Lehrer Brenner further taught him German but
punished him as a six year old for walking with the girls in
break.
At the center of this memoir, naturally, are his parents, Jascha and Mama.
Evoking them, he regrets that he did not manage to reciprocate the
unquestioning love they showed him. For him, it seems, their qualities and
their foibles were too close to be disentangled. Small, bald, and
shortsighted, Jascha was so careful with himself that he could be rather
ridiculous, for instance brushing his scalp till it went red; a worrier and
a hypochondriac who took cures in spas like Marienbad; something
of a frant (Russian for a dandy); an admirer of Chaliapin and
a Russian cabaret singer called Vertinski, but himself in the
habit of singing snatches of opera out of tune. So afraid of fire
was he that he put extinguished matches under water. “Be
reasonable” was Jascha’s slogan, which young
Victor interpreted
as timidity and submission. Reproaching himself now for the way
he once could patronize so indulgent a parent, he writes, “A
father doesn’t need to be taught to see through his son.”
Mama had been a Red Cross nurse in Moscow. She had a period stylishness,
large-brimmed hats, French perfumes, and a racy English car, a green Graham
Paige. Somehow she was related to Vera, the wife of the novelist Vladimir
Nabokov. Smoking flattened Turkish cigarettes between her long fingers, she
played championship bridge. She pronounced “Don Juan” as the Spanish do, danced
the foxtrot with her son, read him Gogol, and took him to the movies where
they both liked to weep. One day, through the open bedroom door he caught
sight of Mama slapping an astonished Jascha. Full and considered as these
portraits are, Brombert can sometimes be elliptical and reticent, too much
so. Not till halfway through the book do we discover that Jascha was in the
wholesale and export business, and we never learn Mama’s name. His sister
Nora died when she was small, and again for no evident reason we never learn
the cause of what must have been a determining tragedy for the
family.
Escaping from the rising shadow of Hitler, the family moved on at the
beginning of the Thirties to Paris, to the splendors of the Sixteenth
Arrondissement with its Second Empire stone houses and heavy squares of
chestnuts and gravel, the Eiffel Tower in the background, and the Bois de
Boulogne within walking distance. Other White Russians formed a social circle
with them. Summers were to be spent at Cabourg, Deauville, or Nice, and
winters in Megève. Little Vitka promptly acquired the new nationality of
French, and with it yet another language. So fast was the process of
assimilating that he had become ashamed of his father’s mannerisms and
foreign accent. Jascha enrolled him in a fashionable tennis club, and once
arrived to watch him play. “What are you doing here?” Victor asked him,
mortified now to remember it. November 11, Armistice Day in 1918, happened to
be also his birthday, and his father would take him to the great military
parade on the Champs Élysées, with the band playing the Marseillaise and the
“Sambre et Meuse.” The very idea of France, he says, began to stir him in
a way that Russia or Germany did not.
By his own account, at the well-known but forbidding local Lycée Janson he
was not a good pupil. Too much truancy, too much interest in jazz and girls
and surprises-parties, which the French pronounce as if it were not an
English borrowing. With his friend Jacques Blum, he visited One-Two-Two,
the brothel in the rue de Provence which many celebrities frequented then and
later during the German occupation, and about which books have been written.
To pay for his visit, he stole a piece of Russian silver from his father. But
at the lycée nevertheless, teachers familiarized him with Coleridge and
Wordsworth, Ariosto, Montaigne, and Victor Hugo, and on his own he discovered
minor writers, for instance Lajos Zilahy, a Hungarian novelist, and Paul-Jean
Toulet, a poet who coined a phrase, la douceur des choses, the sweetness of
things, which seized Victor’s imagination. High culture was a matter of
course, something natural and lasting to be enjoyed even by—or especially
by—a schoolboy and a refugee. To be attached to the life of words, he
writes, means to take possession “of sounds and signs that are charged with
echoes, reminiscences” and yet also carry at their core a permanence. By no
means an idle luxury, the taste for literature has a moral quality.
Jascha perceived that there was a flaw in France: the French had not grasped
that they were sleepwalking to disaster. This was not another of his personal
anxieties. From experience he knew that there was no justification either
for Communism or for Nazism, yet these twin ideologies were already holding
the future of France in the balance, and nobody appeared to be aware of it.
But in a little portent of what was to come, at the lycée a lanky boy with
the name of Roussot called Victor a “dirty Jew.” Anti-Semitism to the
Bromberts was a fact of life. A family story had it that a cousin, a soprano,
while singing with Chaliapin, had heard him mutter at her the derogatory
Russian “zhid.” One year at Marienbad, Victor had done his
barmitzvah, but he says that he had been brought up with
“resigned and ironic skepticism” about everything. Now in a
fight, he bloodied Roussot’s nose. And what are the likely
choices taken by Roussot a few short years later under German
occupation?
A photograph in the book shows Victor in the final summer before the war, the
final summer of a whole way of life. Youthful, hopeful, handsome in shorts
and a jacket, he was at Deauville with friends, among them Danielle Wolf,
or Dany, a pretty and sporty-looking girl for whom he felt a forlorn and
unrequited love. What followed, he writes, had the inevitabilty of a bad
dream. War exposed for all to see that France had indeed sleepwalked into
disaster. Like so many others, the Bromberts scurried to and fro, from
Deauville to Paris, by train to Bordeaux in the exodus of June 1940 under the
impulse of the German blitzkrieg, to various places in the still
unoccupied
Vichy zone, and finally Nice, where they rented an apartment. The
seventeen-year-old Victor made friends, enjoyed himself on the
Lido, and explored the countryside on a bicycle. In reality,
anti-Jewish legislation had placed them all in danger of
deportation and death. The Vichy government agreed to hand over
to the Germans all foreign-born Jews. Aunt Anya and Danielle Wolf
were among those eventually murdered in Auschwitz.
Timid as he may have seemed with his poor eyesight, Jascha now showed what he could
do. His calm persistence was nothing short of heroic. Victor confesses how
he let it be known that all the talk about the deadliness of doctrines and
ideologies bored him, whereupon he heard his father give him the advice: “Go
read Montesquieu.” The Spanish frontier was closed. But Jascha had heard of
Varian Fry and the American-run Emergency Rescue Committee which found ways
to help people flee abroad. Patiently he badgered the American consulate in
Marseille until he brought off the feat of obtaining—and
synchronizing—American immigration visas, French exit visas,
Spanish transit visas, and finally boat tickets at a thousand
dollars a person, a sum which must be multiplied many times for
today’s equivalent. How all this was paid for is something
Victor does not know. Others fortunate enough to escape by this
route included Hannah Arendt, Jacques Lipchitz and Marc Chagall,
Franz Werfel, and Lion Feuchtwanger—and at the very last moment,
the aged grandparents too.
The ship the Bromberts caught from Seville was a crowded and unhygienic
banana boat evidently operated by wartime profiteers. In New York, safe at
last, they moved into a building on the Upper West Side. Jascha and Mama
fade from the story as Victor goes through yet another process of
assimilation, speeded-up by circumstances. His parents had had
the foresight to send him before the war to England, where he
had learnt the language, his fourth. At Harrisburg Academy in
Pennsylvania, for the first time he did himself justice as a
student. By the winter of 1942 he was a soldier with an army dog
tag on which was stamped his number and the letter J for
Jewish—a handy tip for the Germans if he had been captured.
On account of his linguistic skills, he was soon training as “a combat
intelligence specialist.” Promoted master-sergeant and posted to England,
he landed with the 2nd Armored Division on Omaha Beach on D-Day +2. Nothing
in his background and education, nothing in the several literatures of his
reading, had prepared him for the fear and closeness of death that lay ahead.
In some forty vivid pages he describes the Normandy campaign as he
experienced it, and the German counterattacks in Hürtgen Forest and the
Battle of the Bulge. Interludes in liberated Paris brought some semblance of
normality. His only regret is that he behaved badly to some captured Nazis,
pulling the beard of one in order to discover if the man had known about the
camps, and depriving another of a box of pills. In these acts he kept seeing
the face of his father, “who was distressed at the mere thought of hurting
someone’s feelings.”
Through this memoir run images of trains, the comfortable trains that once
conveyed the Bromberts to pleasure spots, and the sealed cattle wagons
taking Aunt Anya and Danielle Wolf to Auschwitz. Never again will there be
the poet’s sweetness of things, and never again will the stain of
mass-murder be lifted. After the war, Victor Brombert went to Yale and
became in that setting what he was destined to be anyhow, a man of taste and
sensitivity, a professor and author of erudite books doing justice to
admired writers. It amuses and alarms him to realize that he has inherited
many of his father’s worries and hypochondria, as well as some of his
mother’s stylish idiosyncrasies. But his parents had given him the gift of a
humane culture which America has allowed him to express and
enjoy. He says farewell to Europe and its past with much regret,
but even more thankfulness.
