Postwar Paris is a mythical place, dear to the hearts of a whole generation of Americans. Art Buchwald’s recent memoir, I’ll Always Have Paris, blends the familiar ingredients once again: Sartre and de Beauvoir at the Deux Magots, The Paris Review, Alice B. Toklas, Harry’s New York Bar (located at 5 rue Daunou, pronounced by American visitors “Sank Roo Doe Noo”), A. J. Liebling and Janet Flanner, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Romain Gary. It was Hemingway’s moveable feast, extended well into the 1950s. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, brilliant young Americans could shake the dust of Brooklyn or the Midwest off their feet while taking in the pleasures of Paris. These pleasures were their due as members of the conquering army—as winners.

There was another postwar Paris, of course, one that has not been romanticized and that most people have been eager to forget: that of the losers. The losers were bereft of their homes, their families, their money, their nationalities, often their self-respect. They were German, East European, Russian, Jewish, even French. To them World War II had been anything but the “good war” celebrated by American veterans: it comprised a historical moment of great collective shame, and left behind armies of dispossessed, displaced people.

Few writers have written of this other Paris, this other Europe, with the clear and unromantic vision of Mavis Gallant, the seventy-four-year-old author whose short stories, many of them first printed in The New Yorker, have recently been