Oasis of Normalcy.

Victor Brombert grew up in a wealthy Jewish family that fled Russia to seek refuge in Germany, only to have to pack up again to settle in France in the 1930s. But Brombert, a literary critic at Yale and then Princeton, hasn't produced another prewar tale of terror and impending doom. Instead, "Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth" (Norton) is an elegantly crafted memoir that brings back to life a lost world--and proves that even in the shadow of, to put it in Churchillian terms, the gathering storm, some people continued to savor very full, often joyful lives.

Living in Paris's chic 16th arrondissement, an oasis of normalcy in highly abnormal times, the teenager Brombert was more concerned with his first visit to a brothel than with the rumblings across the border in Germany or, closer to home, the anti-Semitism that regularly surfaced in less exclusive neighborhoods. His recollections are filled with an unapologetic nostalgia for an era when social life moved at its own languid pace, even when he recognizes that he was hardly enamored with such rituals as his parents' "interminable" Sunday lunches at countryside restaurants or cafes. He escaped by wandering off. "Those drawn-out, sun-speckled afternoons, in sight of a curtain-row of poplars reflected in the river, or under some opulent chestnut tree, afternoons heavy with dreamy boredom now seem graced by a special glow," he writes.

While his parents warned him of the anger directed at Jews, Brombert rarely felt it personally. "Even when I felt harassed by my teachers and sorry for myself, I never detected the slightest indication of xenophobia and anti-Semitism on their part," he recalls. As tensions mounted with Germany, a new wave of Jewish refugees quickly became the target of resentment and suspicion. They were seen as both pushing France toward war with Germany and undermining France's strength. But in pointing this out, Brombert notes that French Jews, "feeling superior" to the new arrivals, were no more pleased to see them than were the Gentiles.

When France collapsed and Marshal Philippe Petain set up his puppet regime, most people applauded, thinking this would spare them from a worse fate. "Even Jews congratulated themselves," he writes. But any sense of relief was short-lived. Brombert's father had the ...