LEAVING HOME

Humorist Buchwald turns serious, albeit not wholly so, in this affecting memoir of his painful youth and early manhood. Shortly after she bore him in 1925, Buchwald's emigrant mother was committed to a psychiatric institution, where she was to spend the rest of her life. The author's father, an impoverished draper, couldn't afford to make a home for young Art and his three older sisters, so the children shuttled about N.Y.C.'s foster-care system for most of the Depression. Finally, in 1939, Buchwald päre was able to reunite the family in a Queens apartment. In the meantime, however, his son had developed a fiddlefoot, the soul of a hustler, and a rich fantasy life. WW II gave him a chance to leave a hurtful past behind, and he took it, lying about his age to enlist in the Marines. After returning unscathed from the Pacific (where he served as an ordnance specialist in a fighter squadron), Sgt. Buchwald took his discharge and used the GI Bill to enroll at USC. Despite discovering that he lacked a high-school diploma, the university allowed him to attend classes as a special student. But after three fulfilling years there, Buchwald learned that his government stipend could be used to study in Paris. He transferred almost immediately and found the City of Light much to his liking. In relatively short order, he gained employment as a Variety stringer and convinced a Herald Tribune editor to let him write a column for $25 a week. At the close of this memoir, he's typing ``Paris After Dark'' by Art Buchwald.... An often brutally frank account in which Buchwald reveals an affecting capacity for reflection without lapsing into pathos or losing the light touch that's gained him fame and fortune. The rest of the story can't come soon enough. (First serial to Parade)