A POCKET FULL OF SEEDS

Sachs' story of a Jewish French girl's experience of World War II is based on the experience of a friend and recalled with the slanted sharpness of personal memory (if not the absorbing immediacy of Reiss' The Upstairs Room, KR, 1972). Like her wealthier friends the Rostens, Nicole Neiman had always been sure she was French but not at all sure about being Jewish; now suddenly she is sure of being Jewish but — what with Petain and the German soldiers and old friends' shamefaced avoidance — uncertain about being French. While the other Jews gradually leave town the Neimans stay on, bound by Papa's stubborn insistence that the Germans will never bother with Aix-les-Bains; then one day while Nicole is away from home the soldiers come for the rest of the family and send them off by train. Harbored at school by the enigmatic Mlle. Legrand ("later some of the girls said she took me in because she knew the Germans were losing the war, and that she would be charged with collaborating"), Nicole, though hungry and miserably lonely, comes to understand M. Bonnet, a visitor she had held in contempt for laughing though his wife was dead and his children missing — "People who don't laugh are dead," her mother had said at the time. Another of her mother's remarks is that Nicole can manage to do almost everything except keep her mouth shut, and such glimpses of personal flaws and mild family frictions, along with Nicole's very ungrownup sense of proportion (her longing for friendship with a classmate who ignores her and later calls her a dirty Jew, is far stronger than any sympathy for the refugees her parents put up in their small apartment) give her story personality.