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"A young friend who visits often asked me one day to explain what my book is about. 'It's about the child I was,' I said, 'about ghosts ... and about things that last." These are the first words of the epilogue to Mireille Marokvia's luminous memoir, Immortelles, but they could serve as the prologue just as well. Writing at the end of a long and fascinating life, Marokvia, who was born in... More

"A young friend who visits often asked me one day to explain what my book is about. 'It's about the child I was,' I said, 'about ghosts ... and about things that last." These are the first words of the epilogue to Mireille Marokvia's luminous memoir, Immortelles, but they could serve as the prologue just as well. Writing at the end of a long and fascinating life, Marokvia, who was born in France in 1908, survived World War II in Germany as a Frenchwoman married to a German citizen and immigrated to the United States after the war. She chooses to concentrate on more intimate, if not less cataclysmic, events of her early childhood. To a child, small events can be intensely meaningful; Marokvia describes the overwhelming rage and sense of betrayal she felt when the family doctor, who had assured the 5-year-old Mareille that he would marry her, brings his fianc�e for a visit. When she hears later that the doctor and his bride-to-be had suffered a minor automobile accident--in just the place that Mareille had imagined such an event occuring--she is savagely, ecstatically pleased.

It is this utter lack of sentimentality about childhood that makes Immortelles so memorable. Marokvia writes about the savagery of children matter-of-factly--Mareille's pleasure in the doctor's accident; the two little girls who want to burn her at the stake as a heretic.She also straightforwardly details the habits of adults, which children often see more clearly than their elders.

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