Introduction: The Sewing Room
When I was a small child, living in a gloomy old house at the edge of
Paris, there was a room on the second floor I avoided entering. It
was not a big room, just large enough for an ironing board, a Singer
sewing machine, and a bed. The room was called, in my family, the
sewing room. There was nothing forbidding about the little room; it
had plenty of light, its colors were pale, and it looked out on the
street, a solid bourgeois street of nineteenth-century houses at the
unfashionable end of a fashionable district. Some time after moving
to 18 Rue Weber, which is near the Porte Maillot in the Sixteenth
Arrondissement, the room took on a fearful association. In this room,
my parents said, a man -- the owner of the house -- had killed
himself. They provided an explanation, impressive and immeasurably
big, or so it seemed to me. The man had committed suicide, I was
told, the day the Germans marched into Paris. He had been a famous
doctor, and he had gone into the room to put a gun to his head (this
last part turned out to be incorrect).
It had happened in the past. When? Not the distant past,
apparently. It was not recited as a kind of gruesome curiosity, as
when I was given a lesson out of a guidebook in front of some
European monument. This was serious: the tone was solemn. It was
something that affected the tellers. My parents had not read about it
in a book. The information had come nearly firsthand, or at least
from somebody who had a connection to it.
My parents had not known this doctor. There was no reason why
his action, undoubtedly distressing, should have had any special
impact on them. Yet there was something else that gave it force: the
history behind it. And so the explanation itself became at least as
fearsome a fact as the doctor's death. The man killed himself because
the Germans marched into Paris. For a six-year-old child, born in the
United States in 1960, far in time and space from whatever sinister
occurrences might have been behind the death of the man, that
explanation immediately assumed troubling overtones. This was all the
more true because it was associated with a clear image: I thought I
knew what "marched" meant. It couldn't have been good.
When I grew older, I tended to dismiss the story. It seemed
to be an example of parental exaggeration, even a far-fetched
projection of certain inner fears and animosities that themselves
might have been legitimate but were unlikely to have had such an
intimate link to our mundane family life. There was no use putting
oneself into a story not one's own, or so I thought.
It wasn't until years later that I began coming across
references to the suicide of Dr. Thierry de Martel in June 1940. Many
books describing the defeat of France in that year mention this
notorious death. The historians evoke it as a singular gesture,
exemplary in some respects, though there were at least fifteen
suicides in Paris that day. Thierry de Martel was a society doctor,
an aristocrat who had had a brilliant career, a pioneer of brain
surgery in France, and the director of the American Hospital of
Paris. As a young man he had been an ardent anti-Dreyfusard, and
before the war he had joined anti-parliamentary, anti-Semitic
organizations like Action Française and Faisceau (Fasces). He was a
fervent nationalist and a decorated World War I veteran who had lost
his son in that war. Thierry de Martel had always told friends that
he wouldn't be able to bear the idea of German troops in Paris. On
June 13 he wrote to his friend William Bullitt, the American
ambassador: "I made you the promise that I wouldn't leave Paris. I
didn't say whether I would stay in Paris alive or dead. Alive, I give
the enemy a blank check; dead, an uncovered one."
On Friday, June 14, 1940, a brilliant sunny day, troops of
the Wehrmacht entered the city. They marched up to the Arc de
Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées. Thierry de Martel had arisen
early, shaved, and dressed with his usual care. He heard the troops
and their tanks. He went to his study on the second floor, stretched
out on the divan, and injected himself with strychnine. His
housekeeper found him several hours later, a copy of Victor Hugo's
play Hernani, open to the line "Since one must be tall to die, I
arise," by his side. A letter warned against any possible attempt to
revive him. Six weeks later the far-right newspaper Candide paid
tribute to the memory of "our faithful colleague."1
Not long ago, I looked up Thierry de Martel's name in the
Paris telephone book for 1939. At the top of page 889, above an
advertisement for a neighborhood confectioner that still exists, I
saw "Martel, (Dr. T. de), 18, rue Weber (16e)."
A few historians have used the example of the doctor's
suicide to open or close their accounts, a desperate act
foreshadowing the period to follow or epitomizing the one just
ending.2 For me (and I realized this long after my family had left
France), the story also may have been a kind of beginning. It was an
ongoing problem to be solved, one that had entered the mind of a
small child, survived adolescent skepticism, and been revived in the
light of an adult's greater knowledge and puzzlement. For a long time
I was obliged to be reminded of it every day, whenever I walked past
that little room. Around it our family life continued, but so did the
fact of the doctor's death. The paradox was this: something old yet
bad had happened in there. It had happened a long time ago, yet it
continued to be bad. And it had happened because "the Germans marched
into Paris."
These intruding facts would have seemed striking to me, all
the more so in that they coexisted with a familial atmosphere of
confidence. Several years ago, watching portions of a French newsreel
from 1965, I glimpsed a trace of this atmosphere. In the newsreel,
President Charles de Gaulle gives a press conference under the
crystal chandeliers of the Élysée Palace. Visible for an instant
among the reporters, standing out because of his height, is a man
with dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses. This was my father, then a
member of the Washington Post's Paris office.
Assembled amid all this gilt and velvet, my father and his
colleagues have a deferential air about them. De Gaulle was God in
those years. Some of my earliest childhood memories are infused with
his image. On Bastille Day in 1966, I was taken to an outdoor
fireworks display, a wondrous occasion culminating logically in the
representation of the General himself, his huge nose and peaked
French military hat floating in the ether. When I was a small child,
de Gaulle seemed to be the reason for my father's employment, if not
his existence. His name was part of the furniture at 18 Rue Weber.
Unlike some of the American reporters, my father admired him, seeing
as constructive the grandiose ambitions others found absurd. "On
balance, the world is deeply in debt to this strange man," he wrote
in 1966. Sometimes I would hear the General's emphatic voice
pridefully booming out of our black-and-white television. My father
shared this mid-1960s confidence. "The central feature of present-day
Europe, both east and west of what used to be called the Iron
Curtain, is its comparative affluence," he wrote from Paris. The
article, entitled "Notes on the New Europe," is accompanied by a
photograph of him sitting at a café on the Champs-Élysées, peering at
the newspaper Le Monde.3
The late war continued to exist in this optimistic world, but
only as a kind of negative foil. The country was moving forward; de
Gaulle, as everybody knew, had triumphed in those war years,
incarnating the essence of France with his refusal to collaborate.
His version of the war's aftermath -- nothing of the country's murky
collaborationist regime subsisted, and France had been reborn -- was
the accepted one. "After the war, he wiped out most vestiges of the
Vichy dictatorship and restored France's democratic institutions," my
father wrote in 1966. Our admired family doctor, like many others,
had "been in the Resistance," a phrase I remember as being nearly as
common as "bonjour." The Marais, the old Jewish quarter, meant Sunday
trips to Goldenberg's restaurant, not roundups of Jews twenty-odd
years before. The disciplinarian French schoolteachers who terrorized
us were "Nazis," to be successfully resisted by brave parents. Of
course, no one in my family had any inkling of Thierry de Martel's
political allegiances.4
There would have been a relative lack of interest
corresponding, for other reasons, with an attitude that prevailed in
France during those years. The country's official public relation to
the war was still untroubled. Paradoxically, the war was both closer
in time -- I remember buildings fitted in ancient coats of soot, just
as they are in the haunting photographs of occupied Paris -- yet
further away than it was to become. In that era, the war was simply a
part of history, safely resolved. The French historian Henry Rousso
has written that it was in 1964, the year of my family's arrival in
France, that "this new version of the Occupation -- a version most
comforting to French sensibilities -- achieved its definitive form:
France was now cast as a nation that 'forever and always resists the
invader,' whatever uniform he might wear, be it the gray-green of the
German army or the paraphernalia of the Roman legion."5
Against this background there was the interior world of the
house and the aura of what had happened in the sewing room. What made
that event linger? It was not a question I would have asked myself at
the age of six. Yet long after most definite memories of that time
and place had disappeared, long after I left that house, the doctor's
story stayed in my mind. It stayed even through years in which France
was far from my thoughts. Recently I went back to the neighborhood
around the Rue Weber for the first time in more than thirty years.
Something much less precise than a memory, but palpable nonetheless,
had persisted: the scale of the buildings and the angles at which the
streets met each other were oddly familiar. It amounted to no more
than a vague feeling. Yet the vagueness of this persistence put into
sharper relief the memory of the sewing room.
A woman I met several years ago in the town of Vichy, where I was
living while writing this book, asked with some bewilderment what
could have motivated me, an American, to take on the messy subject of
France and its war. I mumbled something about old ties to the
country, and the conversation moved on, away from the particular
subjects that had brought me back. She began talking about a mutual
acquaintance in the town, a bluff, friendly man with whom I had
cordial relations. The woman began talking about his parents. She
slyly suggested that their role during the Occupation had been less
than honorable. She said their relations with the Germans had been
perhaps a little too close. The woman did not make this observation
because she was a student of history. In fact, as a subject of
reflection, she couldn't have been less interested in the period of
the war.
She made the remark to cast discredit on the man's parents
and, by association, the man himself. Something about this gambit was
familiar to me. It was unpleasant enough -- I was fond of the person
in question -- to make me think about it afterward, and familiar
enough not to have surprised me at all. It had that deep familiarity
of something that may have been implanted a long time ago, a way of
thinking I might have lived with half consciously for years. The
woman was reaching back into a past that was, in some sense, still
alive for her, even though she professed disdain for its more
everyday manifestations -- for instance, the books about the war and
the Occupation that crowded bookstore shelves, even in Vichy.
A recurring story about France in the American press over the
last several decades was that memories of the Occupation had
unexpectedly come back to haunt the country. Whenever scandalous
revelations surfaced about the half-hidden wartime record of some
official, the point would be made: France was newly haunted by its
past. This seemed to me unprovable, inasmuch as it
concerned "France." I met many people there who appeared genuinely
indifferent to what had happened a half-century before and whose
lives showed no sign of being influenced by it.
Yet it also seemed clear, just on the surface, that in
certain times and places, this phenomenon of being concerned with the
past, sometimes to the point of obsession, did exist. The mere fact
that old men, some of them quite respectable, were being accused of
misdeeds long afterward appeared to be evidence. Clearly, some long-
finished events still had the power to move people, or infuriate them.
The notion of a continuing past couldn't have seemed
ridiculous to me. Early on, there had been the story of Dr. Martel,
and later, awareness of the recent Jewish past. This sequence was not
coincidental. Discussions about the Holocaust were infrequent in my
family. My father, a secularized Jew from the Upper West Side of New
York City, was nineteen when the war ended. He turned to the study of
economics, a tool to remake the world, and toyed with the idea of
joining Israel's fight for independence. Unqualified admiration for
the Israelis didn't survive reporting trips to the Middle East, but
he was more likely to be preoccupied by their struggles than by, say,
the Warsaw Ghetto (though, as a young reporter in 1954, he wrote
movingly about a pair of ghetto survivors who had settled in New
York.)6 I told him once that I had been reading Primo Levi. "Who is
that?" he asked. The Holocaust museum project in Washington, D.C.,
disturbed him -- evidence of morbid obsession, or so he thought. It
wasn't that he was uninterested in what had happened to the Jews; far
from it. But it was not a subject of continuing interrogation. It
seemed more important to understand the world from outside that prism.
This imperative didn't apply to me. The Holocaust imposes
itself, its shock waves felt all the more strongly in my generation's
adulthood for having been muted earlier on. These reverberations made
the shiftings in public consciousness that had occurred in France
easier to comprehend for someone like me, born long after the war.
Indeed, the phenomenon of a previously half-acknowledged, now
renascent history was not unfamiliar.
If the past had resurfaced for the French, it had done so
largely through the portal of the Jewish experience. The wartime
crime for which President Jacques Chirac accepted national
responsibility, in his landmark speech of 1995, was the persecution
of the Jews and not, say, French assistance to the Germans on the
eastern front. The reasons were bound up with the complicated
reckoning that had taken place in the country, itself related to the
larger, international change of perspective on the continuing
significance of the Holocaust.
In the years after the war, certain facts had not been dwelt
on -- French officials had helped the Nazis deport Jews, and the
Vichy government's policy of bureaucratic anti-Semitism was not
innocent in the genocide. French Jews themselves had not been eager
to focus on these facts. A quarter of the country's prewar Jewish
population of 300,000 had been deported. Those Jews who remained
wanted to regain their place in France -- a place Vichy had denied
them -- not demand justice that might mark them out once again. Their
fellow citizens needed no encouragement to accommodate this
reticence. Through the 1950s and 1960s, years in which my family
lived there, the question of French persecution of the Jews was
not "simply marginal, it was totally hidden," Henry Rousso has said.7
Then de Gaulle died, in 1970. The next year an innovative
documentary film about the memory of the Occupation, Le Chagrin et la
pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), put on the screen persecutors and
persecuted for the first time. It was banned from French television
for twelve years, but crowds flocked to showings in a small Paris
theater. In the years that followed, the old facts that hadn't
exactly gone away came to seem indigestible.
It was true that in the wave of anger against collaborators
immediately after the war, some 10,000 had been shot, legally and
otherwise, around 40,000 were jailed, and perhaps another 45,000 were
deprived of civic rights. But in no other occupied country in Western
Europe did a smaller percentage of the population receive prison
terms -- 12 per 10,000. And, minor exceptions aside, the genocide of
the Jews was never a focus in this account-settling. So, decades
later, there was a feeling that the reckoning with the past had
failed and that it was necessary to revisit that time. "The Purge was
botched," the melancholy director of a provincial archives said
before unexpectedly turning over quantities of records to me. And
even those who hadn't been particularly interested in the fate of the
Jews were now forced to think about the war again.8
Along with the film, one man, an American scholar, had helped
create the mental landscape in which this new perspective could
arise. Nearly thirty years after the appearance of Vichy France: Old
Guard and New Order, his history of the Vichy government, the
scholar's name still arouses passions in France.
"Have you seen this? It refutes Paxton!" a man in late middle
age said triumphantly, brandishing a book at me, in a country house
outside Vichy one afternoon. I met people who contemptuously
mispronounced the historian's name, and an elderly woman in Paris who
said fiercely that she had kept his book on her bedside table for
almost three decades. In Bordeaux in the fall of 1997, Robert Paxton
had been called on to testify in the trial of Maurice Papon, the
retired functionary prosecuted for helping in the wartime deportation
of the town's Jews. Stepping out of the courthouse, the modest
Columbia University historian was mobbed by a horde of reporters,
fans, and curiosity-seekers. The large crowd that showed up to hear
his testimony was rapt; the young man sitting next to me said,
reverentially, "It's so strong, isn't it?"
Back in his hotel room, in a semichaotic atmosphere with the
phone constantly ringing, Paxton and his wife formulated an elaborate
plan to avoid the reporters dogging his steps. He was unused to this
kind of attention; in his own country he remains obscure. With mild
distaste he asked, "Did you see it the other day?" adding, without
waiting for my reply, "It was like a school of bluefish, a feeding
frenzy." He had the reserve you would expect of someone whose
pastimes are harpsichord playing and bird watching. With a
schoolboy's bewilderment, Paxton said, "It's almost like a cargo
cult. Somehow, I'm coming from afar with some kind of medicine."
Paxton's book had established truths about what happened in
France during the war which have not yet been shaken. He destroyed
myths that originated partly in the propaganda of Marshal Pétain's
Vichy regime, and which, for the most part, the Gaullist government
had seen advantageous to maintain. The most important of these truths
had to do with an innocuous word that even today cannot be used
casually in France: collaboration. In the late 1960s Paxton, using
German documents that French scholars had never consulted (he was
mocked for this exploit by one prominent critic, still active in the
pages of France's second newspaper, Le Figaro),9 found
that "collaboration," far from being a policy pressed on weak French
officials by overbearing Nazis, in fact had been just the opposite: a
goal in which the Germans were only mildly interested, but one
ardently pursued nonetheless by leaders of the Vichy government,
Pétain foremost among them.
The second of Paxton's truths had to with the nature of this
government. Under the armistice signed with the Germans in June 1940,
the French had been allowed to maintain their government; it
established itself in the spa town of Vichy, while the former capital
and the most prosperous three-fifths of the country -- the north and
the coasts -- were occupied by the German military, a situation that
persisted until November 1942, when the Germans moved into the south
as well, following the Allied invasion of North Africa. France north
and south continued to be administered mostly by French civil
servants, under the intermittently watchful eyes of the Germans.
Paxton's analysis showed that the Vichy government was not a stopgap
affair simply reacting to the German presence -- the received wisdom.
Instead, it had far-reaching goals for an authoritarian
reorganization of society. "Vichy was not a Band-Aid," Paxton
wrote. "It was deep surgery."10 It was driven by a right-wing
ideology with deep roots in French culture. Marshal Henri Philippe
Pétain, the hero of World War I, and his subordinates were going to
take advantage of France's defeat to establish a reactionary new
order, rolling back seventy-odd years of parliamentary democracy.
The viewpoint of the American historian was disquieting. It
suggested that "Vichy" had been more than merely a disagreeable but
illegitimate pause, which was the Gaullist orthodoxy for many years.
His book was received respectfully in the United States in 1972, but
it was turned down by the major French publisher Gallimard the
following year, before being accepted by a smaller publishing house.
The country's historical establishment greeted it coolly.
Paxton himself was puzzled by the poor reception he received from the
Institut d'Études Politiques, France's leading political-science
institution. But the popular press, for the most part, was intrigued
by what he had written.11 There is a quiet outrage in the historian's
impeccably documented pages, and it touched a chord with a new
generation in the years that followed. "The more I studied the Vichy
regime, the angrier I got," Paxton said when I asked what had
motivated him. Modestly, he disclaimed the title of groundbreaker,
pointing to the German historian Eberhard Jaeckel and to Marcel
Ophüls's The Sorrow and the Pity. But the 1968 publication of
Jaeckel's book went largely unnoticed and it has been long out of
print, and in France Le Chagrin et la pitié is not even available on
video.
Paxton's work is what provincial schoolteachers know, and his
book is the one universally available in France. His influence is
still felt. At a symposium in his honor at Columbia in 1997, Henry
Rousso defined the unique position the American had come to occupy in
the intellectual life of France. He compared Paxton to a "site of
memory," almost like one of France's historic monuments: "Robert
Paxton has thus become a character in the national novel of France.
He is the messenger, come from afar to deliver the unpleasant news to
a country that was steeped in its past and, until that point, proud
of it . . . His word has served almost as a kind of gospel for an
entire generation."12
He had helped create a new, different consciousness, one that
eventually brought into the open a more complete picture of the
country's wartime experience. There were judicial proceedings against
old men like Maurice Papon, waves of activity by French and foreign
scholars, and newspaper headlines that added nuance to the notion
that de Gaulle had "wiped out most vestiges of the Vichy
dictatorship," as my father had put it back in 1966. For one thing,
the country's president from 1981 to 1995, François Mitterrand,
turned out to have been, in his youth, a more enthusiastic
participant in that authoritarian experiment than anyone had
suspected.
These public manifestations seemed to be signs of something
that had never actually gone away: a familiar relationship with the
recent past. They created the possibility that you could perhaps get
a glimpse of this relationship. It might be the last such
opportunity, a moment at the point of its disappearance. The war has
been over for nearly sixty years. The obituary pages of French
newspapers these days record, at least once a week (or so it seems),
the death of a famous résistant.
For three years, I lived and worked in three towns in France
trying to find out what it means to coexist with the past. I took it
as a given that in the places I went to, certain people -- more than
just a few, perhaps not enough to impress a pollster -- were obliged
to think about the past. Did this mean that they lived with it? Did
the past manifest itself through the words they spoke? Could the
ongoing effect of the past be measured? Did past events -- the events
of the war -- continue to exist in any objective sense? What might be
the relationship between a preoccupation with the past and
expressions of this preoccupation? I started with a prejudice:
memories -- in other words, that which had survived the passage of
time -- should be taken seriously. Memory's distortions, if I could
identify them, would be precious indications of how people lived with
the past today.
I chose the three towns in order to examine different phases
of intensity in the relationship with the past. These phases of
intensity would increase from town to town -- each had had a
different degree of closeness to the events of the war. This would
allow me, or so I hoped, to get as close as possible to the question
of what it might mean to live with the past. I wasn't interested in
what could be considered the artificial transmission of the past --
that which took place, say, in the classroom. Rather, I wanted to
find manifestations, even random ones, that could be considered
echoes of lived experience.
First I installed myself in Bordeaux, in the fall of 1997,
for what would probably be the last trial in France having to do with
the war. Maurice Papon, who had been an official in the government's
local administration in those years, now found himself accused of
complicity in crimes against humanity, a number of compromising
documents with his signature having been accidentally discovered
sixteen years before. The old port of Bordeaux was associated with an
ancient, proud commerce, not the war, though it had been the largest
city outside Paris in the occupied zone, the area occupied by the
German military. I wanted to see how the inhabitants reacted to this
unprecedented confrontation with the past. Unexpectedly, the trial
lasted six months, giving me plenty of opportunity to observe. The
judicial proceeding itself, in all its strangeness -- a man in his
late eighties being examined over events more than a half-century
old -- offered a controlled opportunity to measure the late twentieth
century's relationship to those events. Maurice Papon was the first
high French civil servant ever to be tried for taking part in the
genocide of the Jews, though not the first of the nation's officials.
There had been long delays in his case, some engineered by him, some
due to judicial sluggishness. In 1994 Paul Touvier, a former member
of Vichy's paramilitary political police, the Milice, was convicted
of crimes against humanity for the murder of seven Jews fifty years
before. But the significance of Touvier's trial was limited by the
defendant's loutishness and insincerity.
After Bordeaux, I moved to Vichy, the resort in the center of
France chosen almost by accident, after the armistice with the
Germans, to be the seat of the French government. The world has known
this government ever since as the Vichy government; the town is
indelibly associated with a regime long since condemned to
opprobrium. The inhabitants would thus be forced to think, regularly
and in all likelihood unwillingly, about the past.
Finally I looked at Tulle, a provincial capital in the south-
central region, where German troops carried out a terrible massacre
one hot afternoon in June 1944. The killing had been so public, and
so awful in its means, that the inhabitants couldn't have failed to
have been marked by it, probably down to the present.
In an earlier book about the persistence of the past, I
looked at the legacy of an unpunished civil rights murder in one
corner of the American south. For years the dominant culture there,
the whites, had been able to tell itself that the story was settled.
This was part of the fabric of everyday life -- an element that, in
its small way, helped ensure the smooth dovetailing of one day with
the next. But the story was not settled. For the African Americans in
Mississippi, it was one of a thousand irritants, at times symbolizing
all of them, with the potential to sour ordinary existence. It
summoned up memories of a past -- segregation -- that echoed enough
into the present to make the unresolved murder all the more vivid.
Whites could scornfully dismiss it as just "history," but in the
episode I wrote about, they discovered that they too had been living
with the old story, albeit negatively. The vehement professed
indifference that greeted the presumed murderer's reindictment after
thirty years offered a clue about the story's real place in the
thinking of those I interviewed.
You could see that in Mississippi "history" might actually be
present, a past lived with to an unsuspected degree. Whether or not
the particular "history" in question was fully part of lived
experience might not necessarily be important; the imagination was
capable of filling in what was missing. It seemed to be a
characteristic of memory that the smallest detail had the potential
to expand, in the individual, into a story that might appear
overwhelming. And then reasonably contented living would not go
forward until there was some resolution, or until many more years had
gone by than a past that could be measured simply in decades.
This knowledge helped me undertake a similar exploration of
the relationship between past and present in France. Some aspects of
memory would not change, across continents and vastly differing
circumstances.
Still, the point has been made many times: an American
writing about France during the war should do so with some
circumspection. The United States has never been conquered, never
been occupied. The phenomenon of an old event, a past, that continues
to be bad is something a white American like myself might hope to
understand, but only at a distance. All the more reason why I never
intended, in undertaking this book, to confront another question
often encountered in recent writings about France: whether or not the
country had "come to grips" with its past -- presumably, whether or
not it had fully explored, and honestly judged, the way its leaders
and significant numbers of its citizens had thought and acted in that
period. It seemed evident to me that it had not. But to a greater or
lesser degree, no national entity has "come to grips" with its past.
All relationships with the past are a continuing dialogue, more or
less honest according to circumstances, culture, and tradition. This
is not to say that it was possible for me to approach portions of the
research for this book in a spirit of perfect neutrality. Nobody
whose writing touches on France during the war can fail to wonder at
what is "in one special sense, a mystery," as the historian Tony Judt
put it -- the mystery of what happened in the country with claims on
universal civilization.13
The French wonder about it too. Their deep involvement with
their own recent history is, in one sense, an exotic phenomenon to an
American. Our country is not used to collectively looking back in
this impassioned way. But in another sense this phenomenon is
instructive. The experience of the French, or so it seemed to me,
could offer lessons about living with searing history -- ambiguous
choices, painful humiliation -- years into the future.
Copyright © 2001 by Adam Nossiter