Books: Exiles Waiting

PARIS GAZETTE—Lion Feuchfwanger—Viking ($3).

Paris Gazette is an 860-page story of German émigrés and Nazis in Paris in 1935. Through exhaustive attention to two families and a newspaper, and an apt use of minor characters, Lion Feuchtwanger has set down an unprecedented amount on what it means to be of either camp.

In the spring of that year Sepp Trautwein is still just a warm-tempered Munich bourgeois living in voluntary exile: unappreciative of his excellent wife, writing a piece now & then for the exiles' paper, the Paris Gazette, working hard and slowly at his...