My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin by Peter Gay, Yale, 208pp, £15.50 in UK

Peter Gay's life is a linguistic rerun of Conrad and a sociological living out of the American Dream. Born in 1923 and brought up for his first fifteen years in the Weimar Republic and Hitler's Germany successively, Peter Frohlich did not know a word of English until he was fifteen. Escaping with his family from the Nazis in April 1939, the young Frohlich fled first to Cuba and later to the United States, where he took the surname Gay and later became a distinguished professor of history at Yale.

The world expert on the Victorian bourgeoisie and author of the best biography of Freud to date, Gay is also one of the great masters of English prose, a writer of outstanding lucidity and elegance. From the privileged standpoint of his later life, Gay looks back on his early years and marvels at his survival.

The author's German question has to do with reconciliation with his native land. Unlike those Teutonic trimmers who praised the Third Reich in the 1930s and then claimed after 1945 that the only good German was a dead one (C.G. Jung, for one), Gay has had the intellectual courage and integrity to come to terms with post-war Germany. For many years his hatred for the Nazis was such that he did tar all Germans with the Fuhrer's brush, and even refused to read in his native tongue. Gradually, though, he integrated his hatred with understanding and empathy, to the point where he was eventually quite happy to travel in the land of his forefathers and to give papers at conferences there.

Many Jews who survived the blood-letting of 1933-45 are now obsessed with the Holocaust, to the myopic point where their historical revisionism requires the Allies to have had no other war aims than to rescue the Jews from death camps - the existence of which was unclear even to the code-breakers at Bletchley Park.

While understanding this point of view, Gay does not share it. What does incense him is critics who say that Jews in Germany should have understood the peril they were in after 1933 and got out. Gay flays this culpable ignorance. Jews could exit from Germany only if they were prepared to leave behind all their capital assets and pay huge bribes to Nazi officialdom. Even if they could manage this, where were they supposed to go? During the Great Depression all nations operated strict immigration quotas and the only destination open to fleeing Jews was Shanghai, hardly a come-on when it was being ravaged by the Japanese.

It was in fact the lack of international co-operation and the very impossibility of finding a dumping ground for the Jews that led the Nazis to abandon their original plans for turning Madagascar into the new Zion and opting instead for the Final Solution.

Naturally, for one who achieved salvation and later fame through his naturalisation as an American citizen, Gay has been reluctant to point out the less attractive aspects of the Land of the Free, and unkind critics have "placed" him as a kind of transatlantic Isaiah Berlin, that is to say an "establishment Jew" content to sup, with or without a long spoon, with the political movers and shakers of the USA.

It is true that Gay's world-view is comparatively conventional, certainly when compared with that of more dazzlingly original Jewish intellectuals, like Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim or George Steiner. But to know all is to understand all. The climate of fear in which Gay lived for his first fifteen years was not calculated to produce a rebel once transplanted to the New World, and this touching and thought-provoking memoir of precarious life under the Nazi yoke deserves a wide readership.

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