* Later in 1941, Ullmann is packed into the trunk of his mother's car and driven across the demarcation line into occupied France to visit a shipping firm that, through his stepfather's intervention, is willing to take him to Africa. He watches the Nazis' anti-Semitic propaganda film "Jew Süss" in a Paris movie house, and that evening, overlooking the occupied city, has dinner at Le Tour d'Argent with Brinon. As a goodbye present, he gives Ullmann a book he had written about French-German relations with the dedication, "For you my dear Bernard, this slightly futile France-Germany."

This summer, when anti-Semitism in France is of sufficient reality for President Jacques Chirac to make a major speech about combating it, Ullmann obviously could be read as a man trying to sound an alarm. But his memoir has nothing of a pamphlet, and is so consistently understated and discreet that if there is an historical lesson or warning in the book, it lies in a private kind of reproach.

Beyond the deep roots of French anti-Semitism, Ullmann seems to be angry about what he suggests was the incapacity of the Jews of the French bourgeoisie to confront it head on.

During World War I, his banker grandfather, Emile, had been forced to resign from the board of directors of the Comptoir d'Escompte because the notorious Charles Maurras, later sentenced to life imprisonment as a Nazi collaborator, had called him an agent of the Kaiser. Yet Ullmann says Lisette de Brinon's cousin, Emmanuel Berl, was a ghostwriter for Marshal Pétain in the early days of the occupation, and describes his mother, whom he loved although with difficulty, trying to prove to her son as he grew up that if anti-Semitism existed in France "it couldn't reach people like us, and we wouldn't never have to suffer from it."

Elegantly, Ullmann's target is often himself.

When his friend, Pierre Lefranc, attacked the collaborators to his stepfather's face, Ullmann writes, "My nose dove into my plate. Timidity, the remains of a proper upbringing, the fear of embarrassing my mother? Basically, I felt that marked as a Jew I was almost automatically excluded from this confrontation."

In the end, he writes, Vichy's anti-Jewish laws "had turned out to be particularly effective, or at least dissuasive." "I had been conditioned," he writes, "and I held this cowardice against myself for a long time."

In fact, Ullmann writes that no one in France better grasped the Jews' fate than Brinon. But in escaping to Africa with his stepfather's help, he never touched on the subject at their farewell in a red-flocked nook at Le Tour d'Argent — or at any other time before the war's end.