Critics' choices for Christmas

...Chocolate pudding, with vanilla sauce, of course, was my mother's department," Gay writes, an expression I can hear coming from my own father...

...It is the first of a seven-volume series written in 1954.1 first learned of the book when Commonweal's children's book reviewer, Daria Donnelly, recommended it...

...The signora's yelled communications reminded me of our own attempts to use Florentine pay phones, which usually ended with one of us shrieking into the receiver, clutching one ear to block the roar of motorbikes, pedestrians, and church bells, never quite able to make out the reply...

...Wishing the cat could talk results in a feline who can indeed speak, but only gobbledygook...

...for years I would pick fragments of it from my skin as though I had wallowed among shards of broken glass...

...in fact, my grandmother would often serve a giant chocoCommonweal 20 December 3,1999 late bar to her son and husband instead of dinner...

...Half Magic (Harcourt Brace, $6, 192 pp...

...He deftly explains the peculiar Berlin sense of humor and love of nonsense, such as this snippet: "Look, I told you, the sausage tastes like soapsuds...

...Now we were in Italy...

...our mothers were skilled seamstresses...

...As part of what he calls his survival strategies for coping with the savage "whirlwind of hate and contempt" that Jews were living under, Gay became an ardent soccer fan (ditto my own father...

...We had never been anywhere before, unless you count a comical camping trip through the Pacific rain forest and the Canadian Rockies, during which our outdoor survival equipment consisted of a leaky pup tent, a leaky coffee pot, and a bag of charcoal...

...He is exquisitely aware of how dependent he is on the kindness of those who feed, clothe, and house him, in spite of the paura—fear—of being shot for helping a POW...

...along on our first trip to Europe...

...My parents were also from Berlin, but unlike the Frohlichs (Gay is the name the family chose as a joyful Americanization), they did not make it out of Germany before the Holocaust...

...Commonweal 21 December 3,1999...

...his father and my grandfather were china and crystal merchants in Berlin...

...Freed from prison camp, where he had unfortunately broken his foot the day before, he fled to the mountains to hide from the Nazis...

...Gay, a scholar of the Enlightenment, aptly calls this book "the story of a poisoning and how I dealt with it...

...Newby, who after the war became a much-admired travel writer (A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Slowly Down the Ganges) is modest in recounting his months on the run, aided by poor Italian farmers and villagers...

...It is Newby's good luck that this officer turns out to be a professor of lepidoptery whose military assignment is to teach German soldiers about the Renaissance...

...But at other times, his imagery is piercing: "Berlin seemed far away, but that was an illusion...

...The mother, Signora Agata, relays messages to those in the fields by flinging open a window and hollering in the appropriate direction...

...Another benefactor is the shepherd Abramo, who lives in a hut of wattle and turf, and who wraps the feverish "Enrico" in shirts woven by his great-great-grandmother in the eighteenth century...

...Gay is at his best describing his family and their Berlin milieu, and it is here that I found many astonishing similarities to my own family history...

...Even better, there is love at first sight, as he meets and is helped by a village girl whom he marries after the war...

...It is awe-inspiring to be in the presence of sixhundred-year-old masterpieces...

...It was delicious indeed to return from a day viewing the masterpieces of Italian culture, those monuments to genius and wealth, and read Newby...

...Newby was captured off the coast of Sicily, where his mission had been to paddle ashore, sneak into a German airfield, and try to destroy as many bombers as possible...

...On a day off from harvesting boulders, Newby goes for a walk and is discovered by a German officer carrying a butterfly net...

...Early on, he is rescued by the Zanoni family and given a dry, warm bed in their cavern-like home—"it was the best bed I ever slept in, before or since"—and counts himself the most fortunate man in Fortress Europe...

...I immersed myself in another memoir of a young man caught in the trap of World War II, Peter Gay's My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (Yale University Press, $22.50, 208 pp...

...Sarah (the thirteen-year-old) pointed out that he must have wished he'd read it all...

...is a reissue of Edward Eager's classic children's story of magic and mayhem...

...My forty-eight-year-old husband, who seems to spend all his time reading George Weigel's Witness to Hope, has only read half of Half Magic...

...Sometimes there is a perfect book for a perfect place, as I found out a year ago when my husband suggested I take Eric Newby's Love and War in the Apennines (Penguin Books, $9.95,224 pp...

...This book is an angry answer to those facile, and infuriating, questions...

...Others suffered more, he writes, faced more danger, or risked their lives for him...

...After the war, Gay (along with other German Jews), was subjected to disparagement, "usually laced with self-righteous anger," from those who wondered, ignorantly, why all the Jews in Germany had not simply left the country in 1933, when Hitler came to power...

...He hides buried in a pit, in a cave, in huts, and on a farm, where his job is to dig rocks out of the fields and pitch them over a cliff...

...Evenings are spent around the fire, discussing London and famous English criminals like Jack the Ripper...

...Going over his German travail was painful, and his prose at times seems tense and too careful...

...Gay, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, is the author of many books, including the five-volume The Bourgeois Experience as well as a biography of Freud...

...Newby became a prisoner of war, and Love and War in the Apennines is his account of what happened to him and other POWs after the Italian armistice in 1943 left the Germans in control of Italy...

...Thus, when Frick asks "in his painstaking Italian what was the best way to the top of the mountain, they thought he must be a lunatic to want to go fishing on the top of a mountain which was over four thousand feet high...

...Half Magic is suitable for all ages...

...Both Gay's Onkle Siegfried and my grandfather, Albert Segall, were given the Iron Cross for service in the First World War...

...Brilliantly, his father hides valuable stamps under photos in a book about the Nazis, and successfully sends the stamps undetected to relatives overseas...

...Berliners, my parents included, apparently find this hilarious...

...Gay brings his analyst's eye to his own childhood—he was born in 1923—and is unflinching in portraying himself, his family, and friends...

...It's a remarkable story, made more so by the cast of rural characters, some seemingly preserved from the seventeenth century, and by the constant fear of betrayal and capture...

...The mayhem begins when four children find a magic charm on the sidewalk and discover it will make any wish come true—but only half of it...

...The results are often hilarious as the children must remember not to make idle wishes and to phrase their wishes as doubles of what they want...

...I read it happily, as did my my fifteenyear-old son, my thirteen-year-old daughter, and my seven-year-old daughter...

...My German Question is his painful analysis of how he coped with growing up under the Nazis, until he and his parents were able to flee to Cuba in 1939, and to the United States in 1941...

...The Italian villagers have mistaken Oberleutnant Frick for a fisherman, Newby writes, for none of them has ever heard of hunting butterflies...

...At this farm on the Pian del Sotto, where the most comic scenes occur, he fantasizes about returning after the war, his fortune made, and "employing people to fill carts with stones so I can empty them over the cliff...

...Gay and my father both loved chocolate...

...Wishing they were all on a desert island lands the four children in a desert instead...

...He and his father also developed a passion for collecting stamps—as did my father...

...It is equally instructive, as our bizarre century ends, to realize that fifty years ago some people in Italy were living in huts, Commonweal 19 December 3,1999 eating out of hand-hewn wooden bowls, and wearing animal skins...

...When we were not battling waves of tourists with their Gucci bags, trying to reach the next historic marvel, I was in the company of Eric Newby, who had his own first "trip" to Europe as a young officer in the British Navy in 1942...