An Adolescent’s Christmas 1944

What does it mean if the fourteen-year-old daughter in an affectionate, loyal, and at least three-quarter’s cultured family has bad dreams about the Gestapo? This is memoir-not fiction-about a wartime Christmas in Duluth in 1944. Young Carol has two weeks home from boarding school in the East. Her mother has been dead two years, and of her three brothers, all in uniform, two are away at war. Carol arranges the creche and admires the tree all right, but she also likes writing medium bad sonnets and plans to kiss that boy in someone’s rumpus room if he was the same one I thought he was. Underneath all that, she dreams about Germans, and genocide.