The Factory of Facts.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

*** Though the category is not crowded, it is no jest to dub The Factory of Facts the preeminent autobiography by a Belgian-American. Its author is a gifted Belgian waffler, creatively uncomfortable in two nationalities. "To have been born Belgian," says Luc Sante, mindful of the fissures between Flemish and Walloon, rural and urban, Protestant and Catholic, "is to have been cast, as if by the zodiac, under the sign of ambivalence."

The author was born on May 25, 1954, in Verviers, Belgium. In 1959, following the bankruptcy of the iron foundry that employed his father, Lucien Sante, the family and their only child moved to New Jersey Those are the crucial data that generate The Factory of Facts, a meditative mill that manufactures memoir out of the raw materials of bicultural experience. Not founded until 1830, Belgium, the land of leeks, chervil, gherkins, and pickled onions, is an afterthought of history, and jokes about Belgians are as common and cruel in France, Germany, and the Netherlands as those about Poles are in the U.S.

French philosopher/writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau walked across his life without a footnote, but Sante's book credits about 120 sources for the information that supports his archaeology of identity. To understand himself today, he not only recalls childhood dislocation and digs for family roots as deep as the 16th century, Sante feels compelled to...