Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “I was in love, little sister. With a man I fought with in the Resistance. He didn’t want to survive as much as I did. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it, to confuse luck with will. To survive is no sign of good or bad character, but a gift. Something I must earn every day.”

  “Do you have a picture of him?”

  “No. And a portrait he painted of me has disappeared. He was American.”

  “Is that why you don’t want to love anyone?”

  “Not that way. I have my own agenda, as they say in organizations. But Ari needs someone to love, he needs that a lot.” Jacqueline smiled, her eyes half shut like a cat. She described how things would be.

  “I can have the baby for Vera and Lev,” Naomi said, sitting up.

  “You can’t have a baby for somebody else. You aren’t a cow.”

  “Why can’t I do something good and important for somebody else, just once? Why was I saved when Rivka and Maman and Papa all were killed, if not to pay back my life somehow?”

  “To be killed is wrong. To live is good, a given right. You don’t have to pay for living. They should only have to pay for killing. But they won’t. Nobody but us gives a damn finally. The Americans are already in bed with the Nazis getting ready to fight the Soviets, who are buggering the Poles and the Czechs and the Hungarians.”

  “But if I want to do something good, once, just once!”

  “Besides, when we go to Israel, we’ll be starting a kibbutz. All the babies will be in the crèche, mixed up.”

  “Jacqueline, you always laughed at Papa when he talked Zionism. Why are we going to Israel instead of staying in France?”

  “If the French officials hadn’t cooperated with the Nazis, had not handed over records, if French bureaucrats and French cops hadn’t helped round up Jews, if Vichy hadn’t rushed to pass anti-Semitic legislation and deport Jews as fast as the Nazis, then the French would have saved as many of their Jews as the Danes did. Now in the Resistance there were anti-Semitic parts, but in most of the Resistance, we got along. There were heroes, like the village of Le Chambon, where the whole village saved Jews and never turned one in. But unless we go live there, I can’t live in France. On the street I turn and I expect a raffle—that’s what we called the roundups. On the Métro, in shops, I stare into faces and I wonder, what did you do? Whose side were you on? I can’t live my life that way.”

  “We could live here.”

  “I couldn’t get an immigration visa. I have an arrest record. I only got a visitor’s visa because the Jewish agencies moved mountains to get me in for a month. The Americans don’t care that the Nazis arrested me for Allied activity. An arrest record in their eyes is an arrest record.”

  “What were you arrested for?”

  “Are you tired, baby sister? We can talk tomorrow.”

  “I have to go to school.”

  “Fuck school.” Jacqueline laughed. “I have gotten coarse, Naomi, I’m hardened, how I hope you never know. My bones are made of steel hammered thin. But I still know how to love my family and my friends.” She rose on her knees to hug Naomi again. Then she began to cry slowly into Naomi’s hair. “Ah, dear one, we have stories to tell. Now if you don’t want them to know you’re pregnant, they don’t have to know, your aunt and uncle. He’s making money, this momzer? Good, I’ll talk to him.”

  They did not go to sleep until two in the morning and then they slept till nine, when Jacqueline, who still had trouble with American phones, had Naomi order up breakfast. Naomi watched her sister eat. “You eat more than Uncle Morris does.”

  “I’m always hungry,” Jacqueline said, grinning.

  Naomi looked and looked at her sister who was the same and different, who was still her sister but altogether somebody else. She was falling in love with her own sister. Her heart felt stretched wide open, pierced with love. “Maman would be so proud of you.”

  “Naomi, we all have our guilts. Mine is that I quarreled with Maman over that silly boy and she was taken without me.”

  “What could you have done?”

  “At that point, maybe nothing. I was an idiot then. I had no skills, no knowledge how to behave. I could neither kill nor save.”

  “I can’t do either one. But I can have a baby.”

  “Sixteen is so young, Naomi. We have time for an operation.”

  “Sixteen is not so young. They say Bubeh was seventeen when she had her first baby.”

  “Time to get ready for my press conference. I’m doing things for the Joint and some for the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Then I have to pay a visit. Do you know where Leib’s office is?”

  Naomi nodded. “What are you going to do?” Her stomach clenched.

  “Why, he’s going to pay your passage to Marseille, and then he’s going to make a generous contribution to our organization. Isn’t that nice of him? Then I’ll take you with me to California and Chicago and Texas and then we go back to New York and you make your final decision on having or not having. Then I take a quick trip to someplace that sounds like Lalala.” She squinted at a printed sheet. “Savannah. Then we go to Marseille and you meet our gang.”

  It all exploded Friday. “Back to Europe? But why? Why should she take you back into ruins and trouble.” Aunt Rose twisted her hands in her apron. “You should talk to my baby sister Esther, she’ll tell you what it’s like and how much better it is here.”

  Morris was frowning. “Palestine’s even worse. The fighting is just starting there. Violence every day. Bombing, shooting. The British are sinking the boats full of Jews fleeing Europe.”

  Naomi looked at Jacqueline, sure she would answer them. Jacqueline wore a blue wool dress, dark and bright at once. Her aureole of hair was quelled into braids. She sat very still in the middle of the far side of the table from Naomi, her hands crouching on the table on either side of the plate Rose had been about to clear. “You don’t get anything good without fighting for it. She belongs with me and I belong there.”

  Naomi thought, She thinks they make a great fuss about danger. For her it’s given, like the air. My sister, the lioness. Jacqueline’s hair was lion colored. Naomi liked best when it was loose and wild. She liked to brush Jacqueline’s hair. They were finding little rituals and habits to say their love to each other. The argument raged around her. She felt calm within, calm around the hidden child who smiled at the uproar. The child who would be born in the Land. They were already traveling, Jacqueline, herself and Rivka. Nobody else understood.

  Ruthie stood, her chair falling back. “You can’t do this! She has a life here, she has a family! I’m planning to put her through college. She has a future here. She can make something of herself.”

  “She is something,” Jacqueline said guardedly. “Herself. My sister.”

  Murray stared at Ruthie as if she had gone crazy, but Ruthie for once was paying him no attention. “We’re her legal guardians. We could stop this nonsense. We can’t permit you to take her into danger.”

  Morris made a face. “I’m not going to use the law against sisters.”

  “Tata! We can’t let it happen. She’s ours too! We have to use any means to protect her. She belongs with us! We love her at least as much.”

  “You’re married,” Jacqueline said. “How much of yourself do you have to give her? Ask her what she wants.”

  Ruthie ran around the table and grabbed her hands. “Naomi, you’re throwing your life away. You can’t turn history back. You have a life here, a future!”

  She could not help seeing herself for a moment with Ruthie’s eyes, and suddenly going to Eretz Yisroel became something out of a child’s picture book. Reality was America, college, a good job. People did not suddenly start countries. In Ruthie’s eyes she was sailing off the edge of the world into a silly and dangerous fantasy. How could she hurt Ruthie? Then she looked at Jacqueline, whose eyes were the eyes too of their papa, looking now not at her or any of them but into inner space with that cold stare they took on sometimes, cold as the wind off a
field of graves. She squeezed Ruthie’s hands back and then pulled her own free. “You have Murray. You have your mother and father and your brother and sister-in-law and your nephew and niece. She has only me.” She felt as if she were tearing loose from her own flesh. She wanted to beg Ruthie to let her go willingly.

  “She’s not entitled to your life!” Ruthie cried, clutching her hands across her breasts. Her eyes welled over.

  My lives, Naomi thought. “You’ll come and see us, when the Land is won. You’ll come too.” She stood and put her arms around Ruthie, who began to weep. I won’t have to tell her the truth to get away, Naomi thought with enormous relief. Jacqueline and I can keep Rivka secret.

  “Many people are waiting for her and for me, people to whom she’ll be as dear as she is to you. Naomi brings a blessing to them.” Jacqueline rose also, her hands turned palms upward at her sides. “She brings love.”

  That was the way it happened. In the New Year of 1946, which is to say the month Tevet of the year 5707, there disembarked at Marseille on a choppy day Jacqueline Lévy-Monot, who had a French passport, and Naomi Siegal, who had an American passport, and invisibly, Rivka, who had no passport yet at all but claim to three different nationalities, one of them not yet issuing passports. They were met by Ari Katz, Naomi’s future husband, for although Naomi and Ari did not as yet know this to be true, Jacqueline Lévy-Monot, aka Gingembre, had already decided that matter.

  The End of One Set of Troubles Is But the Beginning of Another

  After Words: Acknowledgments, a complaint or two and many thanks

  I conceived of this novel soon after finishing Woman on the Edge of Time in 1976. At that time I began accumulating books, clippings, bibliographical references and queries and began slowly to evolve the characters. The magnitude of the task was apparent early and daunting to me. I actually intended it to be a third longer than it is and to include the Soviet Union, but the inability to get a grant to cover that research made me alter my scheme. Basically my only financial acknowledgments are to all the colleges and universities at which I did readings, workshops, lectures and everything but a fan dance to support me as I wrote the book over the past seven years. I am especially grateful to the University of Cincinnati, where I served as Elliston Poet as I was putting the penultimate form of the manuscript together.

  I owe a debt to a number of people who helped me, to Howard Zinn and Roslyn Zinn for checking my forties details; to Regine Barshak, one of the few survivors of Drancy, for sharing her experiences; to my friend Ruth Linden of Brandeis and the Women’s Holocaust Media Project, for going over my chapters about the camps and sharing her interviews and her research with me; to Adrienne Rogers for checking my French, and for remembering her student after all these years; to Rabbi Debra Hachen for giving me many dates and Nancy Passmore of The Lunar Calendar for helping with dates also; to my assistant Kathy Shorr for her hard work, intelligence and almost unfailing good spirits; to Claire Beswick of heroic enterprise and my dear friend Elaine Mcllroy, both of the Wellfleet Public Library, who sought out for me well over a thousand books on interlibrary loans, who ran down obscure World War II pamphlets, yellowing government documents, out of print memoirs; to my equally dear friend Stephen Russell of Twice Sold Tales, who found the books I needed to own even when we were assured by everyone they didn’t exist, and who, while wearing his other hats as musician and disc jockey for public radio station WOMR, researched dates on songs, as did Janice Gray of WGBH Boston. I also apologize to and thank all the other people who endured my endless questions about what they did or had done to them in the war. I am grateful to Ruthann Robson for reading the third draft and giving me useful comments; thanks to Professor Eleanor Kuydendall of SUNY New Paltz and Jacqueline Lapidus for helping with assorted facts on France of 1939–45, to Professor Kormel Huvos of the University of Cincinnati for correcting my geography at a critical point and to Marilyn Sweet, formerly of the CIO in Detroit, for giving me some information about Briggs; and I celebrate the bibliography and the answers to occasional queries that Valerie Miner and I exchanged, good vital networking. I also want to express my full and ongoing gratitude toward my agent Lois Wallace for her belief in this work.

  Since this is a novel and not a scholarly work, I don’t intend to append a list of sources. I read so many memoirs, biographies and histories of government officials, of OSS and SOE personnel, of camp survivors, of American generals and would-be generals, of marines and those who covered their war, of the French Resistance, of the race riots in Detroit, of the decoding operations in Washington, Hawaii and England, that acknowledgment even of the finest is pointless. However, there were certain books I want to mention because of their importance to me. Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines by Sally Van Wagenen Keil was simply the best single source of information about the WASP I found, and a fascinating job of recovering forgotten history. Amy Latour’s The Jewish Resistance in France was invaluable to me in locating exact sites I used in the novel and imagining my way into those times, as was Vera Laska’s Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust. Serge Klarsfeld’s Memorial to the Jews Deported from France 1942–1944 is a tremendous monument. The military histories I leaned on most heavily were John Costello’s The Pacific War 1941–1945 and Liddell Hart’s histories (although I read far more naval history than I needed, as I discovered within myself another alternate self, as I always do in writing novels, this one an armchair naval strategist). Karen Anderson’s Wartime Women was very useful. Proceedings of the Conference, Women Surviving the Holocaust, edited by Esther Katz and Joan Miriam Ringelheim, was important to me in confirming observations I had incorporated from my own readings of memoirs and interviews and putting it all together. I would also like to point out the importance of the Holocaust Library in keeping that history alive by publishing important sources. Similarly, I found a number of books published by Calmann-Lévy extremely useful, containing material unavailable in English. Anybody interested in cryptanalysis owes a debt to Ronald Lewin’s books; memoirs by men like W. J. Holmes and Edward Van Der Rhoer and Ronald Clark’s biography of William Friedman, The Man Who Broke Purple, helped me a great deal in creating Daniel Balaban’s milieu.

  I could never have written this novel in the time I did without working on a computer, and I could never have managed the research and been able to have access at once to just what I needed without a powerful data base oriented toward words and text. I used Superfile (FYI) and used it hard. The data base if printed out would be eight times longer than this novel—all on floppies! This is a novel conceived in the imagination, but I wanted nothing to happen in it that had not happened somewhere in the time and place I was working with. I have also relied heavily on my own memory and on the memories of my family and of families I have known well. At times I have slightly altered events, for instance making the Ohio not only an American built tanker, as it was, but under American rather than British command, since otherwise Duvey would not have been aboard her. I have also sometimes used one consistent name for entities (Hypo, FFI) that changed their names frequently, using one term before or after its actual application for the convenience of the reader, who will swim in enough alphabet soup anyhow. I am also sure I have gotten facts wrong, and sometimes even primary sources were contradictory.

  Finally I thank my husband Ira Wood. Perhaps nobody should ever have to read an 1100-page manuscript six times in all its drafts, but he did, and was unfailingly clear-sighted and penetrating. He also gave up his own work for a month to help me with the research abroad, which was sometimes fun and sometimes drudgery and occasionally quite unpleasant. This is one more adventure we have shared. Finally I thank Colette, Dinah, Jim Beam and Oboe for taking turns sitting on the computer and making it work, and for going along to dreary motels and lonesome cities to earn their kibble.

  About the Author

  Marge Piercy (b. 1936) is the author of nineteen poetry collections, including The Hunger Moon and Made in Detroit, and seventeen n
ovels, including the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers and He, She and It, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. She has also written a memoir, Sleeping with Cats; a collection of short stories, The Cost of Lunch, Etc.; and five nonfiction books. A champion of feminism, antiwar, and ecological movements, Piercy often includes political themes in her work and features strong female characters who challenge traditional gender roles. Her book of poetry The Moon Is Always Female is considered a seminal feminist text. Piercy’s other works include Woman on the Edge of Time, The Longings of Women, and City of Darkness, City of Light. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, radio personality and author Ira Wood, with whom she cowrote the novel Storm Tide.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1987 by Middlemarsh, Inc.

  “Of Chilblains and Rotten Rutabagas” was previously published in Lilith 12–13, Winter-Spring 1985/5745, pp. 9–12. “Naomi/Nadine Is Only Half” was previously published in Forum, a Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 12, 3/4, Spring/Summer 1986, pp. 1, 10, 11, 19.

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3343-5

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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