Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  A Jew's Journey (from Aaron Jastrow's manuscript) FEBRUARY 20, 1943.

  BADEN-RADEN.

  I shall never forget the moment when the train passed through opened barrier gates over which a large red swastika flag fluttered, and signs in German began appearing along the track. We were in the dining car, eating an abominable lunch of salt fish and rotten potatoes. The American faces all around us were a study. I could hardly bear to look at my niece. She has since told me that she was already in such shock that she scarcely noticed the crossing of the border. So she says now.

  I saw then on her face the terror of a person being swept over Niagara Falls.

  For me it was not quite such a plunge. My memories of pre-Hitler Germany were pleasant enough; and during my brief reluctant trip to the 1936 Olympics to write a magazine piece, when swastikas were flying wherever the eye turned, I had encountered no problems beyond my own uneasiness. I knew some Jews who travelled in Hitler's Germany on business, and a thick-skinned few for perverse pleasure. Nor were they at much risk. The German moves on tracks; that is at once his virtue and his menace. The travelling Jews were on the track of tourism, as I was on the track of journalism, and therefore safe. I am counting much on this Teutonic trait.

  Even if the worst stories of German brutality prove true. we are on the diplomatic track. I cannot see anti-Semitism jumping its track and harming us on this one, especially since we are being bargained off for Nazi agents, probably at the rate of four or five to one.

  All the same, in our first days here I did not draw a quiet breath. Natalie did not sleep or eat for a week. -The defiant haunted gleam in her eyes when she held her son on her lap seemed not quite sane. But after a while we both calmed down. It is the old story, nothing is as terrifying as the unknown. The thing you have most feared, once it is upon you, is seldom as bad as imagined. Life here in Brenner's Park Hotel is dismal enough, but we are used to it now and mainly bored to death with it. If ever asked whether fear or boredom oppressed me more in Baden-Baden, I shall have to reply, "Boredom, by a wide margin."

  We are quarantined off from the local inhabitants. Our shortwave radios have been confiscated, and we hear no news except. the Berlin broadcasts. Our only newspapers and magazines are Nazi publications, and a couple of French papers full of the crudest German lies, set forth in the language of Motiere, Voltaire, Lamartine, and Hugo. It is a prostitution worse than any poor French whore's submission to the pumping and thumping of a hairy Hun. If I were a French journalist, they would have to shoot me before I would so stain my own honor, and the honor of my elegant language. At least I hope that is true.

  With so little to read, and no news, and nothing to do, all the Americans immured in Baden-Baden are deteriorating, myself perhaps more than others. In five weeks I have not written in this journal. I, who once prided myself on my work habits; I, who produced words as unfailingly as Anthony Trollops; I, who have nothing else to do, and worlds to tell; I have let this record slide like a schoolgirl who starts a diary, then slacks off and lets the almost empty notebook molder in a desk, to be found and giggled over by her own schoolgirl daughter twenty years later.

  But sound the trumpets, The first Red Cross food packages came in yesterday, and everybody has snapped out of the doldrums. Canned ham!

  Corned beef! Cheese! Canned salmon! Canned sardines! Canned pineapple! Canned potatos! Powdered eggs! Instant coffee! Sugar!

  Margarine! I love just writing down the words. These American staples are beautiful to our eyes, exquisite to our palates, reviving to our fading physiques.

  ' How on earth do the Germans fight a war on their everlasting black bread and potatoes and spoiled vegetables?

  No doubt the soldiers get whatever good food there is; but the civilians! Our ration, we are told, is fifty percent more than the average German's. One can fill up on starch and cellulose, but eating such food a dog could not thrive. I say nothing of the disgusting cookery in this famous hotel. The Swiss representative assures us that we are not being mistreated, that hotel food all over Germany nowadays is worse than ours. Another time I shall describe what we have been eating, the strange dining room arrangements, the wretched wine, the black-market potato schnapps, the whole way we five under our German "hosts." It is all worth recording. But first I want to make up lost ground.

  It is eleven in the morning, and very cold. I am out on the balcony in pale sunshine, well wrapped up as I write. Those Red Cross proteins and vitamins are coursing through my system, and I am myself again, craving the sun, the fresh air, and the moving pen. "fbank God!

  My digestion has been poor since we left Marseilles. In Lourdes I thought it was only nervous tension. But I was taken terribly ill on the train after that awful lunch, and my bowels have been in grave disorder ever since. Yet today I feel fit as a boy. I have had (ridiculous to set down, but true) a gloriously normal stool, over which I felt inclined to crow like a hen over her egg. It is not just the nourishment, I am sure, that has worked such healing magic. There is something psychic to it-, my stomach recognizes American food. I could congratulate it on its sensitive politics.

  About Louis.

  He is the pet of the hotel. He grows in dexterity, vocabulary, and charm from week to week. He began to cast his spell over the group on the train. In Lourdes nobody had seen much of him; but at the station someone gave him a fine toy monkey that squeaked, and he went toddling up and down the train, keeping his balance admirably as our car swayed, offering his monkey to people to squeeze. He was having such fun that Natalie let him roam. He quite broke up the glumness in the car. He even brought the monkey to our uniformed Gestapo man, who hesitated, then took the monkey and unsmilingly made it go Squeak!

  It would require another treatise like Meredith's on the comic spirit to explain why it was that everyone in the car burst out laughing. The Gestapo man looked around in embarrassment, then he laughed, too; and the horrible absurdity of the war seemed to strike us all, even him, for just that moment. The incident was talked about all -over the train, and the little boy with the monkey became our first celebrity at the Brenner's Park Hotel.

  I have given more space to a trivial incident than it perhaps warrants, to suggest the beguiling nature of the child. In my bouts of illness in recent weeks (some have been severe) one cardinal thought has kept me from sinking into apathy. I cannot and will not go under until Natalie and Louis are safe.

  I will guard them to the death, if I must, and I will fight depression and illness to be able to protect them. Our flimsy journalists' credentials rest on my few magazine pieces. The special treatment-we are getting-this two-room suite on a high floor with a balcony, overlooking the hotel garden and a public park-can only be due to my literary standing, such as it is. Our lives in the end may hang on my jump, with a book-club selection,-from academic obscurity to a name of sorts.

  There are many children in the group, but Louis stands out.

  He is a privileged imp, getting more and better food than the others from a master scrounger, the naval attache. When this man found out Natalie was a Navy wife, he was enslaved.

  They are quite close in an intimacy of (I am certain) antiseptic purity. He brings milk, eggs, and even meat for Louis. He brought a forbidden electric hot plate too, and Natalie cooks on the balcony to dissipate the odors. Now he is coaxing her to take the role of Eliza in Pygmalion, which he wants to put on with the dramatic group. She is actually considering it.

  Often the three of us play card games or anagrams. All in all, considering that we are on the soil of Hitler's Germany, Natalie and I are living a strangely banal existence, like people on an endless cruise aboard a third-rate ship, forever seeking ways to kill time.

  Boredom is the repeating bass note of our days, fear an intermittent piccolo shriek.

  Our Jewish identity is known. The Cierman Foreign Ministry man stationed here in the Brenner's Park has made a point of complimenting me on A Jew's Jesus. In fact, he talked rather intelligently about it.


  At first I was appalled, but granted the thoroughness of the Germans, it now seems nadve to have hoped that I would pass unnoticed.

  I am listed in The International Who's Who, the Writers Directory, and various academic reference tomes. So far my Jewishness has made no difference, and my semi-celebrity has helped. Germans respect writers and professors.

  This must account for the assiduous medical attention I have been receiving. Our American doctor, a Red Cross man, was inclined to shrug off my gastric troubles as "detentionitis," his own facetious term for the malaise that afflicts our group. But in the third week I became so violently ill that he requested-my hospitalization. So it was that at the Baden-Baden Municipal Hospital I met Drs R-. I will not write down his real name even in this bothersome Yiddishletter cipher. I must draw a portrait of Dr. R- when I have more time. Natalie is calling me to lunch. We have given some of our precious Red Cross food to the hotel kitchen, which has promised to cook it up in style. We are to have corned beef hash; at last, at last, a way to doctor up those infernal potatoes.

  FEBRUARY 21.

  BADEN-BADEN.

  I was very ill last night, and I am far from recovered today.

  However, I am determined to keep writing this record, now that I have started again. Moving a pen across a page makes me feel alive.

  The hotel kitchen's execrable bungling of the corned beef hash upset me. Anger no doubt triggered the indigestion.

  How could a dish be simpler to prepare? But it was burned, lumpy, cold, greasy, altogether odious. We have learned our lesson. Natalie, the attache, and I will pool our Red Cross food, and cook and eat it in our rooms, and to hell with the Boches- Others are doing it; the aroma drifts in the corridors.

  The latest rumor is that the exchange and release will take place at Easter time, to show Germany's civilized respect for religion.

  Pinkney Tuck himself has told me this is sheer wishful fantasy, lbut the rumor mill grinds on. The psychology of this group is fascinating.

  A novel as good as The Magic Mountain could be made of it;, pity I have no atom of creativity in me. If Louis were older he could well be our Thomas Mann, and, possibly his acute little mind is recording more than we can discern.

  The mention of Easter reminds me that in my Lourdes entry I started the topic of my abortive conversion to Catholicism. It is an old sad dreary story, a stirring up of cold ashes. Still, since these pages, if they survive me, may be the last testament of my brief and insignificant passage through the world, let me scrawl out the main facts. They should take but a paragraph or two. I have already described my alienation from the oswiecim yeshiva, the key to it an.

  I could not tell my father about that. Respect for parents was too deep in the grain for us Polish Jews. He was a lovable man, a dealer in farm implements, with a lively trade in bicycles. We were well-to-do, and he was pious and learned in an unquestioning way. It would have shattered him to know that I had become an epikoros, an unbeliever. SO I went on being a star Talmud pupil, while laughing up my sleeve at Reb Laizar and the conforming young noddies around me.

  Our family doctor was a Yiddishist agnostic. In those days Jewish doctors often returned from the university smelling of pork. One day on impulse I iwent and asked him to lend me Darwin's book. Dar-veen, the yeshiva whisper went, was the very Satan of modern godlessness.

  Well, "Dar-veen" was hard going in German; but I devoured The Origin of Species on the sly by candlelight, or away from the house by day. The first actual Sabbath violation of my life was carrying the Darwin book in my pocket down to the meadow by the river.

  Sabbath law forbids the bearing of burdens in "the public domain," and a book counts as a burden. Strange to say, though in spirit I was already far from the faith, the physical deed of carrying that book out of my father's house on Saturday was a terribly hard thing to do.

  Next, the doctor loaned me Haeckel, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. I raced through those books as adolescents do through pornography, with mixed feelings of appetite and shame, thumbing eagerly for the irreligious parts: sneers at miracles and at God, attacks on the Bible, and the like. Two books I shall never forget, cheap German anthologies in green paper covers: Introduction to Science and Great Modern Thinkers. Galilee, Copernicus, Newton, Voltaire, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, the whole radiant company burst on me, a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy lying alone on the grass by the Vistula.

  In a couple of weeks of feverish reading, my world and the world of my father fell in ruins: demolished, devastated, crumbled to dust, no more to be restored than the works of Ozymandias.

  So my mind opened up.

  When my family came to the United States, I was the precocious wonder of a Brooklyn high school. I learned English as though it were the multiplication table, sped through the school in two years, and won a full scholarship to Harvard. By then my parents had seen me Turn Yankee Doodle in speech, dress, and manners. They were proud of the Harvard scholarship, but fearful, too. Yet how could they stop me?

  Away I went.

  At Harvard I was a prodigy. The professors and their wives made much of me, and I was invited to wealthy people's homes, where my yeshiva-accented English was a-piquant novelty. I took all the petting as my due. I was a good-looking young man then, with something of Louis Henry's unforced charm, and a great gift for conversation. I could make the Brahmins feel my own excitement in discovering western culture. I loved America; I read prodigiously in American literature and history; I knew most of Mark Twain by heart.

  My yeshiva-trained memory retained everything I read. I talked with a fluency of ideas and richness of allusion that the Bostonians found dazzling. I could spice my talk with Talmudic lore, too. In that way I stumbled on the perception that later made my name; to wit, that Christians are fascinated when one presents Judaism to them, with dignity and a touch of irony, as a neglected part of their own background. Thirty years later I wrote my Talmudic Themes in Early Christianity, which metamorphosed into a best-seller with a catchier title, A Jew's Jesus.

  I am not proud of what happened next, and I shall be brief.

  Anyway, how repetitious life is! What story is more threadbare than an infatuation between a wealthy girl and a poor tutor? Comic operas, novels, tragedies, films abound on that simple plot. I lived it. She was a Catholic girl of a prominent Boston family. In one's early twenties one is not wise, and in love one is not honest, not with others or with oneself. My own fluency of ideas and argumentation, turned in upon myself, persuaded me that Christ had come into my heart.

  The rest was simple. Catholicism was the true tradition, the treasure house of Christian art and philosophy; and it was a strongly elaborated ritual system, the only sort of faith I really understood.

  I went through a conversion.

  It was a shallow dream. The awakening was ghastly, and I pass over it in silence. At heart, through all the instruction I remained-as I still remain-the Oswiecim yeshiva boy, who came into a church out of the snow, and was shocked to his soul at seeing on the far wall the image of the crucified Christ where in a synagogue the Holy Ark would be. If her family had not thrown me out, and if she had stood by me instead of liquefying in tears like a-candy figure in the rain, I should still have lapsed. My essential condition for admiring, pitying, loving, and endlessly studying and writing about Jesus of Nazareth, as I have done, has been that I cannot believe in him.

  According to the Nuremberg Laws, since all this happened before 1933 and I never did anything about "de-converting," I may be technically safe from persecution as a Jew. The exemption, as I understand it, applies to German half-Jews, and as an American I might well get the benefit, too, if it came to that. When my passport problems grew sticky in 1941, a good friend in the Vatican procured for me photocopies of the Boston documents that recorded my conversion. I still have those dark blurry papers. I have never yet officially produced them, because I might in some way become separated from Natalie. That must not happen. If I can help her with them, I will
.

  As for saving my own life-well, I have lived most of it. I shall not return to the Martin Luther book. I meant to round out, with this Reformation figure, my picture of Christ moving through history. But the coarse strident Teutonism of my hero was giving me greater and greater pause, quite aside from his diatribes against the Jews, indistinguishable from the bawlings of Dr. Goebbels. That he was a religious genius I do not doubt. But he was a German genius,. therefore a destroying angel. Luther's best brilliance goes to smashing the Papacy and the Church. His eye for weaknesses is terrifying, his eloquence explosive. His bold irreverent hatred of old institutions and structures sounds the true German note, the harsh bellow out of the Teutoburg Forest, the ring of the hammer of Thor. We shall hear it again in Marx, the Jew turned German and combining the fanatic elements of each; we shall hear it in Wagner's music and writings; and it will shake the earth in Hitler.

  Let other pens tell of what was great in Luther. I should like to write next some dialogues in the Platonic manner, ranging in the casual fashion of my Harvard conversations over the philosophical and political- problems of this catastrophic century. I could contribute nothing new; but writing as I do with a right hand, I might charm a few readers into pausing, in their heedless hurry after pleasure and money, for a look at the things that matter.