A Great Loss

You all probably know the old joke according to which there are three stages of life: youth, middle age, and “you look fabulous.” Hardy-har-har! But now it turns out there’s a fourth stage, the one characterized (at least retroactively) by the response “he/she was still alive?” For many of us, the death at age 96 last week of Doris Day was in that last category: I think I thought she had died years ago. But now I have a new candidate for that fourth stage: Herman Wouk, who died last Friday at age 103. This is more than slightly embarrassing to me however, because it turns out Wouk’s last book, published just three years ago, was entitled, Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author. How can I have missed that? I was and am a great fan, and to this day I consider Wouk to be one of our least appreciated American authors, a true giant who apparently ran afoul of the literary establishment by publishing book after book that resonated deeply with the reading public and brought him the commercial success that those people find impossible to square with true literary talent. I couldn’t disagree more. Mind you, those people didn’t (and don’t) think much of John Steinbeck or James Michener either.

Far more accurate in my mind were those who, at a gathering held at the Library of Congress in Washington in 1995 to celebrate Wouk’s eightieth birthday, acclaimed Wouk as an American Tolstoy. And, indeed, Wouk—in this just like Tolstoy—filtered what he saw of the world through his own religious consciousness to produce pageant-like novels filled (like life itself) with countless characters, some centerstage and others present only briefly for a moment before disappearing into the wings, some crucial to the development of the plot and others depicted as merely standing next to more pivotal personalities. And the intrigues and adventures of those personalities—varying from profound to trivial and from inspiring to shameful (and yet somehow never crossing the line to tawdry, let alone to truly vulgar)—those stories became, for both Wouk and Tolstoy, the canvas on which to paint a picture of the world not merely as they saw it but, far more profoundly, as their insight allowed them to understand it. That, after all, is the novelist’s true calling: not merely to tell make-believe stories about make-believe people but to use the narrative medium to say something insightful and moving about the real-life world in which the author and his or her readers actually live.

Like most of my readers, I suppose, my first Wouk novel was The Caine Mutiny, for which the author won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951 and which was made into an Oscar-nominated film in 1954 starring Humphrey Bogart, Jose Ferrer, Van Johnson, and Fred MacMurray. I loved the book, found it far more engaging than the movie, and resolved to read more, which I did: I believe that I read every single one of Wouk’s novels in the course of my lifetime as a devoted fan of his writing. I’ll read Sailor and Fiddler this summer.

Marjorie Morningstar was the first of Wouk’s novels to be published during my lifetime. (I had to wait a bit to get to it, though, since I was only two years old when it came out.) I had to read it surreptitiously, though—according to the idiotic rules that pertained during my teenage years, Marjorie Morningstar was a “girls’ book,” so not one any boy would be caught dead reading…at least not in public—and I also saw the 1958 movie starring Natalie Wood. (Other books boys didn’t read included Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and, of course, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Enough time having passed, I now feel able to admit to having read both. Don’t tell the guys!) It too affected me deeply, but more because of its Jewish content than its plot…and also because of the fact Herman Wouk was born in the year of my mother’s birth and Marjorie Morningstar, née Morgenstern, in the year of my father’s. Because of that, I think, the whole book felt like a kind of a window into my parents’ world, and particularly into the strange ambivalence they brought to their Jewishness that Wouk captured perfectly in the opening chapters of the book. In the end, Marjorie sees the error of her ways—although she is given a strong push in that direction by her own failure to succeed as a Broadway actress—and ends up abandoning her decision to abandon her Jewishness, marrying a nice Jewish fellow named Milton Schwartz, and settling into suburban Jewish life. The Jewish ending had no precise parallel in my parents’ lives (other than them getting married and living happily ever after), but the effect the book had on me was profound…and eventually I lived out its dénouement personally by adopting an observant lifestyle and embracing a version of Judaism my parents felt more than able to live without.

And then there were The Winds of War and its sequel, War and Remembrance, published in 1971 and 1978 respectively. I read both with the greatest enthusiasm, identifying particularly strongly with one specific character, Berel Jastrow, who is depicted as being in 1941 roughly the age I was when I was reading the book and who functions as the Jewish heart and soul of the story line in the second book. What was remarkable about the books, I thought then (and still do), is how Wouk depicts the Hitler’s war against the Jews as one of two simultaneous wars of aggression being waged by the Nazis: one against any nation deemed to be standing in the way of Germany’s expansionist goals and the other against the Jewish people. Both wars are depicted in detail in both books and, indeed, the story revolves around two families, the Henrys and the Jastrows, who respectively represent these two wars in Wouk’s narrative. I found Wouk’s ultimate point—that neither war is fully comprehensible without a clear understanding of the other—both validating and motivating. Decades later, when I read Ken Follett’s Winter of the World  (the second book in his “Century” trilogy), a book recounting the intertwined stories of five families during the years of the Second World War but in which the Shoah is almost never mentioned and is otherwise wholly absent from the narrative, I was struck by the degree to which Wouk’s worldview had become my own.

I think my favorite Wouk book is Inside, Outside, one of his least well-known works. Published in 1985, it tells the story of four generations of the same Jewish family from the vantage point of one Israel David Goodkind, who belongs to the third generation of the four. It’s an interesting book in a lot of different ways—filled with historical personalities like Richard Nixon (delicately left unnamed in the book but unmistakable), Golda Meir, Ira and George Gershwin, Marlene Dietrich, Bert Lahr, Ernest Hemingway, and others, what the book felt to me like it was really about was how a man who made every conceivable sacrifice to thrive in the highest echelons of American society, how even such a man in the end felt drawn back to his roots and ended up embracing a version of Judaism he had earlier on mostly rejected. That image of the Jewish individual sacrificing everything to succeed in the secular world and then returning, one way or the other, to his or her roots keeps coming back again and again in Wouk’s books. That isn’t my personal story, but it is the story of so many people I’ve known over the years that it is nonetheless very resonant with me. I suppose I should mention that I read Inside, Outside in our apartment on the Heinrichfuchsstrasse in Rohrbach, the little town outside Heidelberg that Joan and I lived in during the years I taught in Germany. So I read this book about American Jewry when I myself was both inside and outside—the ideal setting! I wonder if I’d find it as compelling today. I suppose could find out easily enough.

There’s a lot more to write about. I read Wouk’s “Israeli” novels, The Hope and The Glory when they came out in 1993 and 1994. They’re expansive, big books, the first covering the years from 1948 to 1967 and the second moving forward through the Yom Kippur War, Entebbe, and, finally, Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel in 1977. Like The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, Wouk tells his story by intertwining the stories of fictional characters and historical personalities, and he does yeoman’s work in both volumes: even today if someone asks me what to read to “get” the whole Israeli story, I send them to those two books.

There are lots more books I could write about. I read Youngblood Hawke, Wouk’s fictional biography of a young American author not unlike Thomas Wolfe. I read Don’t Stop the Carnival, about a Jewish New Yorker who attempts to escape his own middle-age crisis by moving to a Caribbean island. And, of course, I read Wouk’s book about Judaism itself, This Is My God, in which the author talks about his own trajectory as a Jewish American but leaves for readers to see just how many pieces of how many of his novels were rooted in his own understanding of the nature of Jewishness and the ultimate meaning of Judaism.

There have been many great American Jewish authors, but few, if any, wrote about the Jewish part of their Jewish characters with more insight, with more sympathy for the spiritual dilemmas they encounter engaging with the secular world, and with more overt affection than Herman Wouk. Yehi zikhro varukh. May his memory a blessing for his readers and for us all.