The Long Way Home
An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
David Laskin

Pub

Monday, March 15th, 2010

They say publishing a book is like giving birth to a baby but I’m not so sure. Having watched three babies come into the world and grow to radiant maturity (yes, dear daughters, this means YOU), I would say that literary and human birth are about as different as two milestone events can be. With a baby, “the man after his turbulent minute or two/Is expendable,” as the poet Robert Pinsky puts it. Turbulence over, it pretty much comes down to an increasingly agonized waiting game until – bam! – out comes this red-faced squalling demanding confusing bundle of needs. And that’s just the beginning. Expendable or not, I’ve loved nudging those bundles along the bumpy road from mewling and puking to reading Walter Benjamin, Checkov and Marguerite Duras, skiing circles around me, writing essays I envy for their elegance and depth.

But here is my book, with its own bright red new-born face, staring at me blankly, utterly and eternally silent. No needs at all. About the only pleasure I’m getting out of this baby right now is the memory of its turbulent generation – years not minutes. All those interviews, those neck-cramping days in archives, those stacks of library books and photocopies that kept mounting and merging around my office. The first hundred words (but who was counting?) tapped onto the screen. The cold sweat night after night at 3 AM as I woke wondering, Can I really pull this off? Where am I going to find Polish stories? What is phosgene gas anyway?

Lots of angst, many nails bitten – but I wouldn’t trade this protracted turbulence for the world. Indeed, for me, this IS the world, at least the corner of it I most want to live in. To wake up every day with a book to push a few inches forward is about as close as I’m going to come to a mission, a calling. And how utterly inspiring and consuming that calling became in the last months of writing, when all the characters were in place, the tone and voice long since habitual, the structure fixed and seemingly inevitable – and I threw myself into the mad gallop to bring it all to completion. That is the part of writing I always find most rewarding, most invigorating – though even then, at the height of authorial ecstasy, as one sweats it out at the computer day and night, skipping meals, neglecting dogs and garden and wife (sorry about the order there, sweetie), at the end of the tunnel one sees not the white light of bliss but the shadow of emptiness.

The book must be finished. The writing done. But all that looms as “The End” approaches is the “publication process” – the editing, the galleys, the review copies, the blogs. The daily (hourly?) temptation to check the Amazon rankings. The good part is long since over.

Tomorrow is my book’s birthday and there it sits all shiny and new with its pale bold letters popping out of its antique red background and its stirring ship-board photo and its naked secret spine under the cover, embossed in gold like a Medieval Bible. I still remember wrestling with that verb, that strained transition, the title of that chapter, but it’s only a memory. This baby has ceased to be mine.

The phone rings – one of my daughters. We talk about her paper on The Portrait of a Lady. The health of our dear old dogs. The wild weather in New York. My awakening garden. And while we chat my book stares at me from my desk, silent and remote.

All I can say in return is: I’m sorry our passionate engagement is over. I miss your youth, when you were unformed and full of possibility. I miss shaping and pouring myself into you. My real children bring me joy (okay, some angst too – and lots of bills) – but what do you bring? You never call, you never write – all you crave is the caress of others’ eyes. I can’t bear to look at you anymore. Go. Crawl into bed with someone else – preferably legions. Immolate your physical self on Kindle. Leap off the shelves of Barnes and Noble. Claw your way up the slippery sales ranking ladder at Amazon. Find another home – there’s no more room for you here. Don’t expect any more love from me. Get out. I’m already involved in another – even better than you.

Book, it may be your birthday, but you and I are history.

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Onward Jewish Soldiers

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Reporters always love a shaggy dog story, and back in the early autumn of 1917, as the nation mobilized for war in Europe, they got their hands on one at Camp Upton.  Draftees from the mean streets of New York City were pouring into this boot camp out in the scrub flats of central Long Island, and the New York dailies dispatched a pool of reporters to write about how the “Izzies, Witzers, Johnnies, Mikes and Tonies” were coping.  One reporter fixed on a recruit sporting “a great beard – long, fuzzy, and innocent of all tonsorial attack,” who was wandering dazed and confused around the barracks.  The Bearded Soldier, as the press corps dubbed this Orthodox Jewish buck private, spoke no English, ate nothing but sardines, and refused to shave on religious grounds.  Reporters cracked-wise for days over the stoop-shouldered tailor who, as one wrote, had spent his life working  “fourteen hours a day on cheap ladies’ wear” but now seemed perfectly content “ “to be out in the big open air and play and think and stroke his beard.”

Such was the image of the Jew in uniform when the U.S. entered the Great War.  Pants pressers, push-cart peddlers, sewing machine operators – maybe businessmen or doctors at the upper echelons, but certainly not warriors.  That image would change dramatically in the coming months as the Bearded Soldier and thousands of his fellow Jews shaped up, shipped out, and took their places in the front lines in France and Belgium.  Jews had, of course, fought in America’s previous wars – but never with the numbers and the recognition they attained in World War I.  It was the first war in which the army brought in Jews as chaplains – eventually six rabbis ministered to the 100,000 Jewish soldiers on active duty in France.  And, starting in February 1918, for the first time the graves of slain Jewish soldiers were marked with the Star of David instead of a cross.

Among Jewish-Americans who distinguished themselves in the Great War were Sam Dreben, the so-called Fighting Jew, who enlisted in the U.S. army soon after arriving from Ukraine in 1899 and led a colorful life as a soldier of fortune in Central America before reenlisting in 1918 to serve with the 141st infantry;

Samuel “Nails” Morton, a Chicago gangster who, given the choice of doing prison time for assault or signing on with the army, chose the army, fought bravely with the Rainbow Division, and was commended by his commanding officer for his “unusual aptitude for weapons;”

and Rabbi Elkan Voorsanger, known as the Fighting Rabbi, who served the spiritual needs of the heavily New York (and immigrant) 77th “Melting Pot” Division.  “In France, there was no distinction,” the Fighting Rabbi told a reporter for the New York Times in 1919. “Each Chaplain was responsible for the religion of every man, and it didn’t matter to us how a man prayed but that he prayed.”

Praising the participation of Jewish-Americans, General Pershing wrote, “When the time came to serve their country under arms, no class of people served with more patriotism or with higher motives than the young Jews who volunteered or were drafted and went overseas with our other young Americans to fight the enemy.” Though only 3.27 percent of the U.S. population in 1917, Jews made up 5.73 percent of the army, with 72 percent of Jews in uniform serving in combat units, compared with 60 percent of all military personnel.  The Bearded Soldier soon vanished from the New York dailies, but chances are he saw his share of action and acquitted himself bravely, bushy beard and all.

In his book A Jewish Chaplain in France, Rabbi Lee J. Levinger, a chaplain with 27th Division, reflected on why Jews showed such eagerness for combat.  Levinger told a story about a young Jewish soldier in the division who risked his life to rescue men wounded in the course of a terrible firefight:  “I asked…why he had led a group of volunteers in bringing from an exposed position some wounded men of another regiment, an act in which the only other Jew in the company had been killed and for which my friend was later decorated. ‘Well, chaplain, there were only two Jewish boys in the company and we’d been kidded about it a little.  We just wanted to show those fellows what a Jew could do.’”  I suspect a lot of Jewish Doughboys felt the same way.

If you’re interested in pursuing the history of Jews in the American military, check out the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America website – or drop into the JWV’s National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington, D.C.

I’ll close this post with a request.  When I was in France walking American World War I battlefields, I visited the Meuse-Argonne American military cemetery and came across the grave of William Sawelson, one of two Jewish Americans awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in the war.  Sergeant Sawelson was born in Newark, New Jersey, served in the 312th infantry, and was killed by a machine-gun bullet on October 26, 1918,  while trying to bring water to a wounded comrade at Grand Pre.  I searched for more about his life and service, but aside from the MOH citation I came away empty-handed.  If anyone knows anything else about this Jewish-American hero, I’d love to hear about it.

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