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

Book Tour: The Movie

Monday, April 19th, 2010

I’ve always loved the way Hollywood portrays writers – the knit brow wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke as the Opus lies mired in writer’s block; the Breakthrough arriving in a smoky burst of creativity; the pages flying out of a big black ash-sprinkled typewriter; the meteoric rise to fame, fortune, and smoldering co-stars.  Just another glorious tour of duty in the literary trenches.

So far as I know, Hollywood has yet to tackle Book Tour:  The Movie.  But you can just picture it.  Opening shot:  a packed auditorium full of chanting stomping readers.  A hush descends as the venerable, bespectacled, ever-so-slightly balding author (Ralph Fiennes?) takes the stage.  Zoom in on the lined but still surprisingly attractive face, the hands trembling just discernibly as they grip the side of the lectern, a glint of light reflected off the chic Italian spectacles.  Wide shot of the rapturous, mostly young female audience (Natalie Portman in front row?) staring dewy-eyed as The Talk commences:

We live not only in a nation of immigrants…but a nation of poor immigrants…

Cut to the Statue of Liberty…Ellis Island… vaguely klezmery music swells…A still of immigrants packed in steerage dissolves to a wide shot of an endless line of leggy young readers clambering to have their copies inscribed, their questions answered, their demands met.  “I know it sounds crazy,” Natalie pants, “but I just had to buy 10 copies.”  “Where on earth do you get your ideas – and such big, complicated ideas?” “I’ve never read anything like this – when’s the next one?”

The reality, I can report after legs one and two of my own book tour (hence the long silence of the blog), is a little different.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m incredibly grateful that my publisher has sent me on a book tour at all.  We writers live cloistered lives and it’s always enlivening to get out there in the real world and meet the reading public.  It’s also, frankly, a tad humbling.  The first leg of my tour took me to New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago – and I’ll confess I felt a bit like a kid with his nose pressed to the window of the candy store.  Or rather the Apple-Disney-Nike store.  To the extent I felt any cultural pulse throbbing in the veins of our big cities it was pumped out not by words between covers but by images and characters shimmering on little screens.  Even the bookstores, if you can find one, seem to be more about wifi, coffee and ephemera than the printed and bound page.

Which is not to say that book lovers are history.  I met scads of people who are passionate about books everywhere I went.  On my first night on the road, the Affatato family (descendants of Epifanio Affatato, one of the twelve men in my book) filled their Long Island house to overflowing with relatives and friends eager to hear about the service of a great Italian American.

The official launch at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum was every author’s dream come true – standing room only crowd; evocative surroundings; great questions; and great company for my book in the museum’s wonderful little book and gift shop.  The Army and Navy Club in downtown Washington, D.C., was one of the most beautiful and august places I’ve ever lectured in, and I was pleased to see three soldiers on active duty in the audience.  Warm welcome at the Polish Museum of America; fascinating post-talk tour of the National Museum of American Jewish Military History.

Yes, my book tour was brought to you by a massive Apple-Disney-Nike style corporation.  But the people who attended the events were part of a community – or rather many overlapping communities.  History buffs, sons and daughters of Italy or Poland, proud descendants of Jewish plumbers-turned-soldiers who still feel a connection to their heritage and want to see it preserved and carried forward.  It’s fitting that a book about twelve ordinary guys who got caught up in the cataclysm of the Great War should be promoted one community, one circle of readers, one family at a time.  And that the venues were museums, libraries, private clubs, social halls, family living rooms, and of course the handful of beloved, heroic independent bookstores that miraculously still survive – Elliott Bay Books, University Bookstore, and Third Place Books here in Seattle; Rainy Day Books in Kansas City; the Bookworm in Omaha; Port Books &  News in Port Angeles, Washington.

If I were making a movie of my tour, I’d open in the big drab hall of the Rocky Point, Long Island, Sons of Italy chapter.  A handful of tables of mostly elderly Italian-Americans, some speaking Italian, gathered for a relaxing night of cards and pizza.  The grizzled author sidles in, hands trembling, with his laptop and speech.  Suspicious stares, mutters of Who the hell is this guy? Close up of now sweating author launching into his talk:

We live not only in a nation of immigrants, but a nation of poor immigrants…

Cut to author shaking hands with stout gray-haired Italian gent.  “You know, your talk was actually kinda interesting,” the gent remarks as he pumps and pumps author’s hand. “Reminded me of something I haven’t thought of in years.  My uncle Nick – he served with the 77th Division.  Was gassed and everything… We’ve got his discharge papers somewhere. And hey, thanks for writing your book.”

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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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Great War Poets

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

This is what I love about the Internet. On Monday morning I was reading the New York Times and this headline caught my eye on the front page: ”A Well-Written War, Told in the First Person.” Elisabeth Bumiller had written a lovely piece about some of the fine poetry and prose coming out of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was especially taken by the work of Brian Turner, whose poem “Here, Bullet” Bumiller discussed.

I Googled Turner and found more poems of his online describing “a murder of crows” looking down on a row of body bags and a man named Hasan who tried to commit suicide by leaping off a balcony, only to be rescued, temporarily, by a clueless soldier, and an American PFC named Miller who succeeded in committing suicide by putting a bullet through his mouth—“nothing can stop it now, no matter what/blur of motion surrounds him…” A little more Googling and I learned that Turner’s work is included in the Voices in Wartime anthology that my friend Andrew Himes put together and that a recording of one of his poems is available on the Voices in Wartime website. So that was a good morning on the Internet in an otherwise frustrating stretch of days.

But this thread gets even better. Reading Turner’s verse got me thinking about the poetry that came out of the Great War and how all the really good stuff was written by Englishmen—Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, T. E. Hulme. The only American poets of note I could think of off-hand were Joyce Kilmer (“I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree…”) and Alan Seeger (“I have a rendezvous with Death/At some disputed barricade/When Spring comes round with rustling shade/And apple blossoms fill the air.”).  Memorable enough, but let’s face it, tarnished by time.  So back to Google I went and entered the words “World War I American poetry” and bingo, I found a website called Poetry of the First War which features write-ups of e.e. cummings, Archibald MacLeish, John Reed, and yes, Seeger and Kilmer. Scrolling down, I came across an entry devoted to a writer I’d never heard of named John Allan Wyeth. What caught my eye was a blurb of Wyeth’s book This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets:  “Let the trumpets sound for John Allan Wyeth!” wrote British poet and critic Jon Stallworthy.  “At overlong last, marking the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, an American poet takes his place with the British in the front rank of the war poets’ parade.”

The original 1928 cover of John Allan Wyeth’s sonnet series

Two more clicks and I arrived at an essay by poet and former National Endowment for the Arts chair Dana Gioia which told the story of why it took nine decades for those trumpets to sound. Wyeth, the son of a prominent New York City surgeon and a graduate of Princeton, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 with the rank of second lieutenant, shipped out to France in 1918, and spent the duration of the war with the Interpreters Corps of the 33rd Division. He returned to live and work in Europe after the war and published his slim sonnet collection to moderate acclaim in 1928. Shortly afterward both he and the book vanished into obscurity. Eighty years later, This Man’s Army fell into the hands of Dana Gioia, who instantly recognized Wyeth as “the missing figure in the American literature of World War I—a soldier poet still worth reading.”

Gioia notes that Wyeth’s sonnets chronicle with “documentary exactitude” “the poet’s journey through the war.” Places, song lyrics, the sound of incoming shells and muttered conversations, even the weather—Wyeth conveys it all in minute detail. But what makes this verse stand out is Wyeth’s loose, jittery, colloquial style and biting tone. None of Seeger’s sonorities or Kilmer’s misty-eyed piety.

We passed
two soldiers, pain-white, and a man they bore
between, blind twisting head and drunken knees,
—like Christ.
“Come on, Bud—There—You just been gassed.”
(from Through the Valley)

Every war has its own patois—a jaunty muttered soldier’s slang set to the beat of whatever music blared through headphones, loudspeakers, or from the throats of marching men. I’ve heard the American version of the Great War patois in the prose of John Dos Passos (Three Soldiers, the USA Trilogy), e.e. cummings’s The Enormous Room, in Fix Bayonets!, the lightly fictionalized stories of Marine battles by Lieutenant Colonel John W. Thomason, Jr., and the superb memoir Suddenly We Didn’t Want To Die by Marine enlistee Elton E. Mackin.  But never before had I caught that peculiar note—weary, young, wised-up, pissed-off—in American verse.  Stallworthy is right: John Allan Wyeth is a cause for celebration. Thank you, Dana Gioia. Thank you, Internet.

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Frank Buckles Turns 109

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Sometimes history is not about what happened but about what has disappeared or quietly ceased to exist while no one was looking.  One of those silent erasures is occurring right now with the passing of the generation of soldiers that fought in the Great War.  Some 4.7 million Americans either enlisted or were drafted to fight in the war to end all wars – but Frank Woodruff Buckles, a West Virginia farmer who celebrates his 109th birthday today, is the last of the last.

Buckles would be the first to admit that he was not a major player in the conflict that killed more than 9.5 million soldiers and set the course for modern history. Fibbing his way into the army (he was underage) in August, 1917, he shipped out to England in December, 1917 and spent the duration of the war driving officers around and delivering their messages far from the front lines.  “I wasn’t disappointed that the war ended,” he told a reporter recently, “but I would have liked to accomplish what I had started out for.”

Still, though he didn’t see any action, Buckles conveys a visceral sense of what it was like to serve when Woodrow Wilson was commander in chief.  Until someone invents a time machine, nothing in the historian’s bag of tricks can match this experience of living through it.  Four years ago, a dozen American World War I veterans were still alive, so the visceral sense of the past was that much richer in texture, detail, anecdote and emotion.  At that time, I had just embarked on research for a book about the immigrant experience in the Great War – and learning that two of these surviving veterans were foreign-born, I moved heaven and earth to meet them.  These were encounters I will never forget.

Italian-born Antonio Pierro, 110 at the time of our meeting, reminisced about the snakes in his family’s orchard back in the southern Italian province of Basilicata, shuddered at the memory of the shells that fell near him in the Argonne forest in the autumn of 1918, and smiled wanly when his nephew mentioned the name of a French girl he had fallen in love with.  The young Pierro was stunned when someone called him a “wop” on the chow line at training camp.  Nonetheless, he went on to fight bravely with the 82nd  Division’s field artillery.  He died on February 8, 2007, a few months after our interview.

Samuel Goldberg, a 106-year-old Russian-born Jew, harbored a fierce engagement with a past he remembered in minute detail.  Like Buckles, Goldberg had to wiggle his way into the army – at 104 pounds he was underweight, but Uncle Sam was hungry for soldiers in the spring of 1918, and Goldberg secured a waiver.  The skinny eighteen-year-old intended to sign on with the Signal Corps, but the recruiting officer convinced him he’d be better off in the cavalry.  Goldberg told me that on his first day of boot camp at Fort Oglethorpe the drill sergeant did a double-take when he got to his name and snorted, “Jesus  Christ, a Jew in the cavalry.  I’m surprised they let a little guy like you in.”  But nobody was snorting when they saw Goldberg drilling with a saber.  Ninety years later, he was still proud of the respect he commanded and muscles he acquired. Goldberg died on December 10, 2006.

What I took away from these interviews was the sense of the melting pot in action.  “Regular” American guys entered the army expecting immigrants to be lazy, cowardly, untrustworthy, clannish and incomprehensible.  But after enduring mud, gas, shelling and machine-gunning side by side with Jews, Italians, Poles and Slovaks, most American-born Doughboys came to accept foreign-born recruits as one of them.  The immigrants themselves, fully one-fifth of the American armed forces, assimilated by serving.  They weren’t citizens, many of them spoke only halting English when they enlisted or were drafted, their deepest loyalty was to family, religion, or the heritage of their culture of origin.  But the army made them Americans.  The ethnic slurs continued despite the army’s attempt to stamp them out; but the names lost their sting when they were tossed around by buddies.

Tony Pierro and Sam Goldberg did not have any insights to share with me into military tactics, politics or diplomacy:  but in the course of the hours we spent talking, they did powerfully summon up the tensions, hopes and aspirations of a time when American soldiers from 45 different countries marched to the front singing  “Over There” and “K-K-K-Katie” in unison.  When Frank Buckles passes, the last reverberations of those grand old tunes will pass with him.

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