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Soldiering for Freedom by Herman J. Obermayer
- Abstract
Coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, a clutch of new books has focused on the day-to-day life of American soldiers, mostly as conveyed in letters home to families and loved ones. A number of these books have the additional feature of being organized around the theme of Jewish identity, while others inevitably raise the issue of the Jewish fate in the great battle against Nazism. Two problems immediately arise from this sort of exercise. The first has to do with the inherent value of personal correspondence as history. War letters tend to be written not in the heat of battle but during downtime, as armies rest or prepare to fight or to move on. As devices for warding off boredom and contending with loneliness, they are tedious almost by their very nature, filled with the dry particulars of barracks life—packages that have arrived or failed to arrive, gripes about the weather, the food, the privileges unfairly afforded to officers, and so on. Rare are the letters, or the books made from them, that actually illuminate larger events or add meaningfully to our understanding of those events. This is certainly the lesson one takes away from one of the most ambitious recent efforts, Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters.* Drawn from highly disparate conflicts ranging from the Revolutionary war to Iraq, this collection not only lacks a unifying theme but offers very few “powerful and revealing” sentiments, unless the sentiment that war is hell qualifies as one.
A second problem bedevils World War II letters by American Jewish soldiers in particular, or at least those chosen with an eye for what they can tell us about issues of “identity” (hardly a common obsession in those days). Wrestling on paper with one’s Jewishness has its poignancy, no doubt, but in context it can also seem rather small beer against the vast scale of the enterprise in which these soldiers are involved and the human stakes that hinge on its outcome. A useful example here is GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation. Deborah Dash Moore,† the author, a professor of religion at Vassar, has drawn on a selection of letters, monographs, interviews, and other material in order to tell the individual tales of some fifteen Jewish GI’s hailing mostly from New York City. In her pages we encounter the Jewish loner whose sense of isolation drives him to join a Christian-fellowship group; the assimilated Jew who during a tour of duty in India, brought face to face with the local Jewish community, discovers his own hitherto unsuspected ethnic pride; the Orthodox student from Yeshiva University forced to confront simultaneously the prejudice of Catholic mates and the hostility of a Reform chaplain; and so forth. Unfortunately, despite certain vivid episodes, Moore’s hodgepodge of “great moments in Jewish consciousness” adds up to a rather less than instructive whole.
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