Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

By Marge Piercy

This sweeping New York Times bestseller is “the most thorough and most captivating, most engrossing novel ever written about World War II” (Los Angeles Times).

Epic in scope, Marge Piercy’s sweeping novel encompasses the wide range of people and places marked by the Second World War. Each of her ten narrators has a unique and compelling story that powerfully depicts his or her personality, desires, and fears. Special attention is given to the women of the war effort, like Bernice, who rebels against her domineering father to become a fighter pilot, and Naomi, a Parisian Jew sent to live with relatives in Detroit, whose twin sister, Jacqueline—still in France—joins the resistance against Nazi rule.
 
The horrors of the concentration camps; the heroism of soldiers on the beaches of Okinawa, the skies above London, and the seas of the Mediterranean; the brilliance of code breakers; and the resilience of families waiting for the return of sons, brothers, and fathers are all conveyed through powerful, poignant prose that resonates beyond the page. Gone to Soldiers is a testament to the ordinary people, with their flaws and inner strife, who rose to defend liberty during the most extraordinary times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Apr 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504033435

Marge Piercy

<p>Marge Piercy is the author of the memoir Sleeping with Cats and fifteen novels, including <em>Three Women and Woman on the Edge of Time,</em> as well as sixteen books of poetry, including <em>Colors Passing Through Us, The Art of Blessing the Day,</em> and <em>Circles on the Water.</em> She lives on Cape Cod, with her husband, Ira Wood, the novelist and publisher of Leapfrog Press.</p>

Book preview

A Talent for Romance

Louise Kahan, aka Annette Hollander Sinclair, sorted her mail in the foyer of her apartment. An air letter from Paris. You have something from your aunt Gloria, she called to Kay, who was curled up in her room listening to swing music, pretending to do her homework but being stickily obsessed with boys. Louise knew the symptoms but she had never learned the cure, not in her case, certainly not in her daughter’s. Kay did not answer; presumably she could not hear over the thump of the radio.

Personal mail for Mrs. Louise Kahan in one pile. The family stuff, invitations. An occasional faux pas labeled Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Kahan. Where have you been for the past two years? Then the mail for Annette Hollander Sinclair in two stacks: one for business correspondence about rights, radio adaptations, a contract with Doubleday from her agent Charley for the collection of stories Hidden from His Sight. Speaking engagements, club visits, an interview Wednesday.

The second pile for Annette was fan mail, ninety-five percent from women. Finally a few items for plain Louise Kahan: her Daily Worker, reprints of a Masses and Mainstream article she had written on the Baltimore shipyard strike, a book on women factory workers from International Publishers for her to review, William Shirer’s Berlin Diary.

Also in that pile were the afternoon papers. Normally she would pick them up first, but she could not bring herself to do so. Europe was occupied by the Nazis from sea to sea, an immense prison. Everywhere good people and old friends were shot against walls, tortured in basements, carted off to camps about which rumors were beginning to appear to be more than rumor.

She leaned on the wall of the foyer, gathering energy to resume her life, to walk into the emotional minefield that lately seemed to constitute her relationship with Kay. The foyer was the darkest room of the suite, for the living room, her office and Kay’s bedroom enjoyed views of the Hudson River, and her own bedroom and the dining room looked down on Eighty-second Street. She had lightened the hall with a couple of cleverly placed mirrors and the big bold Miró with the spotlight on it, which she contemplated now, seeking gaiety, wit, light.

The talk she had given two hours before had bored her, if not her audience. Passing the shops hung with tinsel, she found Christmas harder to take than usual. The world was burning to ash and bone, and all her countrymen could think of was Donald Duck dressed in a Santa Claus suit. She ought to cross town to the East Side soon to get lekvar for a confection she liked to bake at Chanukah, a Hungarian-Jewish treat her mother had made, but the shop that had it was in German Yorkville. She needed a belligerent mood to brave the swastikas openly displayed, the Nazi films playing in the movie theaters, Sieg im Westen, Victory in the West, the German-American Bund passing out anti-Semitic tracts on the corners.

Next to the mail was a list of phone calls, scrawled when Kay had taken them: Ed from the Lecture Bureau called. Call him tomorrow A.M. He sounds bothered.

Some lunatic called about how she wants you to write her life story.

Daddy called.

The notes from her secretary Blanche or her housekeeper Mrs. Shaunessy were neater:

Mr. Charles Bannerman, 11:30. He wants to know if the contracts came.

Mr. Kahan, 2:30. He is in his office at Columbia.

Mr. Dennis Winterhaven, at 3, said he would call back.

Miss Dorothy Kilgallen called about interviewing you December 12.

Oscar had called twice. She tried to treat that as a casual occurrence, but nothing between them would ever be reduced to the affectless, she knew by now. At the simple decision that she must return his call, her heart perceptibly increased its flowthrough, damned traitorous pump. She cleaned up the business calls first, straightening out her schedule, glancing at the contracts and initialing where she was supposed to initial and signing where she was supposed to sign. She certainly could use the money.

She also decided she would talk to Kay before taking on her ex-husband. She knocked. At fifteen she had longed for privacy with a passion she could still remember. She granted Kay the sovereignty of her room, although it took restraint. Louise knew herself to be an anxious parent. She wanted to be closer to Kay again, as close as they had been when Kay was younger, even as she knew Kay needed to assert her independence. Somewhere was the right tone, the right voice, the right touch to ease that soreness.

Gosh, that’s an Annette hat! Kay said. She was sprawled on the floor, all legs and elbows and extra joints in a pleated skirt that was rapidly losing its pleats and an oversized shirt in which her barely developed body was lost, as if dissolved. She turned down the radio automatically when Louise came in.

Louise touched the hat: a cartwheel in pink and black, with a loop of veil over the eyes. I was addressing a literary club in Oyster Bay.

"Literary? Kay screeched. What do they want with you?"

That’s what they call themselves, but they aren’t reading Thomas Mann. Unpinning the hat, she balanced it on two fingers, twirling it. She stepped out of her high heels and sank in the rocking chair to massage her tired feet. Did your daddy say what he wanted, Kay?

Kay giggled. I told him about my essay and he practically wrote it for me on the phone.

I’m sure that was very helpful, Louise said, tasting the vinegar in her voice. Did he volunteer anything else?

Kay shrugged. Clearly she did not care to share the riches of a private conversation with her father.

Louise remembered. Here’s a letter for you from your aunt Gloria.

Gloria, Oscar’s sister, had been caught by the outbreak of war in Paris. Gloria was Kay’s favorite aunt, the glamorous other she longed to be: a chic black-haired beauty who worked as a stringer reporting French fashions for stateside magazines. Gloria, like Oscar, had been born in Pittsburgh, but the only steel remaining was in her will. Louise admired her sister-in-law’s willpower and her style, although Gloria had no politics besides opportunism and had married a vacuous Frenchman with more money than sense and more pride than money.

Gloria took her aunt’s duties seriously. She was childless, for her French husband, some twenty years her senior, had grown children who obviously preferred that he propagate no more. As Kay knocked through a rocky adolescence, Gloria sent her inappropriate presents (either too childish—stuffed bears—or sophisticated beaded sweaters) and anecdotal letters, which Kay cherished.

Now Louise stirred herself, sighing. She brushed a cake crumb from the skirt of her rose wool suit and looked at herself in Kay’s mirror. You look elegant, Mommy. Why are you still dressed up? Are you going out again?

No, darling, not a step. I just wanted to check in with you. She did look reasonably soignée, her complexion rosy above the rose suit, her hair well cut, close to the sides of her oval face whose best feature was still its finely chiseled bones and whose second best feature was the big grey eyes set off by auburn hair. Louise had always taken for granted being attractive to men; it was a given, not worth much consideration, but an advantage she could count on. Now she examined her looks warily, as she did her bank account each month. Expenses were high for their fatherless establishment, and the cost of living could write itself quickly on the face of a woman of thirty-eight. Little vanity was involved. She reasoned that when an advantage was lost, it was well to take that into account. But the mirror assured her she remained attractive, if that was of any use.

When she thought of marrying again, she wondered where she would put a man. After Oscar had walked out, she and Kay and Mrs. Shaunessy and her secretary Blanche had quickly filled the space. She would not give up having an office to work in, never again satisfy herself with a dainty secretary in a corner of the bedroom behind a screen. She smiled at the reflection she was no longer seeing, thinking how that setup was a symbol of the way she had had to pursue her work in a corner while living with Oscar. Everything had been subordinated to him at all times.

Mother! You use that mirror more than I do.

She realized Kay was sitting with Gloria’s letter unopened in her lap, waiting for her to leave so that she could engorge it in private. Feeling shut out, Louise departed at once. Supper would be better. She and Kay would talk at supper, for often that was their best time. She would turn her afternoon into a string of funny stories to make Kay laugh, then ask her about school and her friends. She was always courting her daughter lately. She had to restrain herself from buying too many presents, but maybe Saturday they could go shopping together, in the afternoon. She could remember their intimacy when she had known all Kay’s hopes and wishes and fears by heart, when she had held Kay and sung to her, You Are My Sunshine, and meant it. Her precious sun child whose life would be entirely different, safer and better than her own, poor and battered, growing up.

Now she could not put off calling Oscar. She thought of questioning Mrs. Shaunessy about his exact words, but her procrastination and anxiety were not yet totally out of control. Door shut, she put her bedroom telephone on her lap, then changed her mind and decided to call him on her office phone. Desk to desk. That felt safer. Louise sat in her swivel chair looking with satisfaction on the little kingdom of work she had created and then reluctantly she dialed Oscar’s number at his Columbia University office.

Oscar? It’s Louise. You called?

Louie! How are you. Just a moment. He spoke off-line. The voices continued for several moments while she sat grimacing with impatience. Sorry to keep you waiting, but I wanted to pack off my assistant to the outer office.

Assistant what?

I’m running an interview project on German refugees. I have a student of mine interviewing the men, and a young lady of Blumenthal’s who’s going to start on the females. How are you, Louie? I spoke to Kay earlier. We had a quite intelligent conversation about the meaning of democracy.

Kay said you’d blocked out her essay for her over the phone.

Isn’t the news rotten these days? I turn on the radio expecting to hear that Moscow has fallen.

They’re fighting in the suburbs. I keep waiting for the legendary Russian winter to do its historic task and freeze out the Nazis—

I saw Oblonsky last week. He was in Leningrad, you know. He says they’re starving.

Not literally, Louise said acerbically. She disliked hyperbole.

Quite literally. People are dying of hunger and the cold. He said they’re dropping in the thousands with no one to bury them.

Louise was silent. She and Oscar had friends among the intellectuals and writers of Leningrad, a city they preferred to Moscow. Oscar spoke some Russian, and they had visited the Soviet Union in 1938. Finally she said, I suppose we won’t know till the war is over what’s happened to everyone. She sighed and Oscar at his end sighed too. Oh, Gloria wrote Kay.

What did she have to say?

You’ll have to ask your daughter.

I’m sure Gloria is fine. She’s well insulated from the Nazis, and I can’t imagine why they’d take an interest in her. I do wish she’d get herself back here, but I suppose she sees little reason to pick up and leave. After all, she’s a citizen of a neutral power.

What’s on your mind, Oscar? I had two messages from you.

Sunday’s our anniversary. The seventh, right?

It was extraordinary for you to remember it the fifteen years we were married, all my friends used to tell me, but don’t you think it’s superfluous to note it since we’re divorced?

I still don’t know why you wanted a divorce—

It’s been final for a year now. Isn’t that late to debate it? I found it absurd being married to a man I was no longer living with.

Don’t let’s quarrel about that now. I thought it would be nice to have supper together for old time’s sake. After all, we’ll think about each other all evening anyhow. Why not do it together?

Are you asking me for a date, Oscar? She sounded ridiculous, but she was playing for time.

That’s what I’m doing. Wouldn’t it be rather sweet? We haven’t sat down in a civilized way and shared a good meal and a bottle of wine in ages. I’d love to tell you what I’m doing. And hear all your news too, of course.

Oscar hated to let go of women. He tried to retain all his old girlfriends in one or another capacity, friends, colleagues, dependents, at least acquaintances. He was used to demanding his widowed mother’s attention still. He could not see why he should ever let go of any woman whose attendance he had enjoyed. He also knew how to manipulate her desire for advice and commiseration on her problems with Kay. She could not imagine ceasing to be curious about Oscar; one problem she had with all other men was comparing them to him. Dennis Winterhaven said she made Oscar into a myth, but he did not know Oscar.

Come, Louie, why not? I’ll take you anyplace you want to go. But I’ve discovered a wonderful Spanish restaurant on Fourteenth, refugees of course, fine guitarist, perfect paella.

She was supposed to see Dennis that evening, but not till seven. They were having supper and then he was taking her to hear Hildegarde at the Savoy. I have plans for Sunday evening. But I could have Sunday dinner with you.

Pick you up at one?

Fine. The moment she hung up she paced her office. Why had she agreed? Because she could not resist seeing him. She would be safe, seeing Dennis just afterward. Oscar was right, of course; she would spend the evening thinking of him. She wished she had the capacity to fall in love with Dennis. The dinner was theoretically rich in possibilities. How to use her skittery feelings? Her fingers sketched circles on the pad. She could not have a divorcée as heroine. They were only the occasional villainess in the slick magazines. She herself adored the racy sound of being a divorcée. She had graduated from dull wifehood, emerging a glorious tropical butterfly, but one with a wasp sting.

Could she get away with the couple being separated? Or would it have to be a man almost married, years before? That was safer. The anniversary was of the day they had almost married, but she had decided not to. Now why? Louise glanced at the clock. She had a couple of hours before dinner. She dug for the buried fantasy that lay in the bland story. That was her power, to exploit that vein like radioactive ore in rock, the uranium Madame Curie had worked; or, more honestly, a layer of butter cream in a cake, the power of fantasizing what women really wanted to happen. Let’s see, how about a widow? Widowed young? They weren’t into war deaths yet, but how about an accident? No blame attached, proceed at your own pace now. A second chance at a man you’d turned down or dropped for reasons you now know were unworthy. Yes, she would work that secret fantasy in married women that their idiot husband should suddenly drop dead and the one who got away came back on the scene. This was a sure seller.

What she needed was a good hook and a good title. A bouquet of yellow roses coming suddenly to the door. A mistake, surely. The memory years before. Call her Betsy. That’s a nice safe respectable-sounding name. It was a New England story, she decided, one of the ones she would set in her invented Cape Ann town of Glastonbury. A fisherman who went down in a storm? Or a commuting husband in a train accident? That would provide better class identification for her readers.

Funny how the phone call with Oscar set her off. She had often worked the effluvia of their life together for exploitable material. Growing up, Louise had never fantasized about being a novelist or a short story writer. She had wanted to be a journalist, a foreign correspondent, a Dorothy Thompson. She had written her first story when Oscar was out of work and Kay was a little girl and they had no money for rent. With the apartment they were renting in farthest Flatbush had come a shelf of Saturday Evening Posts, Ladies’ Home Journals, issues of McCall’s and Redbooks. They had not the money to buy a newspaper that winter. Oscar used to pick them up on the street after other people had read them.

That her story sold astonished her. She could still remember shopping on that money, buying chicken, lamb chops, buying Kay a real doll with hair and eyes that shut, buying Oscar a warm sweater and paying the back rent. The next one did not sell, nor did the next, but then she sold another. She began to study what worked and what didn’t; she analyzed stories they printed according to sociological and psychological profiles of acceptable heroines and heroes. She laid out the plots of twenty stories each from the six highest-paying magazines. She sharpened her focus and began to sell regularly.

The pen name was the one she had signed to her first story, when she noticed no Jewish names among the writers published and that women whose names implied marriage seemed to sell well. She had invented Annette Hollander Sinclair, and later when that lady became a popular writer of women’s fiction, she learned to become her for appearances. She bought Annette separate suits, hats, gloves, shoes, purses. She even had an Annette voice. Dennis, she thought, had fallen in love with Annette, which was probably why she was not in love with him. Oscar at least wanted to dine with Louise. Ashamed of herself, she began cautiously to look forward to Sunday. In the meantime she ran across the hall, changed into a comfortable smock and full peasant skirt, slipped her feet into furry bunnies and then resumed at her desk the story of Betsy whose husband died in a train wreck on the 5:15 commuter from North Station; and whose lover sent yellow roses and smiled enigmatically, whose laugh was boyish, but whose black roguish Asiatic eyes were borrowed from Oscar.

DANIEL 1

An Old China Hand

As Daniel Balaban crossed the bridge from the Harvard Business School, where he and his fellows were being housed, to the older Harvard on the Cambridge side of the Charles, he gazed at the crowds of undergraduates with as curious and wary an eye as he had the polyglot strollers in the Bund. He did not belong here. The Navy was playing a little joke on Harvard, having collected a wild assortment of sons of missionaries, naval career officers, old China hands who had been there on economic or military business over the last twenty years. Most of them had some Japanese, but others, like himself, only knew Chinese. The Navy had brought them here for a crash course in Japanese at the Yenching Institute in the yard. Daniel, the child of an immigrant Jewish family huddled in the Bronx, a student who had shown spotty ability and arrived at no particular ambition, at least none for which degrees were given, worked hard at his Japanese and looked around with surprise, pleased but also amused at his good fortune.

Daniel remembered the Depression well enough so that he was convinced he would never forget how hunger felt and how it reduced a person to nothing but itself. His father had come to the United States at fifteen from Kozienice in Poland. Gradually he had built up a small button business that prospered in the twenties. He believed in his adopted country and wanted only to do as the Americans did. He took Daniel and his older brother Haskel to see the Giants play, and he thanked his business contacts profusely for the stock market tips they passed on to him. They were doing well, very well, as in his dreams. It disappeared overnight, as if it never had been: fairy gelt. Daniel thought that neither of his parents had ever got over the shock of all that money melting into debts. Within two months, they were no longer prosperous and shortly after that, they were poor.

Uncle Nat, who had been a businessman in Germany, left as soon as Hitler assumed power. Thriving in Shanghai, Nat sent for his brothers. Uncle Mendel was working in France; Uncle Eli and Aunt Esther were doing very well, thank you, in Kozienice. In the Bronx, Daniel’s father received the passage money thankfully and set off to try his brother’s luck in Shanghai. Neither got rich, but they flourished, taipans, successful businessmen. Within six months, Daniel’s father sent for his family. They all went except Haskel, a brilliant if narrow student in premed at City College.

He could still remember how he and his sister Judy and his mother had eaten on the French boat that took them to China. They had traveled third class, but the food had been plentiful, so plentiful they could only talk about that their first week at sea. How much there was to eat. How often they ate. How they would eat just as much very soon. After three weeks on board, their gauntness was replaced by tanned flesh. His mother looked ten years younger. His sister Judy at sixteen was suddenly pretty.

Up until then, he had been an awkward child. Any ball thrown near him would hit him in the face, as if maliciously or as if compelled by some loadstone in his skull that called to it, so that by age fourteen, he had been wounded by baseballs, hard and soft, footballs, soccer balls, beach balls, tennis balls, Ping-Pong balls, basketballs; they had all in their turn attacked him and caused the anger and mockery of his fellows.

He had been a stubborn dreamy withdrawn child, fond of books about the dogs and cats and horses he could not have. His pets were two goldfish, Meeney and Moe. His mother kept warning him not to overfeed them, but that was the only thing he could do for them. One morning they floated belly up in their tiny bowl. He did not replace them. He would rather read Lad: A Dog or The Jungle Book. It seemed to him that wolves might be warmer, more attentive parents. In early childhood, he had been close to his mother, but the loss of their fine home, car, furniture, status, reduced her to apathy. She had talked to herself as she cleaned and cleaned their tiny crowded apartment. Although she now complained incessantly about China, she had a houseboy and a cook, and every day she went visiting with other married Jewish ladies.

Daniel’s family moved into a lane house in Hongkew, a poor, crowded, but enthralling northeastern suburb surrounded on three sides by water. They lived there because rents and food were half the price they were in the International Settlement or Frenchtown. Their house was one of a number of similar structures thrown up in a hurry, surrounded by a wall with a gate, chilly, heated with small and smelly coal stoves.

Daniel was sent to a school for American children in the International District, but school hours were not long and he could wander the streets much of the time. He bought from a street vendor some used Chinese clothes, which he hid in the wall. With his black hair, his heavy tan, his dark eyes, he did not look Chinese, but he could pass for Manchurian. If he had wandered dressed in European clothes, wearing his watch, he would have been attacked, robbed. Finding himself in an adventure of his own devising, he bloomed with new confidence. He imagined boys from the old neighborhood envying him, sorry they had not chosen him on their sandlot baseball teams, that even at stickball they had passed over him.

The streets were jammed and glittered with huge gilded signboards, flashing neon, enormous brightly colored murals advertising local products. He was growing fast and always hungry, but there was much to eat, all of it cheap: noodles, filled pao, tangtuan dumplings, sweet almond broth, sweet or salty cakes, salt fish and cabbage. He loved the races, the little Mongol ponies flashing past. He loved the steamers and sampans with painted eyes in the muddy harbor.

At the American school, no Chinese was taught. Few of their parents spoke Chinese or understood it. Uncle Nat said it was exactly the same at the other international schools and settlements. When his uncle saw that he was interested, he arranged for Daniel to have two tutors, one for conversational Mandarin and the other for reading and writing the characters. He studied with his two Chinese teachers far more avidly than with his teachers at the American school, because what he learned, he could practice at once in the streets where he always wanted to be.

The Europeans and Americans act like fools, Uncle Nat said, pointing out that the Americans would not let Chinese into their country club. There’s no one in this world you can be sure of standing on. You come into someone’s country and you have a chance to be safe, to lead a good life, then you learn their customs and you speak their language, so you don’t offend more than you have to. If you spit into the wind, it comes back in your face. Understand?

Uncle Nat was a grizzled man much like his father, but he stood differently, not stooped. He was sharply observant. Daniel felt more at ease with him than with his own father. Both his parents talked constantly of Haskel, piling up A’s at City College. The firstborn, the good son.

Shanghai was crowded, four million Chinese plus a hundred thousand foreigners, with modern skyscrapers, stylish Sikhs on little cement pedestals directing traffic, five universities, numerous scholarly and scientific institutions, fancy hotels and exclusive private clubs: but for most Chinese, there was poverty and a fast or slow death. In the mornings, corpses lay in the street as he went to school. Everywhere maimed beggars shook their cans. Shanghai was seething with diseases, as well as political unrest and assassinations. He watched prisoners beheaded and garroted for political or ordinary crimes, public executions where he stood in the crowd staring astonished at how casually life ended but taking care to look as blank as everybody else, to avoid trouble.

Then he caught a strain of paratyphoid that featured intestinal cramps so powerful that he could see them rippling his belly as he lay panting in high fever. After that initial fierce attack, it came back every month; then he seemed to outgrow it. He went on eating from booths and street vendors. He shot up to six feet. At sixteen, he bought his first sexual experience in the Kiangse Road red-light district, and unlike what his reading had led him to believe, he did not find it disgusting or blasting of his sensibility, but delightful, although incomplete because in no context.

After his initial sexual experiences, Daniel looked at women with a great deal of interest. He tried to do so on the sly, but apparently the wife of a doctor from Berlin noticed his interest. She seduced him, a task without difficulty once he grasped he was being offered what he most wanted. He had promptly fallen in love with her. Oh, so that was what he had been waiting for, that was what he had been expecting. There was sex and there were crushes, but when he put them together in a particular woman, it was a compelling new game, one that lasted into his first year at Shanghai University, when he began to make friends with two Chinese boys his own age and visit their homes.

The invading Japanese army approached the city. The Chinese troops burned much of Hongkew, the Japanese bombed the rest, and the Balabans moved reluctantly into smaller far more expensive lodgings in Frenchtown until once again lane houses were rapidly thrown up. Frequent bombings shook the ground, took out blocks. The train station was bombed and the dead lay uncounted. By 1938, Shanghai was cut off from the mainland and growing less profitable. Refugees from Germany and Austria were pouring in with frightening tales. Daniel’s parents grew increasingly nervous. It was time, they felt, to return to the Bronx.

He left China under protest, weeping openly. Judy was happy. She wanted the normal life of an American girl, she said loudly. Daniel had no desire for the normal life of an American boy, which he saw as a Saturday Evening Post cover, a freckle-faced country boy with a fishing rod. Nor did he long for fights with Italian and Polish kids on the embattled streets of the Bronx.

He attended City College. The political upheaval fascinated him as the streets of Shanghai had. He went to meetings of splinter groups, shopping the bazaar of ideas, unable to identify with any but hopeful that some ideology would ravish him into commitment. He lived at home and commuted, although he was restless with his parents, in whom he had not confided in years. He saw them as narrow, naive, sweet but parochial. Their life had been spent in survival stratagems. He expected quite other options. He did not enjoy the company of Haskel, now in medical school, on whom their mother waited like a body servant. Each brother found the other contemptible.

Every Tuesday and Wednesday after college, he took the IRT downtown to the Upper West Side, where there was a small community of midcoastal Chinese. There he took lessons with the owner of the Shanghai Star, upstairs in a little office overlooking the restaurant. Tuesday they had conversational lessons. Pao Chi was a big man, heavyset and bald, but his voice was melodious and gentle. He liked to discuss Taoism. On Wednesday they studied the characters. Just after the American New Year, Mr. Pao permitted him to do the calligraphy on a menu.

His family disapproved of his infatuation with things Chinese. His father, his mother and his sister Judy had lived in China like a family of cats standing on a log in a brook, keeping dry, keeping out of the world flowing past. Daniel planned to rejoin his uncle Nat, who loved China as he did. That was his consuming fantasy.

He fell in love with a Trotskyist and tried very hard to be one too, because her body was silky and she had a rich sexy laugh and a good hard mind he enjoyed striking ideas against. She did not enjoy the arguing as much as he did, and gave him up for someone whose politics were stronger and whose lust appeared just as strong. He was learning that love for him was like fireworks, heat and light but little damage. His lust did not diminish, although his infatuation often did. He fell in love with trivial things, a laugh, a turn of leg, a smile; no wonder that interest dissipated quickly.

He made friends with his cousin Seymour, a year older and a Communist who tried to recruit him. You’re a dilettante, Seymour told him. Nothing moves you or everything moves you.

Mr. Pao thought that was a reasonable way to be. True goodness is like water. Water helps the ten thousand things without itself striving. Water flows down into the low places men despise, for water is in the Way, Pao quoted from the Tao Te Ching.

Daniel did not know if he truly wanted to remain so watery. He imagined wondrous passions that would obsess him for longer than two weeks. Only the wife of the doctor had sustained his interest, but she was reported to have run off with an Englishman who had been supposed to be an agent but who turned out to be a conman, leaving huge debts. Uncle Nat’s letters were full of disasters of incomprehensible proportions, bodies falling like leaves to make the bloodiest of compost as the war went on and on. The Japanese now controlled Shanghai. Uncle Nat described a last contingent of a thousand Polish Jews straggling in to safety. Many refugees were stuck in Shanghai, which required no visa, no passport, no papers, no certificate of rectitude or of past or present splendor. The war was impoverishing them all, Nat reported. Soon he would only be a yang kueitze, the insulting term for a penniless foreigner.

In Hongkew, Uncle Nat wrote, amid the wrecks of bombed buildings and rubble fields, there was a chamber orchestra, several theaters and an ongoing war of cultural snobbery between the Jews of Vienna and the Jews of Berlin. Daniel was nostalgic. His parents sang the litany of how smart they had been to leave. Only his teacher Pao Chi shared Daniel’s fascination with what was going on in China.

Daniel worked as an usher in a local theater. Summers he waited on tables in the Catskills. The only time his obsession encroached on his university life was when he was asked to address the Progressive Club about the situation in China. His speech was not a success, for his confidence, often leonine one on one, vanished when he saw those bland anonymous faces. After graduation, the only job he could find was serving subpoenas.

Still he felt that his rotten speech had paid off when his economics professor gave his name to someone in the Navy, who called in the spring of 1941 to ask him if he might not be interested in a special crash course in Japanese being mounted at Harvard that summer. The Navy was training Japanese-language officers. Most of the students would already know some Japanese but others, like himself, were being recruited for their knowledge of Chinese. Daniel privately thought that was an example of white stupidity, because although the written languages shared many characters, the spoken languages had not as much relationship as Norwegian and Italian. Their assumption rested on a typical American attitude that if you knew one of those funny heathen languages, what was the problem learning another?

Since he could not rejoin his uncle, this sounded more interesting than the only other option he saw, which was to go on serving subpoenas for his father’s pinochle buddy. He felt as if he were personally oppressing every petty criminal and wayward spouse and luckless witness and suspected bookie on whom he served papers. Twice the servee had taken a swing at him.

So, on to Harvard. For a City College boy, it would be a look at how the top five percent lived. His parents bubbled joy. Judy was marrying a nice Jewish dentist, Haskel was finishing medical school, and now their boy was going to Harvard. He knew that a crash course at the Yenching Institute was not exactly going to Harvard, but it beat pounding the pavements of the Bronx looking for people who hoped he would not find them.

His days at Harvard were pleasant. He started in the elementary class, but once he had his teeth into Japanese, he moved up rapidly. He drove his roommates crazy by insisting on speaking Japanese from the time he woke until he fell asleep. By October he was progressing markedly and had been moved ahead. He took long walks along the Charles, across Cambridge, into Mount Auburn cemetery. Sunday night he ate Chinese in Boston with buddies from the program, showing off by ordering from the menu in Chinese. Many of the restaurants were Cantonese, of course, which he could not speak. Someday he would learn: after the war in China, when he could return.

Still if he could not go to China, Boston would do. His roommate mocked him for preferring Boston to New York, but New York to him did not mean Manhattan, but the lower reaches of the Bronx. His attention centered on the demanding and intense classes. He worked hours too long for romance. Although he looked with sharp and frustrated interest after the Radcliffe girls on their bicycles, he found his life civilized and realized he was happy. Finally something besides an infatuation had focused him. He was no longer merely flowing water.

JACQUELINE 1

In Pursuit of the Adolescent Universal

14 mai 1939

Marie Charlotte is definitely my best and dearest friend, and the only person in the world in whom I dare confide my most secret thoughts and wishes. Suzanne has proved her perfidy, and I shall never, never be foolish enough to trust her again. I am ashamed of myself for being such an idiot as to tell her about that little conversation with Philippe in the Musée Carnavalet. Who would have imagined she would have gone straight to him and begun saying in that loud vulgar voice of hers so that everyone could hear it, I hear that Jacqueline is your dear friend, your girlfriend now.

I am the unluckiest seventeen-year-old in my entire deuxième classe at lycée Victor Hugo. Marie Charlotte has only one younger sister making her life miserable, but I have two: double trouble, twins, and completely wicked. I count my blessings that Maman is not vulgar and would never dress the twins in those disgusting identical dresses. In fact Maman is always careful to give each different clothing, but the little beasts think it is funny to try to confuse people. Today Renée went out in Nadine’s sweater and skirt, and Nadine wore Renée’s, and the little beasts thought it was amusing to pretend to be each other all day long. They communicate by grunts like savages or dogs and sometimes I swear by telepathy.

Maman simply refuses to understand that it is humiliating to have to haul those brats along to the park or to the cinema. They are forever pulling pranks and dashing around like the worst tomboys and skinning their knees and laughing, very loudly. In addition they call each other Rivka and Naomi, such embarrassing ghetto names I could smack them. Saturday Maman made me take them along when I went to L’Etoile with Suzanne (that slut) and my dear Marie Charlotte. During the scene where Gabrielle falls into the arms of her lover, François, those wretches smacked their lips and giggled. I was humiliated. I will not go out to the cinema if it means taking the twins along, and I am going to make that clear to Maman! Sometimes when Marie Charlotte and I sit on our special bench in the little park Georges Cain near our lycée, the little beasts sneak up on us to listen.

I believe in the universal, not the accidental particular. Being born in this house on the rue du Roi de Sicile (which name I have to admit I still derive an irrational pleasure from inscribing, for its incongruously romantic sound), in the IVe arrondissement near the Métro stop St. Paul, is simply a matter of coincidence and has no lasting importance. Similarly that I am called one thing—Jacqueline Lévy-Monot—rather than Marie Charlotte Lepellier has no real significance. I want to find what is true, lasting and universal in human life, rather than sitting in my little corner repeating to myself some few phrases of so-called popular wisdom as silly as any other superstition, as Maman does, saying, Nor a shteyn zol zayn aleyn, only a stone should stay alone, as if we were not crammed in together. The labels we apply to one another keep us from penetrating to the truth, and we must rip them off our own eyes as well as banishing them from our view of others. The parochial mind is the greatest obstacle to progress, I believe, and I wrote an essay to that effect which won second prize, a Petit Larousse dictionary which I employ every day.

I strive with that romantic weakness in me, for instance that likes the name of our narrow street, which is after all a dingy thoroughfare of some antiquity but little architectural merit, lined with shops and businesses such as the furriers where Maman works with little overcrowded flats like ours piled above. On our ground floor is a kosher butcher. The street of the King of Sicily indeed, where the old stone entrance halls dark as little mine shafts stink of urine, where machinery roars and sewing machines whir day and night. The King of Sicily must have had run-down heels and patched his coats as Maman does ours.

How will I ever survive the desert of time that stretches out before me bleak and endless till I shall be on my own as an adult and not have to explain myself morning, noon and night to my family? A family is an accidental construct, a group of people brought together by chance and forced to cohabit in insufficient space. If it were not for my tiny room on the top floor, a floor up from our flat, I would suffocate!

15 septembre 1939

We have been at war for two weeks, but life does not seem all that different. Everywhere royal blue blackout material is going up, in case we are bombed. Maman worries that Papa will be called up. I have embarked on the première classe in my lycée, Victor Hugo. I have two students I am tutoring after school, immigrants whose French is poor, one sweet ten- and one fat eleven-year-old who can sleep with her eyes wide open. No one has ever awakened that brain, which is encased in her head like a turtle basking in the sun. I intend to open its shell! The ten-year-old is my cousin, Maman tells me as if announcing a great dessert, although I lean over backward to show no favoritism from such a quirk of randomly tossed genes. From Kozienice, Maman says, with absurd excitement: some dusty town in Poland where Maman happened to be born, a mistake she was intelligent enough to rectify by moving to France at sixteen. Aunt Batya looks older than Maman though she is the next youngest sister, dowdy as a peasant.

Sometimes I feel called to be a teacher, because I have the gift, and I believe it is as much a gift as that of acting, which I believe I also truly possess. Maman tells me that all young girls want to be actresses because they imagine it is glamorous. I know that to assume a different character is hard work. Maman imagines that I am more naive than I am. Both gifts require understanding others and both require a species of humility. Maman thinks that it is egoism that makes me want to be an actress, but I see it as a kind of self-abnegation, wherein my own personality is subsumed under the character of Bérénice, Phèdre, Juliet.

To teach literature is in a way also to enact it. Both gifts interact and complement each other, but I suspect that having two gifts is as bad as having none. Maman said something cruel to me when I spoke to her about my doubts about pursuing the vocation that I feel. She said I took being pretty far too seriously. Since then I have embarked on a discipline intended to prove at least to myself how mistaken she is in her estimate of my seriousness. I have refrained from looking in the mirror all week. When I comb my hair, I shut my eyes and do it by touch. No one in the family has noticed my new discipline, but that is perfect with me, as I am sure if I explained, I would be mocked for my efforts.

I never understand what people mean by calling me pretty, for when I look into my eyes I see despair, exaltation, joy, pity, an intense probing curiosity, compassion, an aloof questioning spirit; chaos and struggle. Marie Charlotte is pretty. Hers is a calm pure nature in which certain ideas come to rest and she is content with them, as I am content with the furniture in my little room under the eaves. But I think my face is as changeable as my soul. Perhaps only through acting can I reveal those depths and heights, those tempests that rage invisibly, shaking me profoundly. When others call me pretty, they believe they are flattering me, but I feel diminished, invisible behind the mask that they and not I create.

21 février 1940

Papa has been called up, and we are all shaken. He is very cheerful and says not to worry, that it is just like going away to camp. It is true that being at war has been peaceful so far and I think the sensationalistic reporting of the early weeks has faded away before the reality of modern war, which seems mostly a matter of arguing and sitting. The terrible icy weather continues, the harshest winter I can remember, as if nature were mourning our idiocy in this long farcical drôle de guerre.

I have felt estranged from Papa in recent times, but now I wish that we communicated better. Our differences are in reality a matter of Papa choosing to limit himself culturally, while I am trying to expand. I don’t think we have ever forgiven each other for the fight about the Farband picnic last summer. I know I was right, but perhaps I stated the matter too baldly. After all I have nothing in common with a bunch of gawky plain lifers simply because they’re Jewish. Being Jewish is a matter of accident too. I was born Jewish, but what does that mean? As a religion, I find it absurd. As dietary laws, archaic! I am told those Polish refugees the Balabans from Kozienice are my aunt, my uncle, my cousins, but I cannot even communicate with them about the simplest matters, about tables and chairs, let alone about my ideas, my feelings or my aspirations.

I don’t understand Papa’s involvement in Poale Zion. The notion of all of us picking up and moving to the Orient to become date farmers is a fantasy I cannot take seriously for five minutes. Papa has always been a Socialist, but he has been involved in the folly of Zionism for the last two years. I suspect he will come home from the army without that baggage. He needs more contact with intelligent Frenchmen who discuss modern ideas. His intelligence is greater than can possibly be used in his factory work, and therefore his thinking tends to become undisciplined.

Papa has great energy, which is sometimes wonderful and sometimes embarrassing. I still do not know if I admire him or not for what happened last fall, when we were waiting in the crowd for the mairie to open its doors and when it did not happen for twenty minutes, everyone was still waiting and grumbling. And Papa just walked up to the head of the line and pushed the doors open. They were unlocked all the time!

Nonetheless for him to talk about meeting boys of my own kind struck me as vulgar and tasteless, as well as insensitive to who I really am. I do not understand what some future tractor driver can possibly want to say to me or what Papa imagines I would have in common with him. It’s one of those monomaniac obsessions. Sometimes when Papa and his copain Georges are together, all they can talk about is who is Jewish. It reminds me of that slut Suzanne after she slept with her equally vulgar boyfriend, walking down the street and speculating who’s a virgin and who isn’t.

Maman is very frightened and will need a great deal of soothing and comforting, I can see. The twins bawl and cling. I feel like the only one in the house with a cool head!

16 juin 1940

Really, the Germans are here and it is no massacre or bloodbath, although they have made us put the clocks forward an hour so we are on German time. It has been quiet, orderly, scarcely a shot fired and everyone feels a little stunned. I saw some well-dressed people cheering the German troops as they marched past. They seem clean and well behaved on the whole. I think our fear has been pumped up by the newspapers which have nothing else to do but try to create sensationalism. I am sure Maman is ashamed of having sent the twins south to Orléans with her boss M. Cariot.

I am committed to seeking out the universal, because only in that way can we rise rigorously out of the slough of the accidental particular. I find patriotism not only a refuge of scoundrels but of idiots and those who like to buy their thinking ready made each morning in the vacuous newspapers. Every decade or so governments create wars and whip up a frenzy, so that we will not notice the shortcomings of our own side and will not question the assumptions of our society and demand more rational institutions and laws. I am sure that the Germans aside from speaking another language will turn out to be different from us mostly as we are different from one another, as individuals. We are two countries side by side that seem to have nothing better to do than to invade one another every few years, butchering a great many young men and tearing up the countryside in the process. I suppose what we would discover if we had the courage to examine reality instead of repeating old clichés, is that the Germans are people like ourselves who are good, bad, indifferent in the same measure as we ourselves are.

If only we knew where Papa is, we would probably be quite calm. I was crossing the rue de Rivoli this afternoon and I bumped into a German soldier in the crowd, a lieutenant, I believe. He touched his cap and smiled at me and stepped back out of the way—not at all the brutes dashing out babies’ brains we have been led to expect. So much for the enemy being fiends. There has been no raping or looting I have heard of. The gendarmes are back on the street and the stores are opening up again.

29 juillet 1940

Papa is back! First the twins, and then him. He escaped from the POW camp where he was being held. He said that they were beginning to sort out the Jews from the others, although I think that is just their obsession with purity and schemata. They like everybody in neat pigeonholes. He was working on the garbage detail when he escaped from the camp and threw away his uniform. I hope he does not get in trouble from his impetuousness. He wanted to come home, but they say that soon the Germans will release all the prisoners of war anyhow.

It is as if an earthquake had its epicenter right under our little apartment, since he is back. He is rushing around seeing all his copains on the old radical papers and at the Poale Zion. They even sent a delegation to talk to the Jewish Communists, who are reputed not to be going along with the Stalin-Hitler pact like the rest of the party. In the old days, Papa would not even speak to the Communists, but now he is running around Paris conferring with every hothead. He has been handing around some sort of Jewish resistance brochure called Que Faire copied out by hand, full of horror stories and slogans like partout présent: be everywhere, and faire face: stand up to them. I am relieved that Papa is safe, although how long he will be safe acting as he does is another question. But I must say, until the twins were returned to us, thinner and bedraggled and full of stories of burning vehicles and abandoned babies and planes strafing the roads, things here were extremely peaceful with just Maman and me. She was worried sick but I comforted her, and I think she respects me more now.

14 septembre 1940

Myself, I believe in attaining an inner tranquility. I admit it is disturbing to walk through the streets and see posters on all the walls denouncing Jews en bloc and to see all those gross new newspapers that do nothing but wish all Jews death, Au Pilori, for example. But I practice a discipline as I go around, saying to myself, I know I am not dirty, I am not vile, I am as French as anybody else and as thoroughly imbued with French culture as any of my teachers, so it is not me that this vileness is aimed at and I will simply not accept it. To grow angry is to give power to those who attack. To ignore such an attack is to diminish the attacker, not oneself. We give those screamers their power by taking offense.

Papa and Maman are very upset because the citizenship of the Balabans has been revoked. They have only been in France since 1935, and they have had their French citizenship taken away from them. I am sorry for them, but I cannot think it is too strange. They do not seem to have made any effort to enter French society. They speak only Yiddish or Polish among their friends and are obviously foreigners even on the street. I feel that to be so conspicuous when living in another country is almost arrogant. I feel immensely sorry for the Balabans nonetheless.

2 octobre 1940

Now we are all ordered to go to the local police station and register as if we are prostitutes or criminals, and have a big ugly JUIF stamped across our identity cards. I announced at the breakfast table that I am simply not going to do it. I thought Papa and Maman would be shocked, but instead Papa said he would try to figure out what would happen if we did not obey. He thinks it isn’t a bad idea to refuse to register, if we can figure out how to avoid it. I know it’s meaningless, but I find being separated out and labeled in this way simply humiliating.

Marie Charlotte has been extremely strange with me lately. The last two times we were supposed to meet, she did not show up. She simply left me sitting there waiting. Finally I had it out with her yesterday. She said that she still loved me dearly, but that she had heard that others thought she was a Jew because she was always with me, and she was afraid. She did not want to bear such a label, especially since she was born and raised a good French Catholic and her mother felt it was her own fault because she stuck to me more closely than to her own kind.

9 octobre 1940

We are all duly registered, one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. Since the defection of Marie Charlotte, I have been making friends with some young people I would have considered hoodlums last year. They are definitely not the respectable element, but they are not unintelligent and do not seem prejudiced, the way so many people one thought above that sort of thing have revealed themselves to be in the last months. They listen to jazz a great deal, especially American jazz, and affect a bohemian style of dress.

One thing that fascinates me about them is that they do not segregate themselves rigidly by age. Some of this new crowd I have been meeting are in the university, some like me in the final year of lycée, some no longer in school but not yet employed. The peculiarities of their style do not attract me, but their tolerance does. They do not seem anxiety-ridden to obey the German decrees and they do not care what I am, only who I am. For that, I respect them. They think I am too serious but they are going to set me right. I doubt that, but it soothes me to walk into the café Le Jazz Hot where they hang out and sit down with friends and feel welcome. These days to feel welcome is rare, and their languor conceals a courtesy I value.

Every day I feel less certain what is to become of us, all of us, and whether I shall ever get a chance to be anything at all, let alone deciding between becoming instructor or actress, for doors seem to close faster than I can prepare myself to enter them. I feel the way I imagine some creature of the tropics felt when the Ice Age descended and the glaciers loomed over what had been lush and pleasant banana forests. I feel as if I no longer truly belong to my family but have no new niche or role I have created, no place to go where I am truly at home. It is therefore not to be wondered at that I now spend more and more time with my new unrespectable friends at the café Le Jazz Hot.

ABRA 1

The Opening of Abra

For two hundred years, men in Abra’s family in Bath, Maine, had gone to sea. Abra went to New York.

At twenty-three, Abra considered her real life to have begun back in September of 1938. Then, at nineteen, she transferred from Smith to Barnard and finally made it to Manhattan, the glittering Oz of her childhood where she had always known she really belonged. Last year she had been accepted in graduate school at Columbia in political science. Abra did not consider herself true scholar material and could not quite imagine teaching, but graduate school was at once sufficient in itself—politics after all was the most exciting topic in the world—and moreover there were ninety percent males in her department among the graduate students and nothing but men on the faculty. Abra, growing up with brothers, found the situation of being the only woman in a room quite natural. Among men she perked up.

She had disposed of her virginity during her nineteenth summer out on Popham Point where her family had always summered, with a sweet local boy who had settled down by now to lobstering. He had wanted to marry her, and she had understood that to put a nice face upon her apparent acquiescence, she must pretend to be considering marriage, oh, on down the pike, of course, after graduation. Abra had transferred to Barnard that very fall and she had no intention of returning to Bath except of course on vacations when John had remained for two more years her delightful summer romance. Romance for Abra included good healthy acrobatic sex.

Now here she was, twenty-three, with a lively group of friends and her own apartment in the Village, a cosy Bank Street walk-up, a good relationship with her thesis advisor Professor Blumenthal and a stimulating new research assistantship with his pal

Reviews for Gone to Soldiers

[docwood-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Piercy wrote that nothing happened in this novel that did not happen to someone, somewhere in real life. That is a level of research--impeccable!--that all writers of historical novels should aspire to.

[tinkerbellkk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book. The author did a wonderful job of developing diverse characters who were experiencing the war from all sides - U.S, France, London and even in the South Pacific. Following along with 10 different characters who were intertwined made the story very interesting. IT was fascinating to read of their intense struggles to survive in each of their own situations.

[marilib_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

women in world war II from various angles

[schaefme · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of my favorite books of WWII. period. The characters are rich and the details of the era are nearly perfect.

[byroade · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent historical fiction, really pulls you into the world of World War II America. It's a big read and it does have an agenda.

[civilwarwriter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Piercy wrote that nothing happened in this novel that did not happen to someone, somewhere in real life. That is a level of research--impeccable!--that all writers of historical novels should aspire to.

[Josefina La · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great story, I love how it was given. Good job writer! I suggest you join NovelStar’s writing competition right now until the end of May with a theme Werewolf. You can also publish your stories there. just email our editors [e-mail], [e-mail], or [e-mail].

[majesdane-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An interesting but sometimes tedious book.