Reckoning in Normandy: The Last Gathering of the Greatest Generation

By Donald Rosen

Reckoning In Normandy: The Last Gathering Of The Greatest Generation concerns the authors experience at the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion in June 2004. As the son of a WWII paratrooper, he came to honor his father, a man who died young, and someone he hardly knew. In the process, he witnessed the return of the Normandy veterans for a last look back at their greatest achievement, and their middle aged children, seeking to discover the depth of their fathers souls after a lifetime of love and alienation. This book illuminates the difficult road the two groups traveled, and chronicles the emergence of respect, admiration, and above all, forgiveness on the beaches of Normandy.

The second volume will be available next Spring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493119288

Donald Rosen

Donald Rosen is a retired software developer. He spent a month in Europe during the summer of 2004, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings. His travels took him to such places as the beaches of Normandy, a Bridge Too Far in Holland, the Dachau concentration camp, and a solitary excursion to the Auschwitz death camp. He concluded his journey with a week in Israel. Donald attended the University of Southern California and the University of Nevada. He lives in Upland, CA.

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Copyright © 2013 by Donald Rosen.

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Rev. date: 11/11/2013

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CONTENTS

A RENDEZVOUS WITH GREATNESS

Bugle Call

Staging Area

Aldbourne

Point of Embarkation

THE GREAT CRUSADE

Crossing The Channel

Death From Above

Confronting The Darkness

God Bless America

Breakfast At Omaha

D + 60 Years

Saluting The Greatest Generation

To George A. Budd Primrose, 1922-2011, Baker Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, 1943-45. Husband, father and U.S. paratrooper, when all those things really meant something.

Author’s Note

There is nothing quite as humbling as staring at a blank screen, courtesy of your trusty word processor, only to realize how daunting a prospect it is to compose a narrative as complex as this one turned out to be. The enormity of the task could explain why it took so long just to sit down and put fingers to keyboard, in the parlance of 21st century authorship. Putting pen to paper went out with VCRs and cable television, but the process is the same, and just as challenging.

When I came home from Europe in 2004, my brain was so crammed full of diverse experiences, I thought my head would explode. During my brief tenure as a public speaker, it was rare that I could do justice to my Normandy experience in less than two hours. Many times I discovered what most professional speakers already know—that the attention span of most audiences corresponds to the duration of most contemporary reality shows. So, if the clock ticked past one hour, I found myself in trouble more often than not. Of course, there were a few audiences who sat, rapt and focused on my every word for the entire presentation. But they were more the exception than the rule.

Following each speaking engagement, the response was always the same. You’ve got to write a book. O.K. Fine. But that was easier said than done. And now, on the other side of crafting my way through the crusade in Europe, I finally understand why. Unless the storyteller is extremely disciplined, the effort often disintegrates into an exercise in free form futility.

So, let me offer a few disclaimers before you, the attentive reader, plunge into the pages of yesterday.

First, this is not a linear history. Neither is its companion volume, due for release in a few months. Together, they chronicle the experience of American veterans over the course of the entire war in Europe. The two books deal with different themes, but the approach is the same. Of course, what follows is deeply rooted in history and all the complexities that go along with it. But don’t delude yourself into thinking this narrative somehow qualifies as a definitive volume. I included some brief background about the battles and the political forces at work behind them, but only to provide a frame for the central theme(s) of fathers and children, love and alienation, respect and resentment, and above all, forgiveness and reconciliation. To explore the actual events in greater detail, I can only point to the many excellent books available on the subject of the Second World War. Take your pick, sit back and enjoy. But don’t look for more than a cursory explanation of the specifics of WWII in this book.

Second, this is not an exercise in sociology, psychology, theology or any other kind of -ology. Again, there are elements of all these disciplines, but nothing that fits this work into one neat category.

If I was hard pressed to sum up this book while dancing on the head of a pin, I would loosely categorize it as my personal reflection on the personal reflections of other men. And walking that minefield had its own unique hazards. If there is an overarching theme, it would be how a lifetime of years influences the memories of old men.

Which brings me to the veterans of D-Day.

I was confronted with a crisis in approach right from the get go. Many of the men who guided me through the battlefields of Europe are still alive, and some of them are well-known in the annals of WWII history. I was surprised how forthcoming all of them were, considering theirs was a generation that guarded their secrets with singular perseverance. Most of their comments were simple and straightforward. Then there were other, more disturbing recollections, which presented me with a problem. I could soft peddle their gut-wrenching tales of combat—not to mention the postwar aftereffects that haunted their wives and children—or I could change the names to protect the innocent and guilty alike. I opted for the second choice.

The accounts that were more or less benign, I reported as given, with the names intact. It was my attempt to pay homage to what I considered the exemplary service of the last totally committed generation of Americans, caught up in extraordinary times, demanding tremendous dedication. I felt it only right to honor men who lived lives of incomparable significance, now, in their twilight years. But the stories that had a darker face, with the potential to embarrass or harm friends and family alike, I took the liberty of changing a name here, a unit there, or a military occupation specialty somewhere else. My intent was not to mislead anyone, only to respect the privacy of veterans who endured extreme conditions and failed in one way or another. I found that the greatest wisdom could be garnered from the ordeal of men who fell short, and how they coped with their failure. I felt I owed it to them, to tell their story with all the hard edges intact, but in a way that respected them and their good names. Jesus said, He who is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. Those are good words to emulate, and I labored at great effort to do exactly that. I hope the men, and the readers of this book will find that I was true to that commitment.

Some readers will notice that the personal stories may not agree with the historical record. The most notable example of this was the old woman’s description of Carentan immediately prior to the Normandy invasion. There is no record of a famine in Carentan that I could find. But the flooding of the nearby fields by the German army is well-documented. It’s easy to see how the two could be related, but I found nothing to support that part of the old woman’s story. Still, I chose to recount her tale of occupation as she related it. Readers can draw their own conclusions as to its accuracy.

Finally, I opted for a narrative style for lack of a better way to impart the totality of the story, with all its nuances mixed in. Of course, my own subjective style colors the text, but that is simply part of the complexity of the experience. Just as the memories of war veterans is colored by the years, so my ability, or lack thereof, to recount them is likewise affected by my past experience with the greatest generation, and everything that has happened since. But, that caveat aside, I have reported everything that went down with as much accuracy as I could muster. I hope that effort is enough, because it will have to do.

Donald Rosen

Upland, California

August 2011

A special shout out goes to Carol Houghton, without whose relentless support, this work would never have seen the light of day. Behind every sensitive, artistic type, there lurks a two-fisted, bare-knuckled dynamo who gets things done. That is, if you’re lucky enough to have one. I did. And if this story makes sense, credit her efforts. If not, blame the greenhorn whose name is on the cover.

A RENDEZVOUS WITH GREATNESS

Bugle Call

I call to remembrance my song in the night; I meditate within my heart, And my spirit makes diligent search.

—Psalms 77:6

She was staring at me from across the lounge. Staring and smiling. At first I thought there had to be some mistake. I was on the high side of the Me generation, a 50-something narcissist, comfortably serene in middle age after a lifetime spent gratifying my every desire. Well, not exactly, but you get the idea. I was a self-absorbed baby boomer, used to getting my way and prepared to pitch a fit if I didn’t. She, on the other hand, was fresh-faced and new, young and bright. The young woman beaming at me bore all the enthusiasm of a life beginning, as yet unscathed by the burdens of the world. She could have passed for a high school girl, but there was something exotic about her that dispelled that myth.

Ever notice how airport lounges and traveling companions make strange bedfellows? We often end up talking to people we have nothing in common with, simply because we are both in transit. And this time was no different. The VIP waiting room was just the arena where such disparate characters come together, secure in the knowledge that such encounters will be brief, governed by itineraries and limited by flight schedules.

So it was for me on this late spring evening at LAX. All my plans had been finalized. All arrangements had been made. I sat in the American Airlines lounge nursing a non-alcoholic beer, and trying to relax for what may have been the first time in over a year. Only I couldn’t. There was just too much excitement in anticipation of an excursion forty years in the making.

I suppose all my fidgeting caught her attention. I certainly looked the part of an aging tourist, complete with carry-on meds and the obligatory Nikon camera draped over my shoulder. She approached me, still smiling and sat down at my table. No preamble, no introduction, nothing. This came as something of a shock, partly because I’m far too old to catch the eye of a member of Gen-Y or Gen-Z (or however the 20-somethings of the world are designated these days). The other out-of-character aspect of her actions was simply that most Californians are not given over to warm, fuzzy familiarity. For all the anything goes image of life in the Golden State, open displays of affection, particularly among strangers, are definitely not part of the program. Unless, of course, you find yourself in an airport lounge.

My new companion was named Juliette. She was an exchange student from Tromsǿ, Norway, heading home after a year of study at Pepperdine University. That explained her charming demeanor. She hadn’t been in California long enough to learn to be defensive. Her area of study, she explained, was environmental engineering. Her ultimate goal was to lobby for the greening of international shipping lanes on behalf of the European Union, and to bring all international commerce under an integrated collective of global environmental regulations. I remarked that I never knew Pepperdine offered such a program, considering it still maintained something of a traditional attitude toward its academic disciplines. I told her UCLA might have been a better choice, considering the globalist orientation of its business courses, and a faculty replete with its share of new age radicals.

She seemed puzzled by my comment, and remarked that she was quite satisfied with the quality of her education in Malibu. I didn’t press the issue. I did, however, ask if the German battleship Tirpitz was still at the bottom of Tromsǿ harbor. A look of utter astonishment crossed her otherwise placid features.

How could you possibly know about that? she wondered aloud.

What can I say? I read a lot, I told her.

Apparently in the contemporary world of the 20-somethings of northern Norway, it is matter of indifference that the 35,000-ton German surface raider was sunk by British Lancaster bombers in the late fall of 1944. Young Juliette couldn’t conceive of a portly, balding middle-aged American having such obscure knowledge of the presence of the wreck, much less the action that sent the ship to the bottom of the fjord in the first place.

I explained to her I was something of a history buff, with a particular fascination with the Second World War. She acknowledged my interest, but couldn’t quite see the relevance it had in the present climate of continental political re-alignments and global commerce.

It was so long ago, she offered in a somber tone. The significance of such things were fanciful, she patiently pointed out, but certainly bore no influence on the current geo-political climate and all the opportunity it afforded.

In a way, our exchange was appropriate. The inability of this articulate, well-educated young woman to grasp a time when the entire world was locked in an armed, industrial death-struggle was ironic indeed. It was simply not part of her mindset. It certainly held no relevance to the life of endless possibilities that stretched out before her. My young acquaintance had not yet come to grips with the incredible capacity for destruction that lurks not far below the surface of most human beings. Sad to say, Juliette would probably yet encounter it.

When the boarding call came, we parted company, expecting this would be the end of our conversation. To our surprise, we discovered we were seated next to each other, in the last row of intractably upright coach seats. Wonderful! I thought. I can never sleep on any moving conveyance. I can’t even doze off. Now, I wouldn’t even be able to put the seat back and pretend I was catching forty winks. (Note for future travel plans: next time I go over the pole to Europe, pay the $2 and go first class. I may not be able to sleep up front, but at least the accommodations would be more comfortable.)

As we settled in for takeoff, my traveling companion finally got around to asking me what brought me to Europe. I sighed and cast a weary glance her way. Did she have any idea that she had just opened the door to an long-winded chronicle that would likely consume most of our twelve-hour flight? Of course not. I answered simply:

Normandy.

Her puzzled expression clearly conveyed she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

D-Day, I explained. The 60th anniversary. You know? The invasion of Europe? 1944? I’m going over for that.

She smiled at me. It was a patronizing smile, suffused with the understanding that the future belonged to her, and how she could afford to indulge this aging artifact of a bygone era. Clearly, I held no place in the dynamic future that awaited her.

Of course, she said. Has it been that long?

Time flies. I replied.

Out of curiosity, I asked her what she learned of the war years in whatever passed for high school in Norway. She patiently explained to me that the curriculum in her school in Tromsǿ was more concerned with the future than the past. After all, Norway was part of the European Union. The bold future ahead for a united Europe was based on free trade, multiculturalism, and an egalitarian vision for all people of the developed world. Long-ago struggles such as the one I was soon to commemorate held no significance in a future so bright, so full of promise. But, she concluded, she understood my fascination with such olden days…

(Oh really?)

. . . and found it (and here she struggled for the English word as a frown darkened her youthful features) quaint! That was it! She found it quaint for me to engage in such activities. There had been quite a bit of coverage during her last few months in the U.S. about the upcoming anniversary, and she was curious to see if she would find a similar level of interest when she got home.

I told her she might be surprised. The puzzled expression returned as she settled in for the long flight home. Poor Juliette. She just wasn’t getting anywhere with this aging old crock. And in truth, we spoke different languages, were nurtured by different cultures, and held decidedly different views of the world. I thought for the first time during our brief encounter, we were really considering the same question: Which one of us was a stranger in a strange land?

We cleared L.A. airspace in a matter of minutes, attained cruising altitude, and settled in for the night. Juliette called for a blanket and a pillow, closed her window shade, and was lights out as soon as her head hit the pillow.

She slept all the way to London. Snored too. And once again it occurred to me, only the young can sleep so peacefully.

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Juliette was right, of course. The world is a much different place today than it had been sixty years before. It’s a relatively safer place, despite the threat of international terrorism. The opportunities for worldwide commerce, as Juliette so correctly pointed out, are virtually unlimited. Even the concept of the nation-state has become something of an anachronism in the opinion of many scholars and international businessmen. In that sense, we’re all part of the global village.

But the world of the early 20th century was a decidedly different place. For one thing, the reality of sovereign nations was alive and well, both in theory and in fact. As the world turned the corner into the 20th century, the rise of the modern industrial state was well underway in the western world. The United States emerged from its 19th century development, free from significant foreign influence, thanks to two massive oceans which served as practical buffers against the turmoil that plagued Europe. During the post-Civil War years, the U.S. developed as an industrial behemoth, bearing the deportment of a world power on the precipice of taking its place among the great empires of the world.

The time of expansion was not long in coming. The Spanish American War catapulted the U.S. squarely onto the world stage. America was now a global power. And the nation bore the responsibilities that went along with it.

WWI was the first instance where the U.S. intervened in a foreign conflict. Gone were the days when the nation’s primary concern was to defend itself against invasion. As a world power, America was now sending troops to fight in a war overseas. It marked a sea change in how America viewed itself and its place among the nations of the world.

Coming out of that war, the country entered a period of flux in the 1920s. Contrary to popular myth, the 20s didn’t roar for everyone. Paper fortunes were accumulated in a runaway stock market, built on a mountain of cheap credit. But farm prices collapsed, a harbinger of things to come, and those who worked the land had little to distinguish their plight from the Great Depression ten years later.

In the midst of all this, a generation of Americans arose who had an appointment with history. Born in the Depression and tempered by its hardships, they came to an age of awareness at a time when a new specter of war was ramping up for a second go-round following a twenty-year hiatus. The young people of that time had no concept of Juliette’s borderless world. Theirs was a local community defined by the common experience of privation, and the poverty that went along with it. The day-to-day business of living was a bare-bones scramble for survival. My slumbering travel companion could not have dreamt of its harsh realities in the life she led with such confidence.

The hard times of the 1930s introduced those young people to the equally hard facts of life. They could hardly have expected they would be called upon to contend with a modern-day global threat unprecedented in the world’s history.

So, there I was, tossing and turning—as much from anticipation as my confounding inability to sleep in a moving vehicle—en route to a rendezvous with my own destiny. I was a son of a WWII father—a man who survived the Depression, served in the war, and built the world which was currently crumbling before us. Like the rest of his generation, my father participated in the great crusade to rid the world of tyranny. It just so happened that this formative experience of his life was the pivotal event of the 20th century. Like many of my contemporaries, I possessed a consuming curiosity about the events that were so crucial in forming my father’s character. Call it The Desire of Every Son. Young boys yearn to know their fathers, particularly the experiences that made them the men they became. All sons have this yearning, but mine was off the charts. (It would be a cruel turn of events that would keep me from this knowledge, and forever seal this desire in my heart.)

And so, after a lifetime of false alarms, the planets finally aligned, and I was off to the northern coast of France—to witness perhaps the final great commemoration of the one massive invasion of the last truly global war. The one invasion that could not fail.

I turned to my snoring companion. Our conversation was an appropriate curtain raiser for the panorama that was about to unfold before me. But my business was not with her, or the young people who looked forward with confidence to the future.

It was with the greatest generation.

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It’s hard to know when the seed was planted. Hard to know when it took root.

I was born into a family of oddly-brilliant New York Jews the day before Bobby Thompson delivered the shot heard round the baseball world. The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff as it was also called, sunk my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers on the last day of the 1951 season, after blowing a double-digit lead in mid-August. Good thing I made my entrance when I did. For the soon-to-be Dodger fan I was to become, being born on the actual day of infamy for the boys of summer would have been a curse beyond any hope of redemption. My parents were delighted. They had a newborn son, a pennant winning team, and the source of much gloating and posturing for years to come. They were lifelong Giant fans. This would not be my only disagreement with them.

They were the first generation of native-born American children. And for their immigrant parents, they were the promise of America fulfilled. By the time of my arrival, the WWII generation was in complete command of what, by then was the most powerful country on earth. The tenor of the times when I came along reflected their full enjoyment of the fruits of victory. The post war economic boom was the high summer of their lives. But how they came to the heights of this dizzying precipice bears close examination.

The United States experienced two significant waves of foreign immigration in the 19th century. The first consisted of northern European émigrés during the years preceding the Civil War, predominantly the Irish. And while these settlers were not entirely welcomed with open arms, they were sorely needed. There was a frontier to tame. And if the streets were not literally paved with gold as the newly arrived foreigners discovered, they were certainly littered with opportunities.

Considering how despised the Irish Catholics were among the predominantly Protestant population of the U.S., the commonality of a shared language did little to dispel the hostility toward the newcomers. The Irish were viewed as human garbage by many of the same people who shared their heritage. Such was life in the 19th century. People were different. They expected to be different, wanted it, and expected those differences to be respected. But the immigrants were resourceful and resilient. They came to America for the same reason everyone with an ounce of ambition did—for the opportunity to rise as far as talent and energy could take them.

And they did. When opportunity meets desire, great things happen. Not all immigrants of the early 19th century went on to become the robber barons of the Gilded Age, but they did assimilate, and carved out their own corner of prosperity from the work-in-progress that was the American experiment of its time.

But the America of the 1840s was predominantly a rural landscape. Most people still lived on, and worked the land. The Civil War changed all that. It was the triumph of an armed industrial power (the North) over a rural, agrarian one (the South). The conquest of the Confederacy by the Union armies forever put to death the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of gentleman farmers, and secured in the country’s immediate future the rise of industrialization and with it, the cities.

Into the strange and novel landscape of the late 19th century came a new group of pilgrims. Unlike Northern European immigrants, who arrived in the early part of the century to tame the frontier and work the land, half a century later, newly-arrived migrants passed through Ellis Island to confront a closed frontier and developing urbanization. Post-Civil War America was an emerging industrial juggernaut whose landscape was dotted with factories. This was a new challenge previous immigrants did not have to face. The new arrivals were from eastern and southern Europe. They did not speak English. They did not possess the same cultural heritage. But they came with the same desire to escape the hardships they were fleeing, and start fresh in a new country. They also knew how to work, fully expected to, and did. It was amidst this sea of humanity that my father’s parents processed through Ellis Island with so many others.

There was a certain commonality of experience for all immigrants as they steamed past the Statue of Liberty toward a new life. But for the Jews of Eastern Europe, it was subtly different. They possessed a greater sense of urgency than other groups. The Italians who came to America were native to Italy, just as were the Irish were to Ireland some fifty years before. Danes came from Denmark, Germans from Germany. But Jews were wanderers, and had been for nineteen hundred years. Other people abandoned their homeland to embrace a new country. Jews turned their backs on one foreign land in which they were not welcome to pursue another in which they might be. It was a small distinction, but an important one. The very fact Jews thrived everywhere they settled, under circumstances ranging from intermittent attacks to institutional persecution speaks to the providence of God, the faithfulness of His covenant, and the power of His Holy Spirit.

So Jewish immigrants came through Ellis Island with an added incentive. They came to find a land free of the shroud of bigotry. They yearned for opportunities where their talents could grow and thrive. And it was to America they came as the last haven, free from a knock on the door in the dead of night.

My grandparents were a young, married couple expecting their first child (my father’s brother Phil, as it turned out). He was nineteen. His wife was seventeen. Those ages were typical, not only to marry, but also to face a precarious future together. My grandfather was an apprentice shoemaker in Kiev, in the heart of Czarist Russia. He had the dubious job of providing the Czar’s Cossacks with boots. This was a dicey proposition for a Jewish merchant, as the entire community lived in fear of pogroms that inevitably came. They were as brutal as they were random, with increasing frequency and ferocity. When my grandfather’s youngest sister was raped and murdered by a troop of drunken Cossacks, he decided to take his young wife and get out of Dodge while the getting was good. Fortunately, his timing was impeccable, with the door to America still open. He would not live another fifty years to appreciate the significance of the course he charted, when the Nazi juggernaut overran his former home in 1941.

They embarked from the port of Danzig in 1895. And an uncertain future is just what awaited them. They had a sponsor in America—it was a requirement by that time, at least for Jewish immigrants. But beyond that, they arrived at Ellis Island, outsiders in an alien land. It was a daunting prospect, facing a strange new land and a language unknown to both of them. With nothing more than youth, strength and a small nest egg, they were left to their own devices to chart their way in this new land.

My father was the last of five children, and his arrival in 1909 cemented his immigrant parents in America forever. The children owed no allegiance to the Old Country, as it was called. They were Americans. It was the greatest hope their parents could have for them. And at the same time, the ease with which their children assimilated into the culture of the new country was unsettling. The older generation was never quite at ease with their new home. Their suspicion of despotic regimes was deeply rooted and not easily overcome. But their children knew nothing of this. And their parents, to their credit, encouraged them in their American identity, even though it generated a gulf between them that nothing could bridge. English was a first language for these young Americans, although my father spoke Russian fluently. He also picked up a smattering of other languages around the polyglot neighborhoods of New York City in the early years of the 20th century.

The family settled in Mt. Vernon, New York, where my father went about the business of being folded into the great America melting pot. The instrument of his integration was the same for everyone—the public schools. He perfected the English language and the basics of math and science. More significantly, he learned what it meant to be a citizen of the diverse community of which he was becoming a part.

He also had occasion to fight his way home, not to mention across the schoolyard. While the country proved to be a wealth of opportunity, it also manifested some of the same dark tendencies of the homeland his parents left behind. Terms like kike, yid, sheenie, and Jewboy were common epithets, hurled with regularity. And my father, being an abrasive, combative schoolboy was quick to take up the gauntlet that was hurled in his face. No sensitivity training was available for the local schoolyard bully in those days. Back then you fought, or you didn’t survive. Unknown to him at the time, those qualities, honed in the concrete canyons of New York City would pay dividends when they counted most.

As with all Jewish families, there were exceedingly high expectations for this first-generation of Americans. The profound impact of Jews in America is a well-established fact. Less than 2% of the population, they have earned accomplishments far in excess of their numbers. For my father, these opportunities were cut short when his own father died of a heart attack when Dad was twelve years old. My father and his brothers all finished high school while supporting their widowed mother. They assumed the operation of the family business, a wholesale clothing distributor in the New York garment district. When the Stock Market crashed and the Depression ensued, it came down to survival. My father was a street peddler, a truck driver, a merchant seaman. He did odd jobs cleaning up the grounds of a local Catholic church, and by nights he was a bouncer at a local speakeasy—before the repeal of Prohibition, that is.

Dreams of prosperity and fortune got reduced to a struggle for survival. The Depression was an equal opportunity destroyer. Like his contemporaries, it had a threefold effect that would bear fruit in the years to come: it reduced his expectations, focused his attention on the task at hand, and toughened his spirit.

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If my father’s history is a bit obscure, my mother’s was an open book. She was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Krakow, Poland. Both her parents embarked from that sinister land to escape the yoke of oppression and to build a better life. My grandfather came over as a babe in his mother’s arms in 1888, my grandmother, as a thirteen-year-old girl in 1901. They met and married in 1907 and spent the next sixty-two years together.

The success of that side of the family, I can readily attribute to my grandmother. While my grandfather was the provider men were expected to be in those days, his wife was the source of the brilliance their children ultimately inherited. She passed through Ellis Island, already fluent in four languages—Polish, Russian, German and Yiddish. (Yes, Yiddish was considered a language back in those days. Were you to pay a visit to her house when I was a young boy, you would have found it spoken with passion.)

Like so many immigrants, she had a built-in suspicion of authority, but also an inherent respect for it. In the Old Country, the police were feared. In the relative freedom of America, the idea of law enforcement as protector its citizens, was a hard concept for her to grasp. This suspicion was something she carried to her grave. My grandfather, ironically, had no such handicaps. He more resembled the down-east, hard-bitten Yankee than the stereotypical Eastern European Jew. Coming to America as an infant, he had no experience with the Polish pogroms that were part of Jewish life there.

My mother was one of three children, the middle child, and the only daughter. If my father’s family bore none of the super-brilliant savant children typical of American Jews, my mother’s cup was overflowing. Her older brother Matt had a gift for languages. If he heard one, he picked it right up, and without an accent. By the time he reached adulthood, he was fluent in French, German, Polish, Yiddish and Russian. This penchant for languages would make him a very hot commodity in the war to come.

Her younger brother was more emblematic of incipient Jewish genius. A family favorite, he showed an immediate affinity for the physical sciences, at which he excelled with little or no effort. He was always at the top of his class, and everything he did, he did well. My Uncle Lou was the jewel in the family crown. Both sons were adored, although Lou was the apple of everybody’s eye. He was charming, roughish, witty and smart. He set his sights on the traditional aspiration for all Jewish families. He applied for medical school. In my family, this wasn’t merely a goal, it was an obsession. For European Jews, as strangers in hostile lands, they needed to offer skills so essential to the native population that their survival would never be at stake. Whatever its origin, my mother’s family embraced this ambition as an article of faith. Both brothers had the ability to achieve it, but as the Depression cast its shadow on the landscape, hard decisions had to be made. My Uncle Matt, it was decided, would go to work to help support the family. He was the firstborn after all, and such responsibilities were his to assume. So, he took his place in the struggle for gainful employment as the 1930s began, never to realize his potential as a physician. It would make him bitter to his dying day.

However, my Uncle Lou hit the lottery. He was the one who would be encouraged, guided and nurtured toward the ultimate goal of becoming a doctor. And under the harsh conditions of the Depression, he thrived. His grades in school were outstanding. He breezed into and through the chemistry program at Columbia University. Then he hit the stone wall of quotas and closed doors when he applied to medical school. There were only so many positions held open for Jewish students in those days. He applied everywhere, but to no avail. He was discouraged, defeated, and heartbroken.

But my grandmother took him aside and suggested that he apply to dental school since his coursework qualified him for the curriculum. It wasn’t his first choice, but he sent off an application to Columbia P&S Dental School anyway. He was accepted. His graduation in 1940 was something akin to a coronation.

Among the accolades and triumphs of her brothers, my mother was the invisible child of the family. Her brothers were the pride of their parents. But my mother was literally a forgotten afterthought, and treated as such. All she accomplished was to skip two grades and graduate high school at age 16 in 1930. This achievement went all but unnoticed. Soon afterward, she went on to work for a local dentist on Staten Island, New York as his dental hygienist.

My grandfather had been an iron worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WWI. As such, he was essential to the war effort and did not see overseas duty. But when he broke his leg in a worksite accident, he got an ambulance ride to the hospital and a splint with a set of crutches. When he got back on his feet, he also got a pink slip from the Navy and a bill from the hospital. That’s what passed for worker’s comp and health benefits in those days. Fortunately, his wife could see the handwriting on the wall. While her husband recuperated, she noticed how many young boys were involved in sports. A year after the accident, they opened a sporting goods store on Staten Island in the nearby village of Stapleton. It was a smart move that paid off when they needed it most. During the Depression, they secured a contract with the New York Yankees as a partial supplier of uniforms and equipment. When hard times hit, the intermittent business they got during the summer months was enough to keep the family afloat during the offseason. My mother never got tired to saying, We didn’t have much, but we didn’t go hungry either.

The Depression was the new normal. It was consistent with the understanding of the inherent hardships of life the young people of that time were learning firsthand. Matt went to work, Lou went to school, and my mother stayed home with her parents, contributed to the support of the family, and otherwise stayed out of everybody’s way.

War clouds gathered as the 1930s progressed, but my father and his brothers were too busy keeping the business afloat to pay much attention to international affairs. All of them viewed the European crisis as something that didn’t concern them. And if war did come, it would not touch them. Oh, the entire family agreed Hitler was a maniac, hated the Jews, and would visit horrible persecution upon them. But they didn’t live in Europe anymore. Indeed, this was exactly why they came to this country. Jews had seen all this before and no doubt would see it again. It was European Jews’ lot in life.

This family biography was a closed door, when it came to my questions about the family. For the insatiably curious youngster I was, a cone of silence descended over the war years like a funeral shroud nobody wanted to confront. The little bit I learned over the years was that my father and two uncles served, and all of them fought. Later, I learned more. But during my formative years, the wartime experience of the adult men in my life was a topic verboten.

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From my earliest recollections, my father, like so many of his fellow veterans, was an aloof, distant man who went about the business of earning a living for his family. His uniform changed, but he was still a soldier, this time in a different army. His daily field orders were to earn a paycheck and turn it over to his wife. Beyond that, he didn’t want to be bothered with the mundane trivialities of life.

When they married, my mother was a 36-year old Jewish woman, who, right up through her years as a senior citizen was capable of turning heads and stopping traffic. She had been a full-grown adult during the war years, and how it was she never married before was a mystery she never disclosed.

How can I describe the blissful, glorious 1950s in a country overflowing with peace and prosperity? It was a combination of the idyllic postwar world envisioned by millions of grimy servicemen in thousands of damp foxholes, sprinkled with an annoying dose of home-grown reality. This fantasy was repeated a million-fold in foxholes from Bougainville to Berlin. Each man would come home to a hero’s welcome, honored by a grateful nation. He would marry the girl he left behind. Together they would buy a comfortable home in the suburbs and set up housekeeping. He would leave every morning for a steady, high-paying job in a nearby city. His wife would stay home, take care of the children and make sure the house was clean and well kept. He would return at the end of the day, and his wife would greet him—perfectly coiffed and dressed to kill—with a martini in one hand and a home-cooked meal on the table. Their children would be in the upper 10% of their class in school, and their accomplishments would validate their fathers as leaders of the family. The children would be well-behaved, respectful of their parents and very, very, very proud of their fathers.

Only it didn’t quite work out that way. But, as with all hyperbole, there was more than a grain of truth to this Ozzie-and-Harriet vision of Nirvana. The men did come home to a hero’s welcome, at least much more so than any other group of veterans before or since. It may not have been the norm for returning servicemen throughout history, but it became apocryphal.

The men who fought the war came home to a country they hardly recognized. They left Depression America, and returned to a country of almost unlimited opportunity. They went to war to defend a country without a social safety net, and came back to a glut of government programs to assist them with everything from education to health care to buying a home. If their immigrant parents came to these shores seeking opportunity for their ambition, the greatest generation found it in abundance. And never would these twin postwar pillars find a more energetic group of young adults to put them to good use.

Enduring so much hardship at such a young age, the men and women of WWII wasted no time putting their collective noses to the grindstone to build a new world. And since their military experience worked so well—they had, after all, destroyed the enemy and won the war—they employed the same relentless tactics to lead the nation into an era of peace and prosperity.

But the objectives had changed. During the war, it was destroy the enemy. After the war it was go to work, get married, have kids and accumulate a fortune. At first, it was the understandable quest for security the greatest generation lacked in their childhood. But it quickly mutated into a kind of relentless competition. And this activity spilled over into the arena of their children as well. Children provided a basic function no one else could fill: to reflect well on their parents. To do so, they had to be more accomplished than their parents as well as the kids next door. A child at Harvard was as good as a new Cadillac in the driveway when it came to turning Harry, the next door neighbor, green with envy.

Our children will have all the advantages we lacked, they declared in one voice. Then they proceeded to give it to them. But somewhere, their selfless motives got corrupted. At some point, it stopped being about educating their children to prepare for life and started being about them looking good to their middle-aged friends.

In the midst of this mad scramble for the brass ring, my parents set up housekeeping in Manhattan. Into this blissful twosome, came a squirming, squealing, mid-life baby who was blessed (or cursed, some would say) with an insatiable curiosity about things that came before. I had the bad form of constantly peppering them with questions about the early years of their lives. They found it annoying, irritating and in no way part of their plans for my future. In a family of doctors, there was no room for a historian. In our family, we sent our children to college to become doctors. It was a cultural imperative for the first generation of American-born Jewish children. But for the next, it became an uncompromising commandment, a non-negotiable mania.

So my father, whose temperament was always distant, became intractable on this point. I was the son who was born to corroborate the wisdom of his leadership. As long as I got with the program, everything would be fine. If I strayed from this incontestable path of life, the wrath of God would descend in the form of his explosive temper.

All this was very well, but for all the JAMA publications they put in my hands, by age four, I had more interest in the Life magazines I found in my grandparents’ basement. I looked for anything that gave me a sense of the past. It was a fascination that has never left me and one that drove the family to distraction wondering what was wrong with their idiot son. Didn’t I see this was a pointless diversion, when I could be learning about human anatomy or bacterial infections?

For all the sound and bluster, I never doubted my parents’ love. If only I was good enough, I knew they would approve of me. They were just extremely frustrated that I would not follow the course they charted for me. All the other children in the family were. Was it asking so much of me, considering their hardscrabble upbringing and my pampered position? So what was wrong with me? They ran the gamut between anger and bewilderment. But it never lasted long, and I always knew how