Farewell Abie! Shalom Annie! And goodbye to Moe and Rob and Yeruchum and Harry and Reb Leibush and the Brauns and yes even Aunt Cele. Mrs. Horn I shall miss your European goodies (oh those chaluptches!).
It’s over. A year of semi-obsession. A year when my every quiet moment was filled with imaginary conversations and endless “what-if’s.” What if Moe has a Jewish friend who dies in Pearl Harbor? (I just couldn’t do it — I liked Harry too much. And yes Luigi’s death brought tears to my eyes.) What if Annie moves in with Aunt Cele and finds out her secret past? (Better: Let Rachel Levine reveal it. Too hard to believe that Annie would break with her father like that.) What if Moe has to choose between a sophisticated worldly and attractive British girl and a simple but courageous survivor he meets in a DP camp? (That was Plan A dropped because there wasn’t enough time for me to develop a new character; instead we got the mazel tov with a slightly softened Rob. Which worked better for Moe; he needs a wife as strong-willed as he is.)
This was a year when a Bais Yaakov grad who abhors violence and who came to adulthood in the height of the anti-Vietnam War days learned the ins and outs of basic training artillery attacks and how to dig a comfortable foxhole. A year when she discovered how horribly abhorrent — and how sometimes absolutely necessary — war and violence is in a world enveloped in sheker.
Unlike Moe and Abe I didn’t travel on troopships or airplanes and I didn’t have to dodge submarines or anti-aircraft flak. But though I didn’t jump out of a moving airplane it’s been quite a dizzying journey. My first full-length novel for adults. My first serial working with remorseless deadlines and unbreakable word counts. My first serious encounter with the history of World War II as seen through the experiences of American G.I.s rather than the Holocaust and with the fascinating narrative of how Torah Jewry both melded and split with American life in the 1940s.
