Gone to Soldiers

a short review

pexels photo

I finished several books recently, one of which I had been reading for months in between other, less hefty titles. The hefty one is an older release (c1987), WWII historical fiction, Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers. A wonderful book—rich in authentic detail—an amazing amount of research had to have gone into this devastating and sweeping novel. Having written two (as yet unpublished) WWII era novels, myself, I am beyond impressed with everything Piercy brings to life here.

Gone to Soldiers tells the stories of ten men and women who served in America, Europe, and the Pacific in vastly different ways: a war correspondent, an intelligence office for the OSS, a Japanese code breaker, a Women’s Airforce Service Pilot, an artist who fights with the Resistance in France, a woman who leads Jewish children to safety over the Pyrenees, a Marine struggling to stay alive in the Pacific, a Jewish teen from Paris sent to America before France fell, and her American cousin.

I have read a lot of WWII and Holocaust related fiction and nonfiction over the years, but somehow I missed this one. My brilliant friend, Sandy, sent me a copy, and I am so glad she did. It is not an easy book to read. Many of the scenes are incredibly vivid and tragic. Some of them were known to me from other sources, but a couple of them depicted battles or situations of which I was not aware.

I was particularly affected by the scenes in the Pacific, I believe, because my father served in the Pacific theatre, but talked about it so little that I never had a clear picture of what he went through. This book made me more aware of the horror he faced and makes me want to know more about his service.

I recommend Gone to Soldiers for its unblinking portrayal of the realities of war, ignorance, prejudice, love, and loss. It is an important book for men and women who seek to understand and remember our shared history—to mourn and honor those lost, to refuse to fall back into dangerous patterns of racism, prejudice, and misogyny, and to continue to work toward the vision of a safe, equitable, and free land for everyone.

“TODAY THE GUNS ARE SILENT. A GREAT TRAGEDY
HAS ENDED. A GREAT VICTORY HAS BEEN WON. THE SKIES
NO LONGER RAIN DEATH – THE SEAS BEAR ONLY COMMERCE –
MEN EVERYWHERE WALK UPRIGHT IN THE SUNLIGHT.
THE ENTIRE WORLD IS QUIETLY AT PEACE.”

GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

Radio address to the American people from the USS Missouri, following the Japanese surrender ceremony, September 2, 1945  (FROM WWW.NPS.GOV)

What I’m Reading

Tatiana De Rosnay’s Historical Fiction Novel, Sarah’s Key, A Review

  

Sarah’s Key tells the intertwined stories of two fictional inhabitants of Paris; Sarah, a ten-year-old girl caught in the terror of Nazi-occupied France, an innocent Jewish child desperate to protect her little brother, and Julia, the journalist destined to discover Sarah’s story sixty years later. Though Sarah and Julia are fictional characters, the situations of the story are sadly all too real.

Before reading Sarah’s Key, I hadn’t known of the Velodrome d’Hiver roundup, which was ordered by Nazis, and carried out by French police officers, but as with all events relating to this terrible time of human history, the story is by equal measure unimaginably catastrophic and yet characteristically illustrative of the horrors of the systematic application of the NAZI party’s stated objective to eradicate Jews in what they termed “A Final Solution to the Jewish Question” at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942.

The Velodrome d’Hiver roundup in Paris, France is one example of the implementation of that horrific policy.

Here is a brief summary of the real events:

“Beginning in the early hours of July 16 [1942], French police rounded up thousands of men, women, and children throughout Paris. By the end of the day, the police had taken 2,573 men, 5,165 women, and 3,625 children from their homes. The roundup continued the following day, but with a much smaller number of arrests.

     Approximately 6,000 of those rounded up were immediately transported to Drancy, in the northern suburbs of Paris. Drancy was at that point a transit camp for Jews being deported from France. The rest of the arrestees were detained at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Winter Cycling Track), an indoor sporting arena in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement.      

     After five days, Jews incarcerated at the Vél d’Hiv were transferred to other transit camps outside Paris. At Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande, French police guarded these men, women, and children until transport to concentration camps and killing centers in the east. At the end of July, the remaining adults were separated from their children and deported to Auschwitz.

     Over 3,000 children remained interned without their parents until they were deported, among adult strangers, to Auschwitz as well.

     German authorities continued the deportations of Jews from French soil until August 1944.

In all, some 77,000 Jews living on French territory perished in concentration camps  and killing centers—the overwhelming majority of them at Auschwitz.”

From: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Velodrome D’Hiver (Vel d’ Hiv) Roundup”. Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-velodrome-dhiver-vel-dhiv-roundup#july-2. Accessed on May 20, 2023.

     De Rosnay’s novel expertly weaves the stories of her two heroines, as one suffers through the event and the other learns of it in a surprisingly intimate way many years later. This book reminds me of the importance of historical scholarship—true scholarship that doesn’t shy away from the painful realities of the past—and of the absolute necessity of bearing witness to the suffering of the innocent—as a way to honor them, of course, and also as a way to teach each new generation the lessons that seem so easy to forget, so fragile, and always under attack. We need to hear the stories. We cannot be allowed to forget. 

     Sarah’s Key is one of those books that takes us on an unforgettable journey, touches our hearts and souls, and joins us to the hearts and souls of others who were forced from this world before their natural times, and in terrible ways. It is both deeply dark and sweetly hopeful. A strange truth about literature, and part of its magic, is that you can enjoy it even while it is hurting you. Sarah’s Key is worth it.

Paris Photos by Lori Pohlman

Looking for Comps

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

     Hello, Readers! I’m putting together my summer reading list, and getting my historical fiction manuscript ready for submission. One part of this process is to read recent books (published within the last few years) that are in some way comparable to mine, so that I can better describe my own manuscript to potential agents, publishers, and booksellers.

     Have you read any recently published fiction set during the 1930s or 1940s? Have you read a novel about a war widow, or a strong woman struggling and coming to grips with some other loss? If so, I’d love to hear about it. My manuscript is set in Lake Arrowhead, California, and the place is integral to the plot, so I’m also interested in any fiction that transports the reader to a specific city, town, or region.

     If any titles come to mind, I’d greatly appreciate your sharing them here. I welcome any and all suggestions. Many thanks!

“Reading with Ghosts” Some thoughts on a post by Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess: “Sometimes tattered and worn = loved” August 9, 2016

Like Jenny, I love used books, books that have a history of relationship with other readers that I can see and hold in my hands. The cover doesn’t need to be in great shape. There should be a name written in long hand somewhere within the first pages. Notes written in the margins. Words, phrases, paragraphs underlined. Exclamation marks, hearts, question marks in the margins. Old shopping lists stuck between the pages. Dedications to lovers, children, grandchildren, friends on the title page. This book reminds me of how very much I love being your mom.

Despite my librarian grandmother, my own library training and teacher training, and my years working in libraries and public schools, I’ve always been much more of a book sharer than a book protector. This doesn’t mean I condone random doodling, especially not of the tasteless variety, or nasty vulgarisms of any sort in any book (and I’ve seen plenty of those, believe me). And I am not advocating writing in any book that you do not own—please, respect all library books, and school texts! But I do appreciate a pithy comment that pertains to the content. I love knowing that I am sharing the experience of reading a particular piece with someone who found something striking enough to comment on right then and there, in the moment.

Jenny Lawson says, “…reading those found books is like reading with ghosts, ones who eagerly point out their favorite passages or share their thoughts or questions in the margins.”

Books that I can remember writing in that are sitting around my house right now include:

Jane Eyre, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Catcher in the Rye (probably my first!), The Diary of Anne Frank, Man’s Search for Meaning, Teacher Man, Rebecca, Atonement, Prodigal Summer, The Glass Castle, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and lots of poems—“The Raven” comes to mind along with some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. And memorably, the teacher edition of a literature anthology I used in my classroom for many years (not sure if this qualifies as defacing a public school text, but it did raise a few eyebrows during department meetings).

Funny story there. I was told, “That’s not your book! You can’t write in that!” back in 1998 by a wonderful teacher I respected and admired. Even so, I continued to write in the book. I planned on outlasting the book adoption cycle, and I wanted to remember what worked, what went flat, what insights, funny or touching, or what “light bulb” moments were expressed by my kids. When I retired in 2014 a young English teacher retrieved the same teacher anthology from the school library that I had written notes in for years. There hadn’t been a new book adoption in all of those years because the budget was just too tight for the district to purchase a new anthology. This new teacher wrote me a letter. “What a treasure!” she said. “Thank you for writing all of that down.”

A reader after my own heart. A teacher after my own heart. I hope she never forgets to write in the margins.

Fireside Chats in Springtime

 

Silly me. I had this idea to write a WWII-era literary fiction novel a while back. Quite a while back.

I spent a lot of time researching in between writing scenes. I felt I had a decent grasp on the time period; my dad was a WWII marine—I grew up waking to The Marine Corps Hymn–and though I majored in English, not history, I spent a good deal of time learning about and teaching the Holocaust to my eighth-grade classes when I taught The Diary of Anne Frank. I even wrote a YA novel about a Polish boy falling in love in war-torn Poland for my Master’s thesis in creative writing.

I’d just need to check a few dates here and there, maybe read a few more books and immerse myself in the movies and music of the 1940s, and presto! I’d be good.

Not so true.

What is true is that old saying about “the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know.” Today’s epiphany: Go Deeper. I stumbled into going deeper today almost by accident. I was looking up a few Roosevelt quotes for a scene in my manuscript where my protagonist listens to the president on the radio. Just a few lines, you know, to add realism and texture to the scene.

                                                                                                   GO DEEPER

And I find myself, hours later, too torn up to write the scene. I’ll write it tomorrow, or maybe the next day. You see, I found recordings of Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking to the American public. I listened to them. Then I found recordings of the broadcasts made by the journalists who had followed him throughout his long presidency talking about him on the day of his death.

These recordings are priceless. You will need Kleenex. And maybe a dog. Or a loved one nearby. Luckily, my protagonist has a hankie, a dog, and a brother.

           (Not my photo)                 Silly me? Yes. But also grateful me.

If you haven’t done so, and you’re interested, go to http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/collections/utterancesfdr.html to get started.

Three dates you might be interested in:

January 11, 1944: Radio Address to the Nation- State of the Union message to Congress (30 min.)

November 2, 1944: Campaign radio speech from the White House—“The World is Rising” (15 min.)

December 24, 1944: Christmas Eve Address (5 mins.) Make sure to stay tuned for The National Anthem that immediately follows.

Rachel “Lori” Pohlman, Copyright2016