The Reader's Shelf—War and Remembrance: Fiction for Memorial Day

War is a force that gives us meaning, as foreign correspondent Chris Hedges pointed out in his 2002 same-titled book, and despite Gandhi’s quote that an eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind, our history seems to be defined by the wars we fight. Certainly, our collections are full of nonfiction accounts of battles, perhaps no topic attracting more attention than World War II. But while generals, historians, and journalists always have their say on the victories and rightness of any conflict, something essential is often lost in the factual retelling. Novels, with their imaginative breadth and creative license, often capture more vividly the feel of war than can ever be summarized in a true-life account. So this Memorial Day, spend some time with the novelists writing about World War II—their perspective is always worth noting.

Elizabeth Berg brings the World War II home front vividly to life in Dream When You’re Feeling Blue (Ballantine. 2008. ISBN 978-0-345-48754-4. pap. $14). USO dances, pin curls, food rationing, and newsreels figure prominently in this romantic story of the three Heaney sisters, nicknamed the “Dreamy Girls.” As each sister adjusts to loss and doubt, Berg sheds light on America’s acclimation to war and the growing role of women. Subtly commenting on the battles (through correspondence and conversation), she deftly blends the tragedy of war with the reconstruction of lives changed forever by its impact.

With Shining Through (HarperCollins. 2000. ISBN 978-0-06-103015-4. pap. $7.99), master storyteller Susan Isaacs brings us likable, unsinkable 31-year-old “old maid” Linda Voss, secretary to handsome, Yale-educated Wall Street lawyer John Berringer. Via John, she becomes involved in counterintelligence work, and as World War II explodes, Linda, a German-Jewish girl from Queens, NY, feels compelled to become an undercover OSS agent in Berlin. A fabulous mix of romance and intrigue, Linda’s story showcases the cost of war in unique ways.

Marge Piercy’s sweeping WWII tour de force Gone to Soldiers (Fawcett: Ballantine. 1988. ISBN 978-0-449-21557-9. pap. $7.99) is an epic melding of many narratives. Alternating chapters braid together ten unique and starkly harrowing stories involving such fully realized characters as a female pilot, a cryptographer in Washington, and a spoiled Parisian who is forced by the war to reexamine her rejection of her Jewish background. Piercy’s riveting prose brings to stinging life the effect of war.

Jerry Spinelli’s portrait of life in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Milkweed (Laurel Leaf. 2005. ISBN 978-0-440-42005-7. pap. $6.99), is both a deceptively simple commentary about the Holocaust and a survival adventure as seen through the eyes of an orphaned eight-year-old. Forced to steal food to survive, the boy, a Jew or a Gypsy, answers to various monikers, such as “Stopthief!” and “Poppynoodle,” as he does not know his real name. Before long, he is marched to a Jewish ghetto, where he witnesses atrocities and processes his observations in poetic ways. As his fate, and that of the other ghetto inhabitants, plays out in the novel, the growing sense of evil is all encompassing but leavened by the hope raised by this unwanted child’s innocence.

The fate of an unnamed Japanese American family is detailed in When the Emperor Was Divine (Anchor: Knopf. 2003. ISBN 978-0-385-72181-3. pap. $11.95), Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel. The family is separated when the FBI arrest the husband on conspiracy charges, and the mother and her two children move into an internment camp. As life falls apart for them in the filthy camps, the young daughter tells her brother bedtime stories to keep the horror at bay, and they get rare news of their father through blacked-out letters. After the war, when the family is finally reunited, the father tells his own story with muffled anger and shattering grace.

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (Houghton. 2004. ISBN 978-0-618-50928-7. $26) asks a big “What if?”—what if America had stayed out of World War II and famed aviator Charles (“Lucky Lindy”) Lindbergh, an isolationist and known Hitler admirer, had been elected President? In leading the nation, Lindbergh sets forth a wave of anti-Semitism that culminates in the creation of holding farms where Jews are herded for their own safety under the authority of the government’s “Office of American Absorption.” As a reimagining of the wrong men at the wrong time, Roth’s take on alternative history is crafted with chilling plausibility. A novel of fear and fearful possibility that will stir book group debates.