Inside, Outside, page 72
The lights of Israel are blazing in the twilight as the plane circles and climbs, and the music tape is playing an old liturgical song, the last words of the kaddish, which has become a sort of marching song for the Israelis:
He who makes peace in the Highest
He will make peace, for us
And for all Israel, amen.
Every time I leave Israel and look back at the coastline and the lights, I feel a tug, but now! Mama is there for good, and perhaps Lee, and at the moment Sandra, too, and even Mark Herz. That song’s refrain goes on and on, a rousing melody repeating just two Hebrew words, Yaaseh shalom, that is, “He will make peace.”
Yaaseh shalom
Yaaseh shalom
Let me write my last glimpse of Bobbie Webb, as I take my last glimpse of Israel, and then get stone-drunk, but one more thing first, before I forget. This morning as I said my prayers, alone in my hotel room, I recited this passage from the daily liturgy; and it is sounding in my brain as I watch those receding lights.
Look dawn from Heaven and see that we have become a scorn and a derision among the nations. We are considered as sheep bound for the slaughter, for murder, for extermination, for smiting and for shame. Yet with all this we have not forgotten Your name. Do not You forget us.
We spoke those words, I and my father and his father, and their fathers before them, for two thousand years—and even in my own time, alas—as a terrible statement of fact. Now there are the lights of victorious Israel below.
Yaaseh shalom…
Yaaseh shalom…
***
Some years after we were married Jan and I went to a Broadway show, and ahead of us, passing the ticket-taker, I glimpsed Bobbie Webb. More by her carriage, and the way she held her head than anything else, I recognized her, because her back was to me. The man who apparently was with her, handing over the tickets, was a greasy-looking, swarthy little person about sixty years old. I thought with horror, ye gods, is this what Bobbie has fallen to? But when we came out into the lobby at intermission, there she stood with a very tall, good-looking man in rimless glasses, so that had been my mistake. She saw me and smiled, and I saw her lips form the words, “There’s David Goodkind.”
The obscenity trials were getting a splash in the papers just then. No doubt she had told her husband something about us. The tall man said, when she introduced us and we shook hands, that he admired what I was doing in the trials. His manner was cordial, his clothes excellent, his speech cultivated. So Bobbie had landed well, after all. She was plumper, but still good-looking, still straight, still striking. Only her eyes were dulled. “I’ve followed you in the papers, David,” she said. “It’s wonderful, everything that’s happened. I’m so proud for you.” Her mother was gone, she said, and Angela was doing well in boarding school. “Angela’s a beauty,” the tall man said, with a touch of fatherly fondness.
I was so stirred I almost lost awareness of where I was and what I was doing. I had not heard from Bobbie Webb since that last meeting in the Palm Court. The four of us went back into the theatre together, still chatting. Bobbie walked past the aisle like a blind woman, and her husband had to take her arm and turn her. “This way, dear.” I watched them walk down to two of the best orchestra seats. Yes, Bobbie had landed well. Thank God.
“Maybe we can meet them afterward for a drink,” I said to Jan.
“As you wish,” Jan said.
I did not look for Bobbie after the show. Bobbie Webb’s last best gift to me was to vanish from my life.
Yaaseh shalom
Yaaseh shalom
The plane still climbs away from the coastal lights, and the old kaddish song goes on, sung in full-throated chorus by young Israelis.
Bobbie and I always talked of going to Lake Louise together. We never did. We should have gone there at least once, and danced under the stars, but the time went by in our quarrels and reconciliations, and we did not manage it. I have never yet been to Lake Louise, and if I ever get there, it will not be to dance with Bobbie Webb under the stars. I do not know what has become of Bobbie; I did not catch her married name, and I have no idea whether she is alive or dead. She would be only sixty or sixty-one, so there’s no reason why she should not still live. But if this book is published and she reads it, I will not hear from her, and I will never know what she thought. She and Jan smiled and spoke fair to each other, but Bobbie has sense, and her last best gift stands.
He will make peace,
For us, and for all Israel, Amen.
The lights of Israel are gone. The kaddish song has ended. So has my book. It is a kaddish for my father, of course, start to finish; but in counterpoint it is also a torch song of the thirties, a sentimental Big Band number that no one has ever heard till now, and its name is, “Inside, Outside.”
***
The stewardess comes up the aisle of the first-class cabin, taking drink orders. The man sitting beside me is a young American, perhaps a war volunteer. “Arthur Susman,” she reads from her list.
“That’s me,” he says.
“What will you drink, Arthur?” Warm smile, Israeli first-name informality. He asks for a martini.
“Israel David Goodkind,” she says.
“Right. Double bourbon and water.”
She blinks at the hairy-chested order, and makes a note. Then, with that El Al smile: “And what do they call you, Israel or David?”
Slight pause. Then Pop’s Yisroelke, enjoying a wry Yankee joke she may not get, smiles back.
“Call me Israel.”
About the Author
A Biographical Sketch
Herman Wouk is one of the most widely-read living American authors around the world—almost as popular in translation in the People’s Republic of China, and in twenty-seven other languages, as he is in his native land. He works slowly. In recent years he has been publishing books six or seven years apart, and each publication has been a major literary event in the U.S. and abroad. He has also composed plays, films, and religious writings. While earlier novels like The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar have become recognized world classics, Herman Wouk is best known today for the linked monumental war books, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, an epic two-part narrative of World War II, interweaving history with the experiences of two fictional families plunged into the perils and tragedies of the war and the Holocaust. Sixteen years in the writing, nearly 2,000 pages in all, the books comprise a comprehensive re-creation of the war, both in its battles and politics, based on painstaking research. Professional historians have praised the accuracy, sweep, and grasp of the work; Henry Kissinger, for instance, called War and Remembrance “an outstanding novel and a great work of history.” Both books were number one best-sellers, and both remained on the New York Times list for over a year.
The work that succeeded them, Inside, Outside, appeared in 1985, and was such a change of pace that some readers called it “a sensational surprise.” But it is not surprising to readers familiar with Herman Wouk’s religious work, This Is My God, which has become a popular guide to the Jewish faith, or with his youthful career as a writer for the great radio comedian Fred Allen, and his short comic novels, Aurora Dawn, City Boy, and Don’t Stop the Carnival. The startling aspect of Inside, Outside is that it combines Herman Wouk’s wildly funny streak with deeply religious passages, and with some intensely romantic scenes of an intimate quality very rare in this reticent author’s work. Written in the first person in a free-form, often ribald style, playing antic tricks with time, Inside, Outside is in fact a striking departure from the traditional storytelling mode in which the author has won international fame; and yet it may be the most truly characteristic of all his writings.
The Glory, published in November 1994, concludes the grand fictional panorama of Israel’s stormy and thrilling history begun in his best-seller The Hope (December 1993). Fathers, sons, and daughters, too, serve side by side in the heart-stopping Yom Kippur War, the famous Entebbe rescue, and the air strike on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor. With the electric pace, brilliant humor, moving love scenes, and powerful battle narrative of The Caine Mutiny, and the dramatic historical focus of The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, Wouk added yet another enthralling saga to an oeuvre treasured by his millions of readers worldwide.
Wouk followed the two-volume Israel saga with The Will to Live On: This Is Our Heritage, which returned to the Judaic scene of his classic This Is My God. The book surveys the worldwide revolution that has been sweeping over Jewry, seen against a swiftly reviewed background of thirty centuries of history, tradition, and sacred literature. It is studded with personal anecdotes and asides, often of lighter texture than the subject matter might suggest, for the Bible, the Talmud, Kabbalah, and Israel are treated in depth. The book closes with a somber yet hopeful depiction of the current state of the eternal people.
A Hole in Texas, published by Little, Brown and Company in April 2004, returns to his comic vein of earlier books such as Don’t Stop the Carnival. A rollicking Washington novel about the interface of Big Science and Big Politics, it is the tale of a media firestorm swirling around a vast hole in Texas, and one obscure NASA scientist who gets swept up in the vortex and becomes an unwilling national figure overnight. Under the comic surface, A Hole in Texas offers a subtly arresting comment on American science and politics today, after the notorious debacle of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993.
The Lawgiver, his most recent book, published by Simon & Schuster in 2012, is an epistolary novel about a group of Hollywood characters attempting to make a movie about Moses. The result is a fast-paced romantic comedy which has won overwhelmingly high praise from critics.
***
Wouk is wholly a New York City product. He was born on May 27, 1915, to Russian-Jewish parents who had emigrated from Minsk. He attended public schools in the Bronx and later graduated from Columbia University in Manhattan. At Columbia he took courses in comparative literature and philosophy. He edited the undergraduate humor magazine, Jester, and wrote varsity musicals, obtaining his B.A. degree at the age of nineteen, in 1934. Wouk’s facility for writing humor led to work in the field of radio comedy. For five years, from 1936 to 1941, he was a staff writer for Fred Allen. In June 1941, Wouk went to Washington as a dollar-a-year man, to write radio scripts for the war-bond selling campaign of the U.S. Treasury.
In December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy, and attended midshipman school at Columbia University, and communications school at Annapolis. In February 1943, Wouk reported to the U.S.S. Zane, a World War I four-piper refitted as a destroyer-minesweeper, at anchor in a South Pacific harbor near Guadalcanal. He took part in eight Pacific invasions, earning several battle stars. When the war ended he was the executive officer on the Southard, a similar vessel. Wouk was to relieve the captain when the vessel was lost in a typhoon on Okinawa in October 1945. A year earlier, during a Navy Yard overhaul of his ship in San Pedro, he had met a young graduate of the University of Southern California, Betty Sarah Brown, a Navy personnel executive. Less than a week after he returned from the sea at the end of the war, they were married.
During his service in the Pacific he had turned at odd moments to the composition of a story founded on his experiences in the radio world: writing, like Lieutenant Keefer in The Caine Mutiny, for an hour or two before dawn. After his discharge in 1946, Wouk finished the book, and the judges of the Book-of-the-Month Club chose this first novel, Aurora Dawn, for their May 1947 selection.
Wouk then dipped again into his past to write a very different novel of an eleven-year-old youngster, City Boy, based on his own boyhood in the Bronx. The story appeared in 1948 and made friends slowly; but its growing circle of admirers call it unique in the author’s work. New editions were published in 1952 and 1969, and it was chosen as an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1973, twenty-five years after its publication. It is now widely used in the English courses of elementary schools.
In June 1949, Wouk went as a reserve officer on a training cruise aboard the aircraft carrier Saipan, and while on board started writing The Caine Mutiny, a tale set aboard a destroyer-minesweeper like the Zane and Southard. It was published on March 19, 1951, and it had a slow start. Neither major book club had chosen it. There was no immediate rush to the bookstores. After a second printing in April, orders began to increase, requiring four printings in June. By September, Herman Wouk had his first number one best-seller, displacing James Jones’s famous From Here to Eternity. His novel continued to lead the field for a year, and in May 1952 he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Both the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild of America had meanwhile chosen the novel as alternate selections, and more than half a million copies of the work had been sold in bookstores. Many millions of copies have since been sold in all editions.
In 1954, the same year The Caine Mutiny was being made into the celebrated film starring Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg, Wouk turned the novel’s court sequence into a successful play, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which starred Henry Fonda as the Jewish lawyer Barney Greenwald. The play is a perennial favorite, both in the United States and abroad. In 1985, Charlton Heston directed and starred as Queeg in a production which toured England, finishing up at the Queen’s Theatre in London’s West End, and in 1986 Heston remounted the production in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the Kennedy Center. The most recent American production of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial was a film directed by Robert Altman for television. An extraordinary event in the history of this play was a production in the Chinese language in 1988, starring the leading actors of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre and directed by Charlton Heston through interpreters. A resounding triumph, the show was also presented in Shanghai.
After The Caine Mutiny made him an internationally known novelist, Wouk turned from the sea to portray a New York girl, a starry-eyed creature who wanted popularity, suitors, and a love affair that ended in marriage. Not only did Marjorie Morningstar disclose the feelings and ambitions of the aspiring American Everywoman, it took the reader into social circles not then used by American authors. Conventional publishing wisdom then held that novels on Jewish themes could not be popular. Marjorie Morningstar was the first in the great wave of American-Jewish novels that took a central place in the fiction of the 1950s and ’60s. It was the most popular American novel of 1955, and, like all Wouk’s subsequent novels, a major club selection. A successful film of the work starred the late Natalie Wood.
Herman Wouk interrupted his work on Youngblood Hawke, a long, complex novel of the literary scene in postwar America, to execute an idea that he had been turning over in his mind for years: in his own words, “a fairly short and clear account of the Jewish faith from a personal viewpoint.” This Is My God, published in 1959, was dedicated to the memory of his grandfather, Mendel Leib Levine, a rabbi from Minsk. It stood high on the best-seller lists for half a year, and has since become a standard book on the subject, of equal interest to Jewish and Christian readers. A labor of love, the copyright was donated by Mr. and Mrs. Wouk to the Abe Wouk Foundation, named in memory of their firstborn son who died accidentally at the age of five. Youngblood Hawke, published in 1962, gave a detailed candid picture of the New York and Hollywood literary life, reflecting the author’s own experiences, and told of the disintegration and death of a powerful young artist in the grip of the American get-rich-quick mania.
On the publication day of Youngblood Hawke, May 17, 1962, Wouk began work on The Winds of War, a panoramic tale that would—in a phrase Joseph Conrad used about a Napoleonic novel he never wrote—“throw a rope around” the Hitler era. He soon realized that he had let himself in for years of research, and probably for two vast novels. By then he was living in the Virgin Islands with his wife and two young sons; he had moved there in 1958, when the distractions of New York had made working difficult. During the War Books research, he gave a couple of hours each day to a new short novel that returned to his comic vein. Don’t Stop the Carnival, published in 1965, is an extravaganza of life on a Caribbean island, which tells some grim truths of politics and race under the surface of fun.
In 1964 the Wouks returned to the mainland and settled in Washington, D.C., where the author began the actual narrative writing of The Winds of War and extensive research for War and Remembrance. There he could consult the Library of Congress resources, the National Archives, and important surviving military leaders. Finding life in Washington pleasant, the Wouks bought and renovated an 1815 house in Georgetown as a combined office and residence. The author also traveled for research to England, Germany, the Soviet Union, Iran, Portugal, Italy, France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and he spent much time on records in Israel of the destruction of Europe’s Jews. Accompanying him on his travels always was his wife, Betty Sarah, his editor and manuscript assistant throughout his career, and since 1978 his literary agent. Mrs. Wouk died in 2011.
For years after the publication of The Winds of War, movie and television companies sought the rights to adapt the novel for film. The Wouks believed that a television series was the best format for the large-scale drama, but stipulated severe restrictions on the nature and number of commercial interruptions, and strict requirements of story fidelity. Twelve years after publication, Paramount’s eighteen-hour filming of Herman Wouk’s teleplay of The Winds of War was broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company and became “the most watched television show in history,” according to ABC. In 1986 Wouk completed the teleplay of War and Remembrance for ABC and for the same producer-director, Dan Curtis. The series, larger in scope than its celebrated predecessor, was aired in two segments—in November 1988, and May 1989. The thirty-hour drama, which won the 1989 Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries, was acclaimed a magnificent production in all respects, but it was the graphic unblinking depiction of the Holocaust scenes—many of which were filmed in Auschwitz itself—that evoked a sweeping emotional response from critic and viewer alike, and as a testimonial to War and Remembrance’s importance in both film and world history, a reproduction of the original 35mm film has been deposited in the Library of Congress. Both serial dramas are available on DVD.
