Herman Wouk has passed away at the age of 103, just ten days short of his 104th birthday. According to the Times of Israel, he was “working on a book until the end.” To say this makes me sad is a gross understatement. While obviously, I knew this day was approaching, imagining a world where he is not writing about it is indeed a depressing prospect.
Fortunately for us all, his written words and now, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, his spoken words, will live on till long after all of us in the current generation have passed on. He was, in my opinion, a great American writer of the 20th century, who deserves recognition with the other great American writers: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner and the rest. Then again, when it comes to Herman Wouk, I am more than a little biased. If you have been a long time reader here, you know that I have quoted him on these pages again and again.
Herman Wouk was a writer that had a significant influence on my life. I’ve read nearly all of his books, some several times. His vivid descriptions of the Holocaust were forefront in my mind whenever I went to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or traveled to and from the city. Same is true of his novels The Hope and The Glory as I traversed the roads of Israel from Kiryat Shmona down to Beersheeva and points south.
Back in 2015, David Frum wrote an article for The Atlantic, pointing out that Wouk’s gifts had been under-appreciated by the American literary world. The whole thing is worth your time to read. Most people only know of Wouk as the author of the Caine Mutiny, or as the writer behind the memorable performance by Humphrey Bogart. However, as Frum reminds us, there is much more to his body of work than that.
His first great success, The Caine Mutiny(1951), occupied bestseller lists for two consecutive years, sold millions of copies and inspired a film adaptation that became the second highest-grossing movie of 1954. Wouk’s grand pair of novels, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, likewise found a global audience, both in print and then as two television miniseries in the 1980s.
Wouk won a Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny. From then on, however, critical accolades eluded him. Reviews of the two “War” novels proved mostly dismissive—sometimes even savage. Critics assigned the proudly Jewish Wouk to the category that included Leon Uris and Chaim Potok rather than Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
Negative critical judgment matters. After the first fizz of publicity, it is critics who in almost all cases determine what will continue to be read. The novelist known as Stendhal described books as tickets in a lottery, of which the prize is to be read in a hundred years. If enduring readership is the ultimate prize for a writer, then Wouk is at present failing. Readers under 40 know Wouk, if they know him at all, as a name on the spine of a paperback shoved into a cottage bookshelf at the end of someone else’s summer vacation—or perhaps as the supplier of the raw material for Humphrey Bogart’s epic performance as Captain Queeg of the USS Caine. What they don’t know is that Herman Wouk has a fair claim to stand among the greatest American war novelists of them all.
When I returned to Israel after a 16-year lapse, it was Herman Wouk I first turned to, to understand the history of Israel ( which I already knew a lot about from having read his books, and a lot of other accounts). I also turned to Wouk as a starting point to better understand Judaism, which I feel is essential if you want to understand Israel truly as it is. Too many Americans don’t bother to learn either history or the religious basis that underpins the Jewish state, and because they don’t, they fall into the trap of not understanding Israel as it really is.
In 2012 I undertook to re-read both The Glory and The Hope, as well as his book This is My God. That led me to accept an offer to learn Hebrew from a class in 2013. While I can read Hebrew quite easily now, the spoken language has proven more of a challenge, but I nonetheless persist in trying to master it. As I immersed myself more and more into all things Israel, Wouk’s writings were always in the back of my mind.
Especially when I visited here:
The Holocaust is front and center in much of his work, even when the war was not the subject. Frum explains:
The Nazi Holocaust pervades the War novels and lurks in the corners of Caine too. Some of Wouk’s characters stumble into the Holocaust’s maw; others glimpse inside and are transformed forever. Adolf Eichmann makes a large and memorable appearance in War and Remembrance. Let it be noted that the supposedly middlebrow Wouk more shrewdly penetrated the Nazi murderer’s self-serving lies than the echt highbrow Hannah Arendt. Wouk’s Eichmann is no banal bureaucrat, but a fanatical plunderer and murderer—just as the historical documents that have become available since the writing of Wouk’s novels have confirmed.
It’s really a striking thing how unexpressed a place the Jewish Holocaust occupied in the writing of American Jewish novelists in the decades after the war: Heller, Bellow, Malamud, Doctorow. (Mordecai Richler too, to include a Canadian.) With Wouk, the Holocaust is always front of mind. In 2012, at 97, when he was asked by Vanity Fair which living person he most despised, he answered, “The Jewish writer who traduces his Jewishness.” (The runner-up, it would seem, is the U.S. military veteran who traduces the U.S. military.)
That is not to say that Wouk’s characters did not have their flaws, and in his historical novels as Frum notes, “ the contrivances necessary to move Wouk’s characters from event to event sometimes creak”. He is right about that, and it’s noticeable in War and Remembrance especially. But Frum also notes,
The characters themselves, however, never feel contrived—not the fictitious characters and (even more difficult) not the historical ones. Their stories and their personalities endure in the memory. Wouk may not be a stylistic innovator or a polisher of the perfect phrase. What he does achieve however is to create characters one finds oneself talking about years afterward as if they were people one knew, with problems as urgent as one’s own.
And from my perspective, to borrow a phrase from one of his characters, I did not care for the blind eye he turned to his country’s excesses, and I am in agreement with Frum that Wouk was very unfair to his female characters, especially Rhoda – who contrary to the assessment in Frum’s article – was a confused soul who had been done dirt by the circumstances thrust upon her.
But these are minor flaws that can be easily forgiven. Herman Wouk was a product of his generation and his beliefs on religion and other things informed his work. It’s very acceptable for me to take issue with him on certain things, yet still adore his work.
The thing I love about his books is that his writing and storytelling just flows and he knows how to create a grand cavalcade of events without becoming bogged down and losing his audience. For a history buff like me, he also knows how to get the history right.
Perhaps his best epitaph and the proper way to close a post is to do so in Wouk’s own words:
“In the glare, the great and terrible light of this happening, God seems to signal that the story of the rest of us need not end, and that the new light can prove a troubled dawn.
For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world’s worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them, there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet thought their bones like in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance
יְהֵא שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא מְבָרַךְ לְעָלַם וּלְעָלְמֵי עָלְמַיָּא
“May His great name be blessed forever, and to all eternity” -from the Kaddish.