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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.

The author was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Caine Mutiny and numerous academic honors, including a degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In January 2001, the University of California, San Diego established the Herman Wouk Chair of Modern Jewish Studies.

In 1995, Herman Wouk’s 80th birthday was celebrated by a symposium at the Library of Congress, attended by what the Washington Post described as “a high-powered tribe of historians, novelists, publishers, and critics,” who came to honor “the reclusive dean of American historical novelists.” The occasion was also marked by the author’s formal presentation to the Library of the papers and manuscripts of The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. In 2008, he was given the first Library of Congress Lifetime Achievement Award for the Writing of Fiction.

The author is an unusually private person, living a disciplined, secluded existence in Palm Springs, California. Writing, scholarship (his avocation is Judaic studies), and the companionship of a close family and a few intimate friends make up the productive life pattern that has made him a world-famous writer. Mr. Wouk has two sons, Nathaniel and Joseph.

Full-length critical studies of the author’s work include Herman Wouk: The Novelist as Social Historian, by Professor Arnold C. Beichman (Transaction Press of Rutgers University, 1984) and Herman Wouk, by Laurence W. Mazzeno (Twayne Publishers, 1994). A recent publication of the Library of Congress is The Historical Novel: A Celebration of the Achievements of Herman Wouk (1999).

Inside, Outside
Copyright © 1985, 2014 by Herman Wouk

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan / Ter33Design
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795344190

Rejoice, young man in your youth, and let your heart pleasure you in the days of your young manhood; and walk in the ways of your heart, and the sight of your eyes; but know that for all these God will bring you into judgment. So remove trouble from your heart and put away wrongdoing from your flesh, for boyhood and youth are a breath.

ECCLESIASTES 11:9–10

PART I

The Green Cousin

Introducing Myself

All hell has been breaking loose around here, and my peaceful retreat in the Executive Office Building may be coming to a sudden rude end.

I suppose it was too good to last. It has been a curious hiatus, unimaginable to me a few months ago—first of all, my becoming a Special Assistant to the President, especially to this President; second, and even more surprising, my finding it no big deal, but rather an oasis of quiet escape from corporate tax law. I’ve at last pieced together the mysterious background of my appointment. The haphazardness of it will appear absurd, but the longer I’m in Washington the more I realize that most people in this town tend to act with the calm forethought of a beheaded chicken. It gives me the cold shudders.

Fortunately for my peace of mind, the bookcase in this large gloomy room contains, amid rows and rows of dusty government publications, the seven volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman’s George Washington: A Biography, and Churchill’s six volumes on the Second World War. I dip into these now and then to reassure myself that things were not very different in the days of those great men. Churchill calls the Versailles Treaty, the product of the combined wisdom and long labor of all the top politicians of Europe, “a sad and complicated idiocy.” From what I see here, this description can be extended to almost all politics. No wonder the world is in such a god-awful mess, and has been, it appears, since Hammurabi ordered his cuneiform scribes to start scratching his great deeds on clay tablets.

Let me describe the jolt I got the other day, to give you my feel of things at this world hub. When I first flew down from New York and briefly met with the President in the Oval Office—the one time I saw him until this recent jolt—I explained that if I did take the job I wouldn’t work on Saturdays, and would make up the time Sundays or nights, if required. The President looked baffled, and then calculating. He pushed out his lips, widened his eyes, raised those thick eyebrows, and nodded gravely and repeatedly. “That’s splendid,” was his judicious comment. “I’m impressed, Mr. Goodkind.” (He pronounced it right, with a long i.) “May I say that I’ve had numerous Jewish associates, but you’re the first one who’s made that stipulation, and I’m impressed. Very impressed. That’s impressive.”

I’m hardly a super-pious type, I hasten to acknowledge. What I do Saturdays, besides the usual praying, is mostly lie around and read, or walk a few miles along the tow path with my black Labrador, Scrooge. I wouldn’t give up this inviolate chunk of peace in my week for anything. It has kept me sane at my Wall Street office down the years, this day of sealed-off Sabbath release from the squirrel cage of tax law.

But that’s not the point of the story. The point is that for much of my life I’ve been a Talmud addict. I don’t spend day and night over its many volumes as my grandfather did, but even at the Goodkind and Curtis office I used to arrive early and, with four or five cups of strong coffee, study for an hour or more every morning. I won’t go deeply into this. Just take my word for it, under the opaque Aramaic surface the Talmud is a magnificent structure of subtle legal brilliancies, all interwoven with legend, mysticism, the color of ancient times, and the cut-and-thrust of powerful minds in sharp clash. I can’t get enough of it, and I’ve been at it for decades.

Once I’d settled into this office and realized that I’d fallen down a peculiar well of solitude, I saw no reason not to bring the Talmud here and resume my usual routine. So there I was, day before yesterday, sitting at my desk with a huge tome open, puzzling my skullcapped head over the validity of a bill of divorcement brought from Spain to Babylon, when the door opened, and without ado in walks the President of the United States.

Up I jump, snatching off the skullcap and slamming shut the volume. Sheer reflex. The President says, “Oh! Sorry. Did I interrupt something? Your secretary seems to have stepped out, and—”

Awkward pause while I collect myself. “Mr. President, you’re not interrupting anything. I’m highly honored, and ah—”

We look at each other in silence. I’m telling this ridiculous and unlikely little scene just the way it was: a goy walking in on a Jew studying the Talmud in the White House, and suitably apologetic. I knew the President had a hideaway office on the first floor of this building, but his barging in like that was a stunner. Well, the moment passed. In his deep Presidential voice, one of several he produces like a ventriloquist, except that all the characters talk out of the same face, he asked, “Ah, just what is that large book, Mr. Good-kind?”

He asked to look into it. I showed him the text, told him the dates and nationalities of the commentators, the printing history of the Talmud and so forth, my standard quick tour for outsiders. It’s not a dull tour. On one page of the Talmud you encounter authorities from many lands, from the time of Jesus and even earlier down through the ages to the nineteenth century, all discussing or annotating a single point of law. I know of nothing else like it in the world. The President has a quick and able mind, though not everybody gives him that, not by a long shot. His face lit up. He shot me a sharp glance and said in his most nearly natural voice, “And you really understand this stuff?”

“Well, I scratch the surface, Mr. President. I come from a rabbinic family.”

He nodded. The momentary relaxation faded from his face, leaving deep-carved lines of concern. The man looks ten years older than he did when we met two months ago.

Presidential voice: “I’d like to talk to you, ah, David. This impressive background of yours is very relevant. Let’s chat right here for a bit. It’s quiet.”

That it was, to be sure. Sepulchral. He sat down, and so I did. The upshot of this exceedingly strange “chat” was that I wrote a TV speech for him about Watergate; a decidedly unlooked-for turn in the life of I. David Goodkind, counsellor-at-law and lifelong Democrat, though no more bizarre than the way I got here.

But rest assured, this Watergate business is going to take up no space in these pages. If it dies off, as I expect it soon will—that’s certainly what he’s hoping and trying for—well, that’ll be that. Just one more sad and complicated idiocy scratched on the clay tablets. Somehow it’s beginning to remind me, the whole Watergate caper, of the first time Bobbie Webb and I broke up; when I rebounded to a brief affair with a screwy but goodhearted dish named Sonia Feld.

As the affair began to cool down, Sonia knitted me a sweater, a loose ill-fitting thing. With it came a sentimental note that did the trick, warmed me up to her again, intravenous glucose for a terminally ill liaison. Well, Sonia left one long loose thread hanging from the sweater, which I cut off with a scissors, but the same thread would work loose as I wore the thing, and I’d cut it off again. Once when I was drunk for some reason—I think, after a snide telephone call from Bobbie Webb, an art form at which she was peerless—I saw that damned thread still dangling loose. I began to pull on it. I pulled and pulled, and poor Sonia’s work began to unravel. That infuriated me. I pulled in alcoholic obstinacy, until I was left with a mess of white wriggly wool over the floor, and no sweater. It was gone.

The President was reelected not long ago with the biggest majority ever. There’s only this one dangling Watergate thread, and he can’t seem to cut it or tie it off. But I daresay he will. He is a tough and resourceful bird, and the Presidency is a mighty close-knit sweater.

Two things happened a while ago to create the hole in the White House entourage which I have filled. A speechwriter who specialized in quips resigned, and Israel sent over a new ambassador. The President and the previous man, a blunt ex-general, had gotten on almost too well; the ambassador actually came out for his reelection. At a cabinet meeting, the President said he wished there was someone on the staff who knew the incoming diplomat well enough to talk to him with the gloves off, until he himself could feel at home with the man. The Secretary of Defense brought up my name. Some time ago this same diplomat had spoken at a United Jewish Appeal banquet where I got the Secretary to come as a guest of honor, and SecDef remembered that the speaker and I had hugged each other. Nothing unusual, the general counsel for the UJA naturally gets to know and hug all the Israeli star speakers. SecDef described my background to the President, who had never heard of me (so much for newspaper notoriety, breath on a windowpane). The President said, “Sounds okay, let’s contact him,” and so it happened. Just like that.

A detail of my background much in my favor was my radio experience. Long, long ago, before the war—as I sometimes feel, before Noah’s flood—the Secretary of Defense and I romanced these two girls in the chorus of a Winter Garden musical, Johnny, Drop Your Gun. I was then a gagwriter of twenty-one, and my girl was Bobbie Webb. SecDef was a lawyer a few years older; very married, and having a final boyish fling. I was discreet, and he appreciated it. We’ve been friendly ever since, as he too is a Wall Street attorney, though at the moment he’s every inch the good gray statesman, a straight arrow with five kids and a house in McLean. Only last week my wife Jan and I had dinner at SecDef’s house, and he made clumsy jokes about the time we hung around the stage door together. Mrs. SecDef gaily laughed; mainly with her mouth muscles, I thought, and her eyes kind of looked like glass marbles.

Anyhow, at the cabinet meeting SecDef mentioned my jokewriting past, and the President perked up at that. All politicians are desperate for jokes. Very few can deliver them, and he is not one of those, but he keeps trying. I have fed him a number of jokes since coming here, but the way he delivers them, they just lie where they fall, plop, like dropped jellyfish.

SecDef also told the President about the obscenity trials. That gave him pause. Like most red-blooded American males, the President is a horseshit and asshole man from way back. His packaged flat image, however, is entirely that other face of American manhood: dear old Mom and grand old flag and heck and golly and shoot, pretty much like an astronaut. He said that he’d never even heard of Peter Quat and Deflowering Sarah, or of Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer—the President is not big on modernist literature—so he doubted that many people had. Anyway, he allowed that a bit of liberal input might be useful around his White House, at that. So I was in.

And I think I’ve already been of some use. Not that I’ve helped him feel at home with the ambassador. This President is never really “at home” with anybody, possibly not even with his wife and daughters. He dwells in a dark hole somewhere deep inside himself, and all the world ever sees of the real man, if anything, is the faint gleam of phosphorescent worried eyes peering from that hole. I did ease the first meetings of SecDef and the President’s chief of staff with the ambassador. Since then I’ve become a sort of cushion for carom shots on touchy Israel matters too small to engage our superstar National Security Adviser. I’ll get an idea or a position thrown at me by the ambassador or the administration, quietly and casually, and nobody’s committed, and there’s no body contact; and I bounce it along, and the play either continues or stops. I’ve furthered several minor matters in that way.

My official handle is “Special Assistant to the President for Cultural and Educational Liaison.” In this political rose garden, Special Assistants and Assistants to the President are thick as Japanese beetles. I’m just one more of them. The job is a real one, of sorts. I’m on the board of the National Endowment for the Arts. Also I meet with delegations of teachers and artists who descend on Washington; I listen to their problems, and get them passes for special White House tours, and so forth. And I shepherd around foreign visitors, like a group of Soviet professors of American literature, who showed up last week, and greatly embarrassed me by insisting on being taken at once to a topless bar, and then to a dirty movie. I may be the noted defender of artistic freedom, but that was the first porn film I’d ever seen. Jan won’t hear of paying money to pornmongers, and I won’t go by myself. Suppose I had a fatal heart attack right there in the theatre? Jan would have to bury a husband carried out feet first from The Devil in Miss Jones. Nothing doing.

Well, escorting the Soviet professors made it all right for me to see a thing called Hot Dormitories, but it was disappointing. I was bored out of my mind, and mainly felt sorry for the poor actresses. The Russkis ate it up, however, and wanted to go to another dirty movie right away. I took them to the National Gallery instead, and they gave me the impression that they were displeased by that. Indeed, they were decidedly snotty about the National Gallery. They said they didn’t have to come to America to see paintings, the Hermitage in Leningrad made the National Gallery look sick, and what about another dirty movie? I fobbed them off on a pallid State Department man, Soviet section, who displayed warm interest in showing the Russian professors, at government expense, all the examples of American artistic freedom now playing in the sleazy dumps on F Street.

Then there was this committee of authors who came here recently to pester Congress and the Treasury for relief from an adverse IRS ruling, something about authors’ research expenses. Whenever an IRS mole has an idle hour, he whets his tearing fangs and has a go at actors, athletes, and authors. The few big ones make a packet, you see, and get hoggish and try to dodge taxes with slick contrivances which the IRS loves to dismember. Out come these adverse rulings, which play hell with the small earners. Well, that’s my field, so I took charge, and actually got Internal Revenue to back down. The authors went in a body to thank the President; and as I saw them off on the Eastern shuttle for New York, they were remarking in wonderment at his approximately humanoid appearance. The cartoons do give a peculiar picture of the man.

Why on earth did I ever accept this job? Well, I can only say I did it out of the same quirk which led me at other times to take on Henry Miller, and the United Jewish Appeal. I would be a lot more affluent than I am, if I stuck to my business. Tax law satisfies me as a hardball mental game, an exercise in concentration and scholastic hairsplitting like some Talmud passages, though utterly devoid, of course, of Talmudic intellectual charm and moral substance. I enjoy the work, but it’s all a mean fight over money; the heavy hand of government, versus the nimble wits of us lawyers hired by the fat cats. It pays very well, if you are good at it, but it is demanding drudgery. You have to dot every i and cross every t yourself, and not leave it to junior lawyers. The IRS will drive a Patton tank through a pinhole. I am paid for perfection.

So I can always be tempted to do something else, if my wife will agree to my indulging myself. She is an astute, beautiful woman, and I am the most happily married man on earth. You’ll learn little about Jan or my marriage in these pages. She is the treasure that lay beyond Bobbie Webb and all my other racketing adventures, and as Tolstoy says, happy families are all alike, so there’s nothing to tell, and Jan will remain a shrouded figure. It just occurs to me, thinking about it, that in my observation happy families are all about as different as faces or fingerprints, but I defer to Tolstoy. Very big of me.

I must disclose, however, that my wife was originally a Californian, and loathing the President is her long-time hobby. This dates back to when he ran for Congress early on, against a liberal ex-actress. During that campaign he doggedly kept hinting that his opponent was under direct control of the Kremlin, and was planning to blow up the White House, or pass Stalin all our atomic secrets, something unpatriotic and pinko like that. Jan worked in the lady’s campaign, and thought these allegations were underhanded and base. Jan has no feel for serious politics.

My big problem, once I decided to consider the President’s bombshell offer of a job, was Jan. When I broached the idea to her, she inquired how I would like a divorce. She too has voted Democratic all her life, and her idol was and remains Adlai Stevenson. She really could not digest the notion that I would even think twice about working for that baleful lowbrow who was so unkind to Adlai. I let her simmer for a day or two, then did my best to explain.

I had just banked a hefty fee from a big corporation for beating the government in tax court out of a massive sum. Was my client right or wrong on the issue? Who knows? I won, that’s all. Where do right and wrong lie in taxation, anyhow? Politicians write laws for confiscating other people’s earnings to use as their free spending money. That’s the long and the short of it. The rest is trying to limit one’s losses to the politicians. It was going on under the pharaohs, and it will be going on when we colonize Andromeda, no doubt, with regrettable waste of public funds by the Andromeda Agency. You can see I’m biting on a sore tooth of conscience here. No more of that.

I was financially able to accept the President’s offer, and I felt like doing it, to my own surprise. Several considerations swayed me. The strongest was curiosity. Most of my friends are like Jan, dyed-in-the-wool eastern liberals content to sit up nights hating the President, and wishing that he would drop dead, and that Adlai would rise from the grave. Okay, but the man holds our present destiny in his hands, does he not? He worked his way into that position despite a singularly unattractive personality, and the political record of a polecat. How come? To observe him at close range, I thought, would be illuminating, and conceivably broadening.

The other consideration I inherited from my father. Pop was your typical young Russian Jewish immigrant, full of idealistic fire, disgusted with Czarist oppression, in trouble because of his clandestine socialist speeches, haunted by yearning for America. My father never changed his mind about the United States. To the end of his too-short life America remained the Goldena Medina (GOLD-ena me-DEE-na, you say it), the golden land, the freedom land. Pop loved the Goldena Medina. So do I, though I don’t hang out flags on Memorial Day. Here was the Medina—my only relationship with which, except in wartime, has been to fend off its grasping tax claws—asking me, man to man, to lend a hand. Wait till it happens to you. If you have an American bone in your body, however you swathe it in cynicism, you’ll feel the tug. And far back in my mind was something Pop or my grandfather would have thought of: placed here, I might somehow, at some moment, do something for our Jewish people. The Talmud says, “A man can earn the world to come in a single hour.”

Certainly neither the supposed glamour, nor the nearness of power, had any attraction for me, and you can believe that or not as you choose. In this regard, too, I may have a screw loose, because those inducements seem to animate the entire place. I don’t think anybody is more beguiled by the glamour and the power than the President himself. He acts in the Presidency, after four years, as though it’s his glittering brand-new birthday bicycle which he adores, and which the big guys will take away from him if he isn’t extra wary. It’s amazing.

Obviously I won the argument with Jan, because here I am. Jan perceived that this was something I wanted to do; and that my motives, while possibly quixotic, were not unworthy. She spends a lot of time on the phone these days assuring our New York friends that I haven’t sold out, or been terrorized into doing this by the FBI, or been thrown out of orbit by the male menopause. I don’t care any more, and neither does she. She’s beginning to laugh at the whole business. When Jan laughs it’s all right.

She knows I’ve been killing empty office time by writing, and my chat with the President was so odd that I decided to tell her about it before putting it on paper. Her reaction rocked me. I thought the man came out crooked as a worm writhing on a hook; but she flew into a tall rage at me for making him sound so sympathetic. I’ll have to think about it some more. If I’m falling under the spell of the President—to me, a ridiculous notion—I want to know it.

Meantime, the big television speech baring all has come and gone. Of the draft the President asked me to write, only a paragraph here and there survived. I expected nothing more. If confusion reigned around here before, we now have unadulterated chaos, for the two ousted German shepherds, as the columnists dubbed them—the chief of staff and the assistant for domestic affairs—had been running everything. Now the press is worrying their corpses on the bloodstained snow with hungry howls and snarls, while the President lashes his sleigh horses to carry him off to safety—if this isn’t laboring the image. I don’t think of many, and when one comes along I tend to wring it out like a dishrag. Old Peter Quat throws them off thirteen to the dozen, but there’s only one Peter Quat.

Incidentally, his new novel is finished and I believe we’re all in for some fun. Nobody has yet seen it except his agent. I’ll be reading it soon, since I’ll be drafting the contract. The agent, a white-haired, corrupt old sinner who has read and done about everything in the sexual line, shakes his head and will disclose nothing, except that “even the title will blow your tits off.”

To be honest I feel a bit futile, fumbling on with this attempt of mine at a book, when such a stupendous blockbuster is shortly to detonate upon the world. But many lawyers are frustrated writers. I’ve been one since I left law school, and I’ve been enjoying the solitary scrawling in all these free hours here. I once made a sort of living by writing, if you can call a gagman a writer. Last year, laid up with a wrenched back for a while, I started a book about my April House days; about Harry Goldhandler, Bobbie Webb, Peter Quat, and the storms that boiled up in my family; that whole dizzy and dazzling time. Recently I dug it out. It commences too far along, and I’m backtracking to the beginning. There’s nothing Presidential cooking at the moment. I can’t just sit here in my tomblike office, in the false calm at the eye of the storm, waiting for some frantic dummy in this place to press the wrong button and end the world. So on I go with my book. Mainly I’ll tell the truth—with some stretchers, as Huck Finn says, but the truth—and I start this time far, far back, with The Green Cousin.

The Ploika

We begin with a stout woman in a Russian blouse and long dark skirt beating up a girl, slapping at her face, her arms, her shoulders, while the girl tries to protect her head and face with her arms; not crying, just covering up like a boxer in trouble. All at once the girl uncovers a very pretty face and counterattacks, battering bang-bang-bang with small fists in her stepmother’s face. Stepmother reels back in amazement and pain, shrieking, “Help! Help! She’s gone crazy! Help! She’s a murderess!” while Mama—because this is going to be my mother, this blonde red-cheeked girl of fifteen or so, with bright angry blue eyes—bats her big cringing stepmother all over the front room and follows her out into the muddy street, still pounding that fat retreating back. Stepmother goes trampling off down the wooden walk between the houses to fetch my grandfather from the synagogue, squealing like a sow chased by dogs, “She’s crazy! Help! Sarah Gitta is trying to murder me! Help!”

Mama goes back into the house, shaking all over with joyous shock at her own rash act. From a bedroom, her half sisters and brothers peep in alarm at crazed bloodthirsty Sarah Gitta. Ah, an audience! Mama marches to the table and, feigning great calm, sits down and methodically eats the PLOIKA.

Anyway, that is how Mama tells it. It is the only version of the event that I will ever know. The victor writes the history. The stepmother is gone from the earth, gone from the memory of man, surviving only in this tale. For all I know, she was an angel of patience, a perfect rabbi’s wife, the most beloved woman in Minsk. I doubt that; but then I also doubt Mama’s version.

Mama has never been easy to get along with. She once picked up a brick and went for a watchman on a Bronx construction job, who slapped my rear to chase me off his lumber pile. I fled blubbering, not hurt but scared. Mom saw it all. She belted the man with the brick, and then called a cop and had him arrested for assault and battery. I went along to the police court as a witness. The judge was sort of baffled by the whole thing, since the accused assailant’s head was bloodily bandaged while neither Mama nor I had a scratch on us. After some confused questioning he threw us all out. That is as I dimly remember it; but I recall perfectly my mother’s melodramatic cry, as she crashed the brick down on the watchman’s head: “How dare you strike my child?”

Let me not ramble, though. Mama is not going to loom large in this story. On the other hand, if not for the ploika incident I would not be here. Occurring when it did, it unquestionably led to Mama’s emigration, and hence to the stark fact that I exist. So there we start.

Okay. When you boil milk, as everyone knows, a skin or scum tends to form on top, and that, in Lithuanian Yiddish, is the ploika. In childhood I would gag on it. Mama had to remove it from my cocoa; which is how she first came to tell me this story, and I heard it a hundred times. In Minsk, or maybe only in my grandfather’s house, this ploika seems to have been the rarest of delicacies. Caviar, truffles, pheasant under glass, white peaches in champagne—mere nothings to that oozy sticky yellow ploika. Mama’s stepmother, a rabbi’s daughter from the nearby small town of Koidanov, had borne my grandfather several children, and the story is that they always got the ploika and Sarah Gitta never did. This Koidanov harpy not only showed such mean favoritism; she hated and persecuted Mama without cease for being so much prettier and cleverer than her own children. (I quote Mama. She also reports that the town of Koidanov was notorious for the nasty natures of everybody who came from there.)

Well, this ploika business really ate at my mother, and that is the one element in the tale that rings like gold. Nobody deprives my mother of anything without sooner or later regretting it. On this memorable day, it appears that Mama—grown bigger than the Koidanov woman quite realized, and evidently feeling her full fifteen and a half years, and possibly her swelling bust, too—decided by God to boil herself a ploika and eat it. The other children were smaller, and no doubt more entitled to what milk there was in the house; but Mama was redressing a long injustice. Koidanov caught her at it, ignored the larger issue, and started slapping her around.

“Why did you hit your mother?” my grandfather inquired, upon hurrying home from the synagogue.

“She’s not my mother, and I didn’t hit her,” Mama replied. “I hit her back.”

And that is how a rabbi’s daughter not yet sixteen was allowed and in fact shoved out to set forth for America alone. Mama was beautiful then—a slip of a maiden, all but cut in two at the waist by a corset. I have seen her faded shipboard photograph. I don’t know how a poor adolescent lass in remote Minsk managed it, but she really looked like a Gibson Girl: all bustle, bosom, luxuriant hair, and cartwheel hat, leaning on a rail by a life preserver. Some version of the ploika incident must therefore be true. I will say this, if any Russian rabbi’s teenage daughter could have done such a bold thing as travel to America by herself, it would be my mother. I talked to her before I accepted this bizarre job, and she opined, “Why not? Say yes! The world belongs to those who dare and do.”

The Steamship Ticket

Hold it. Now, there is a specimen of the unreliability of memory, of memoirs, and probably of all written history. I am honestly trying to tell the truth here. Yet the fact is—when I stop to think—I never even asked Mama about this job. She uttered that gem another time. We were all in a mountaintop Caribbean hotel, some years ago, my wife and kids, myself, and Mama. In a gross violation of security, my sister Lee had disclosed my vacation plans to Mama, who had instantly phoned and invited herself along.

Well, on this day, on that Caribbean island, it was raining, pouring, a steamy blowy deluge. We feared it might be a hurricane. Still, it was beach time, and my mother wanted me to drive her to the beach. Mama claimed that it was “just a shower,” and would pass over. My wife and kids thought it would be insane to venture out in that howling storm, but it was simpler for me to go, and risk being washed into the sea by a flash flood, than to argue with Mama. So off we went in a rented Volvo, slithering in cascading muddy waters down the hairpin turns of that mountainside, Mom and I bouncing about in swimsuits, the thick rain hammering the car like hail. Just about the time we reached the beach, the clouds rolled away and the Caribbean sun blazed out in an azure sky. Mama plodded into the gentle surf of the deserted beach, sat down in the foam in the sunshine, and paddled her legs and arms like a child. “The world belongs to those who dare and do,” she said. She was too old and fat and clumsy to swim any more. Maybe I thought of those words years later, when the phone call came that led to this job. I don’t know.

Anyhow, it was no simple matter for her to go to America. What about the money for the steamship ticket? Most rabbis in Russia were dirt-poor. Here is how my mother got the ticket, and this will tell you something about Mama, and about the Russian Jewry from which I stem; and above all about my grandfather, who will play quite a role in this chronicle as Zaideh (Zay-deh). Mama drops out soon, the sooner the better. She is obtruding herself unbearably, as usual.

About the Author

Contents

PART I

The Green Cousin

1

Introducing Myself

2

The Ploika

3

The Steamship Ticket