A Book to Come

   I’ve been pulled away from tending my blog by an exciting project. When my mother passed away in 1989, a small box with letters, labeled “Rudy" came into my possession. I was too busy to look into it then and subsequently forgot it. Still, it moved with me to Mexico more than two years ago and a couple of months ago I actually looked into that box. What I found, among less interesting items, were 148 letters I had written home to my parents during the year I was in the United States Navy, July 1945 to July 1946, when I was eighteen and then nineteen years old. My father, who was a very orderly person, had collected them—in their envelopes—and put them more or less in order. Imagine, one hundred and forty-eight letters sent in the course of one year!

   But that large number is not the only thing that surprised me. To start at the bottom: the handwriting—I had access to a typewriter only infrequently—is very legible; it was then much better than it is now. Second, those letters are well-written: mostly correct spelling, mostly whole sentences, indeed, literate. They are a testimony to my high school education. I had graduated from Brooklyn Tech(nical High School) just before my stint in the Navy and even though my chief  interest there was in various shops I took in the so-called Mechanical Course, we had to do a fair bit of writing. And the only way you learn to write is by writing. Finally, those letters are surprisingly interesting. They give an account of life in the Navy, from boot camp, at the end of World War II,  and to my very varied doings after training.

   I soon resolved to publish the letters as a book. They are now all transcribed and have been lightly sprinkled with footnotes to explain those references that I could recall.
   Now and then I wrote in German—the very first letter begins with a lengthy German paragraph; I've translated all the German in footnotes. It was only six years since my family had arrived in New York from Heidelberg and Nazi persecution of Jews. While English soon became my best language, even if not my first, the same cannot be said of my parents, who were plus and minus forty years old when hit by English, not a mere twelve, as I was.

   This forthcoming book—its working title is A Sailor Writes Home from His Time in the U.S. Navy  (subtitle:) Letters of 1945-1946: Aftermath of World War II (suggestions most welcome) should be of some interest--almost three quarters of a century after the events described. Or so I hope, because I was lucky to have quite a varied, if short, “career” in the Navy. I  here give only a brief overview.

   From boot camp I was sent to Chicago for some schooling from which I signed out so I could see something of the world. For my glances at different places I was shipped to China—among many other new recruits, to replace sailors who had served long stretches during the war. The LST 919 became my new home, so that I participated in its various missions in the China Sea, until we journeyed homeward from Taku with a “load” of Marines who had been stationed in China. From San Diego, where we landed, to the Puget Sound where did all the dismantling that needed to be done before the ship could be decommissioned. While the 919 went this way, I went that way, sent back to Long Island where I was discharged.

   My job aboard ship was that of a Quartermaster and there are numerous accounts of what I did in the wheelhouse of the LST. But since even in the Navy life isn’t all work, but includes play, my letters also give accounts of sessions of liberty—that allowed me to go to the opera in Chicago and to have minor adventures on shore in various cities in China and finally in Seattle and environs. I was never bored during my Navy year  and when those letters come out as a book—as both my first and my last one, to quote the paradox that opens my draft of the introduction—I am hopeful that its readers won’t be bored either.