The American writer of large-scale dramatic fiction, Herman Wouk, who has died aged 103, belonged to an era of religious and patriotic certainties, fast fading in the aftermath of the Second World War.
He left political challenge to contemporaries like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth or Norman Mailer, whose vision and critique of post-war America were in direct conflict with his own.
Wouk chose to stand apart, a grand story-teller with a broad canvas to paint. Whether writing about Judaism, the Second World War or American history, he was a committed patriot, a Republican and an uncritical Jew and Zionist.
He paid the price by being sniffed at by the literati as a “middlebrow”, a blockbuster author who could not meet the high standards of a snobbish literary world. Yet even they would acknowledge his attention to detail and talent for narrative. And his best-sellers outsold the work of every other American Jewish author.
Brought up in an Orthodox Jewish household, with a grandfather over-committed to teaching him his barmitzvah, Wouk’s best known novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951) reflected his wartime experiences aboard minesweepers, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. He adapted it into a Broadway play, which Columbia Pictures turned into a successful film, starring Humphrey Bogart in 1954.
His novel Marjorie Morningstar became a favourite with Jewish readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Written in 1955, just before a new wave of British Jewish writers like Bernice Rubens, Gerda Charles, Brian Glanville, and Frederic Raphael came to prominence, Marjorie Morningstar was a coming-of-age tale of an aspiring young Jewish, middle-class New York actress who discards her Jewish name, Morgenstern, and struggles with her faith and morality.
Her story resonated with the American readership and was turned into a film starring Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly in 1958. Its old-fashioned realism reached the hearts of its readership.
Today, such a name-change would be regarded as out of touch and anti-feminist, the work of an author who spoke for his own time as an Orthodox Jew.
However, not everyone would agree. Judy Bolton-Fasman writing in the Forward, sees Marjorie as one of the first JAPs of modern literature, who, at the age of 16, understands how male-centric the world is, and that it is men who will determine the trajectory of her acting career. Although it all ends in smoked salmon and suburbia, Marjorie’s sexual liberation and creative aspiration make her something of a feminist trailblazer.
Wouk was a purveyor of the long, long read such as Youngblood Hawke, (1962) a tome-and-a-half fictionalising the rise and fall of a young writer based on the life of Thomas Wolfe. His debut novel, The Aurora Dawn was published in 1947. Others includes City-Boy, Don’t Stop the Carnival, The Winds of War, and its sequel, War and Remembrance, containing his description of the Holocaust as: “the main tale I have to tell.”
A writer who embraced extensive detail and research, Wouk’s own religious background was his true canvas. Inside, Outside, (1985) describes four generations of a Jewish family in Russia, America and Israel, while The Hope, (1993) and its sequel, The Glory, (1994) deal with the first 33 years of Israel’s history. In 2000, his The Will to Live On: This is our Heritage, explained Jewish history with sacred texts.
But it was in This is My God: the Jewish Way of Life, that he reached out and truly expressed his faith. It encapsulated the man within the writer, who held fast to his religion while other writers had a more philosophical take on life’s complexities.
Herman Wouk was born in New York to Esther née Levine and Abraham Wouk, émigrés to the Bronx from today’s Belarus. After years of poverty and hard work, his father opened a successful laundry service.
His maternal grandfather Mendel Leib Levine joined them from Minsk and took over Herman’s barmitzvah studies. Despite Herman’s protests, he was told by his father: “If I were on my deathbed –- I would say ‘Study the Talmud.’” Herman flirted with the secular life but returned to the Judaism of his roots.
He gained a diploma from Manhattan’s Townsend Harris High School, and a BA at the age of 19 from Columbia University in comparative literature and philosophy. He became a radio scriptwriter, and from 1936-41, wrote gags for radio comedian Fred Allen.
Following the US attack on Pearl Harbour, he joined the US Navy Reserves in 1942 and served in the Pacific theatre. On December 10, 1945 he married Betty Sarah Browne, a naval personnel specialist, who had converted to Judaism, and later became his literary agent.
They had three sons, Abraham Isaac, named after his father, Nathaniel and Joseph. Tragically, Abraham drowned in a swimming pool accident before his fifth birthday. Wouk dedicated War and Remembrance to him, quoting Isaiah 25:8 “He will destroy death forever”.
Wouk received many awards, including the Pulitzer and the Guardian of Zion from Bar-Ilan University in 1998. Although success took him far from his Bronx roots and pitched him into the middle ground of American fiction, in a sense they never left him. Sarah predeceased him in 2011. He is survived by his sons and three grandchildren.
Gloria Tessler
Herman Wouk: born May 27,1915. Died May 17, 2019
