Herman Wouk has ranged in his novels from the mighty narrative of The Caine Mutiny and the warm, intimate humor of Marjorie Morningstar to the global panorama of The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. All these powers merge in this major new work of nonfiction, The Will to Live On, an illuminating account of the worldwide revolution that has been sweeping over Jewry, set against a swiftly reviewed background of history, tradition, and sacred literature.
Forty years ago, in his modern classic This Is My God, Herman Wouk stated the case for his religious beliefs and conduct. His aim in that work and in The Will to Live On has been to break through the crust of prejudice, to reawaken clearheaded thought about the magnificent Jewish patrimony, and to convey a message of hope for Jewish survival.
Although the Torah and the Talmud are timeless, the twentieth century has brought earthquake shocks to the Jews: the apocalyptic experience of the Holocaust, the reborn Jewish state, the precarious American diaspora, and deepening religious schisms. After a lifetime of study, Herman Wouk examines the changes affecting the Jewish world, especially the troubled wonder of Israel, and the remarkable, though dwindling, American Jewry. The book is peppered with wonderful stories of the authors encounters with such luminaries as Ben Gurion, Isidor Rabi, Yitzhak Rabin, Saul Bellow, and Richard Feynan.
Learned in general culture, warmly tolerant of other beliefs, this noted author expresses his own other beliefs, this noted author expresses his own faith with a passion that gives the book its fire and does so in the clear, engaging style that--as in all Wouks fiction--makes the reader want to know what the next page will bring.
Herman Wouk writes, in The Will to Live On:
And so the Melting Pot is beginning to work on Jewry. Its effect was deferred in the passing century by the shock of the Holocaust and the rise of Israel, but today the Holocaust is an academic subject, and Israel is no longer a beleaguered underdog. Amkha in America is not dying, it is slowly melting, and those are very different fates. Dying is a terror, an agony, a strangling finish, to be fought off by sheer instinct, by the will to live on, to the last breath. Melting is a mere diffusion into an ambient welcoming warmth in which one is dissolved and disappears, as a teaspoon of sugar vanishes into hot tea....
Yet here in the United States, for all the scary attrition I have pictured, we are still a community of over five million strong. . . . At a far stretch of my hopes, our descendants could one day be a diaspora comparable to Babylonia. At the moment, of course, that is beyond rational expectation. We have to concentrate on lasting at all. . . .
About the Author
Herman Wouk began his career as a gag writer for radio comedians in New York City in 1934. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for the classic The Caine Mutiny. Other bestsellers include Marjorie Morningstar, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Hope, and The Glory. He lives in California and Georgetown.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
The Rebbe and the Historian
In Palm Springs where I live nowadays, I go to a Hasidic synagogue. I am not at all a Hasid, but it is a reasonably short Sabbath walk. Later in my book I write a lot about this mystic pietist movement, which arose in eastern Europe around 1700, and still flourishes worldwide. Our likable young American-born rabbi--lean, tall, long brown beard--settled here years ago. In this desert town of golfing and sun his intensive Orthodoxy has proven a hard sell, and his family is large and growing, so he perforce doubles as a prison chaplain. Now and then after a taxing week, he asks me to give the Sabbath sermon. I try to fill in with a few plain words about the weeks Torah portion, and that once led to a bizarre incident which can serve as a topic sentence for this book.
In the summer, the little congregation can shrivel below the ten men needed for a minyan, a prayer quorum, but come winter the place is packed with black-clad fur-hatted Hasidim of varied allegiance, known like their Rebbes by the ghost names of their destroyed shtetls--little towns--Lubavitchers, Satmarers, Belzers, Gerers, Bobovers, and so on. One Rebbe, who comes himself with his followers to warm up, is the Munkatcher, a grizzled imposing personage in his Shabbat garb of white stockings, dark knee breeches, and black or gold-embroidered long coat. As I was holding forth one Shabbat on a verse in Exodus, the Munkatcher Rebbe suddenly rose to his feet and stalked out into, the sunshine, considerably disconcerting me. I had been citing a comment, by Ibn Ezra, the twelfth-century exegete who strongly influenced Spinoza, and had I made reference to Spinoza I might have understood the Munkatchers walkout. But I had not, and Ibn Ezra is a classic authority accepted by all.
The comment I was quoting was on the laws of the Hebrew bondman, the eved ivri. This, passage in Exodus precedes the law on murder. Ibn Ezra observes that the sequence is proper, because freedom is more to be prized than life itself. Israels first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, once said something like that to me, and I was mentioning this when the Munkatcher Rebbe, upon hearing the name Ben-Gurion, got up and left the synagogue.
There is more to the story, but let me first explain what it was that Ben-Gurion said.
What took you so long? Ben-Gurion asked me when we first met, during the intermission of a performance in Hebrew of my Caine Mutiny Court Martial, at the Habimah Theatre in Tel Aviv. It was a gala evening, laid on in honor of the playwright, a newcomer to Israel, so even the informal Israelis were somewhat dressed up; but the squat paunchy Zionist leader, instantly recognizable by the floating wings of white hair on his tanned balding head, wore a khaki open-neck shirt and pants. My wife and I had been out at sea with the fledgling Jewish navy, had docked late in Haifa, and had been rocketed to Tel Aviv in a military car, barely, in time for the second act. So his inquiry might have been a gentle twitting about that, but it was not what he meant, and I understood him.
Im not here yet, I replied, adopting his allusive style.
He grinned and invited Sarah and me to his home in the Negev desert. Next day we came to the Sde Boker (Fields of Morning) kibbutz in a command car escorted by a jeep with a mounted machine gun, for back in 1955 the raw little country was being bloodily harassed in broad daylight byfedayeen, terrorists from Egypt and Gaza. Ben-Gurion was out of office and working on his memoirs, so he discoursed in long Churchillian style on history, politics, philosophy, and literature until the sun was low. His wife Paula, seeing that he was enjoying himself, invited us to stay for dinner.
No, no, theyre kosher, said Ben-Gurion.
So Ill make them hard-boiled eggs and salad.
Paula, they have to get back to Tel Aviv before dark.
When we were leaving he came out with his straight Zionist line, no more hints. You must return here to live, he said. This is the only place for Jews like you. Here you will be free.
Free? I ventured to reply. Free? With enemy armies ringing you, with their leaders publicly threatening to wipe out ‘the Zionist entity, With your roads impassable after sundown-free?
I did not say safe, the old man retorted, I said free.
That was how I happened, nearly forty years later, to mention him and outrage the Munkatcher Rebbe.
