Herman Wouk was born in the Bronx in 1915, the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi from Minsk who sat him down with the Talmud and drilled him through the texts until the boy knew them cold.
Herman was not particularly enthusiastic about this. He was more interested in books, in comedy, in the kind of wit that got him named the funniest student in his class at Columbia in 1934. After graduation he wrote gags for the radio comedian Fred Allen, one of the biggest names in American comedy. Good money. Secular life. The Talmud lessons were somewhere in the background, not forgotten but not exactly present either.
Then Pearl Harbor happened and the Navy took him to the Pacific.
He served as executive officer aboard two destroyer minesweepers, the USS Zane and the USS Southard, spending four years on ships that swept for mines in waters where people were dying. He said later: “I learned about machinery, I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans.” He also started writing a novel during off-duty hours aboard ship, chapters passed to his Columbia professor Irwin Edman who showed them to a New York editor.
The Bronx gag writer was becoming something else in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
He came home, finished the novel, and kept writing. The Caine Mutiny came out in 1951. It was on the bestseller list for two years and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Humphrey Bogart played the villain in the film. Herman Wouk was one of the most celebrated novelists in America.
In 1955, Time magazine put him on the cover.
The article described his blend of worldly success and Orthodox Jewish observance as paradoxical. He kept kosher. He kept Shabbat. He stopped everything on Friday evening and didn’t start again until Saturday night, no matter what was happening, no matter who was calling. “He is a devout Orthodox Jew who has achieved worldly success in worldly-wise Manhattan while adhering to dietary prohibitions and traditional rituals which many of his fellow Jews find embarrassing,” the article said.
He didn’t find them embarrassing.
In 1959, at the height of his fame, when most celebrated American Jewish writers were running as fast as possible away from public identification with observant Judaism, Wouk wrote This Is My God, a personal explanation of Orthodox Jewish practice aimed at everyone, Jewish and not, who had ever wondered what it was actually about. The book explained kashrut, Shabbat, the holidays, the reasoning behind the rituals, in plain language without apology or condescension. It became a standard bar mitzvah and confirmation gift. It was serialized in the Los Angeles Times. It showed, through anecdotes from Wouk’s own life, that a modern American could be fully Orthodox and not be diminished by it.
Then he spent the next two decades writing The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, his two-volume epic of World War II seen through the eyes of a Jewish American naval officer. Twenty years of research. Thousands of pages. Every major theater of the war documented and dramatized. He dedicated War and Remembrance to his son Abraham Isaac, who had drowned in a swimming pool accident before his fifth birthday, quoting Isaiah 25:8: “He will destroy death forever.”
The man who had briefly drifted from the Talmud lessons of his grandfather in the glamour of radio comedy had come all the way back. He was the grandson of a rabbi from Minsk who had become a Pulitzer Prize winner and a television phenomenon and one of the most widely read American novelists of the twentieth century, and he never stopped being the grandson of the rabbi from Minsk.
He died in his sleep on May 17, 2019, at one hundred and three years old, still married to the same woman, Betty, who had converted to Judaism when they married in 1945 and became his literary agent and the love of his life for seventy-four years.
He once described the moment on the minesweeper in the Pacific where everything shifted: “The hard shell of a New York wise guy cracked and fell off.”
What was underneath had been there since his grandfather sat him down with the Talmud in the Bronx.
It was there until the end.
