Shedding Light on Hell
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Shedding Light on Hell Gone to Soldiers By Marge Piercy Summit Books. 703 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" " I am the unluckiest...
...Piercy lets him marry Abra, but not until she repudiates her upper-class antiSemitic family...
...From the brush, he watched them for a moment, there on the cliffs with the wind whipping the girls' black hair and the sea rising up the horizon so blue it hurt his eyes, and then one of the children missed...
...This story begins in the mind of a divorced New York writer whose success, due to shrewd calculation of women's fantasies and the trade's taboos, has made her valuable to the government as a producer of propaganda fiction...
...Jacqueline suffers this at first from the French unbelievingly, amazed at their quick acceptance of Nazi attitudes...
...She is saying that anyone of Jewish blood who confronts anti-Semitism and learns about the Holocaust must reject the surrounding "civilization" and become totally and passionately a Jew...
...Amazing as the thought transference between twins can be, these detailed visions seem so blatant a device as to lessen the emotional effect...
...A young woman with a small girl in her arms tries but can't bring herself to leap...
...Piercy gives him only five chapters, wisely scattered among those describing the other characters' work, flights, pursuits, and varied (or variant) love affairs...
...Hopes for a future Zion seem unreal: "The idea of us picking up and moving to the Orient to become date farmers is a fantasy I cannot take seriously for five minutes...
...He wants her to meet boys of her "own kind," with whom she has nothing in common...
...At last they reach the idyllic populated island of Saipan, their first easy victory...
...Actually, Piercy not only has nothing good to say about any French or Germans, but about any Americans except her own protagonists...
...The adults, one family after another, jump off the cliff...
...General Patton called them animals, according to Piercy, and our administrators allowed the Germans to go on running the camps where the displaced persons were held...
...I was born Jewish, but what does that mean...
...In those initial journal entries, amid romantic chatter, Jacqueline reports estrangement from her father because "he chooses to limit himself culturally...
...The other much more extensive branches of the Resistance are hardly mentioned, let alone shown in action...
...Later she wonders, "How will I ever survive the desert of time that stretches out before me bleak and endless till I shall be on my own as an adult and not have to explain myself morning, noon and night to my family...
...Her gingery spirit, already evident in these initial Paris journal entries, makes her one of the most appealing of the 10 people whose distinctive, widely separated World War II experiences make up Gone to Soldiers...
...Most of her main characters start out as typical Americans who have become part of their chosen social scene...
...Jeff, whose father (and Bernice' s) is an obnoxious WASP professor, drops into Jacqueline's small group of Jewish Maquis and wins her love, but when he is tortured swallows his cyanide pill...
...But the farther from her own normal territory Piercy ranges—and she reaches into areas considered out of bounds for women—the more effective she is as a writer...
...Until that point her anger finds different objects—men's subjugation of women, racism in Detroit—along with the prevalent anti-Semitism...
...Nine chapters are devoted to Daniel, a cryptanalyst decoding Japanese messages that can, if heeded, save our ships in the Pacific...
...As expected, their fictional experiences make them see wrongs, work for change, acting on what are clearly the author's intense convictions...
...14 to Jacqueline, who learns, almost too late, to love him...
...There are places this very day where people are being called animals...
...And while carrying on one character's narrative it adds inexorably to an awful but irresistible knowledge of what war is really like...
...Like the author's earlier protagonists (one was a crusader against Boston developers' use of arson and eviction) Louise and her ex-husband Oscar, a Columbia sociologist, are alert liberals, in the end taking a strongly Leftist position...
...To create the right response Piercy has followed an effective plan...
...The difference here, as the tale continues, is in the magnitude of the wrongs, their almost limitless field of action, and ultimately the singlemindedness of the way they are perceived, the laser-like enlightenment Piercy means to pass on through the characters to the reader...
...Then her mother and sister become part of a sweep of thousands herded into a velodrome and pressed body-to-body for a week without food or water or latrine...
...If her view of the problem had been as broad as her view of war's savagery, it could have been an appeal to all of us— Jew and Gentile alike—to fight the cruelty and genocide that have gone on everywhere since earliest times...
...Daniel Balaban's devotion to Oriental studies has made him an outsider to his Bronx family...
...Practiced in keeping a grip on the reader, she uses this skill to educate a public too young to remember, along with many who have forgottenorwho never knew the full and shocking truth...
...The young Marine Murray (fiancé of Ruthie, pioneer assembly line worker) is part of a group replacing "gutted hulks of young men" carrying out the endless landings and two-way slaughters America employed in slowly conquering the Pacific...
...and 12 chapters to the author's alter ego, Louise...
...10 to Naomi, one of Jacqueline's younger sisters, who has been evacuated to America...
...10 to Bernice, who when her ambitions as an aviatrix are thwarted by her gender, decides to change it...
...Each of the 93 chapters, individually titled ("Ruthie 3: Of Good Girls and Bad Girls," "Jeff 5: Friends Best Know How to Wound," "Bernice 5: The Crooked Desires of the Heart Fulfilled...
...The lives portrayed are so active and involving (from Jacqueline's delicate placement of scarce plastique under the right Nazi railroad car to Duvey's minute-by-minute urgencies on a tanker trapped as part of a doomed convoy among U-boats in the Mediterranean) that Piercy's purposes—her furious, driving purposes—may not be detected until two thirds of the way through the huge chronicle...
...Nor would you ever guess that Gypsies and radicals and many others had shared the torture of Jews in concentration camps...
...As a religion, I find it absurd...
...One of Piercy's objectives is to show what war did to all kinds of people all over the world...
...Murray, who goes into the War sharing Ruthie's resolve to climb out of the working class through education, returns from combat paralyzed by memories of murdering his sergeant...
...Soon Jacqueline, cut off from that family (itself scattered, the twins separated by 4,000 miles), will be taking her first dangerous steps toward becoming "Gingembre" in the Resistance...
...could be a strong short story...
...The one French citizen we see providing Jacqueline shelter on the underground railway turns out to be Oscar Kahan's sister, a baronne who pays later by being beheaded...
...Louise becomes a war correspondent, and in the last phases of the War makes climactic discoveries that sometimes flash the prose into eloquence...
...Piercy gives early clues to her second driving purpose...
...A Marshall Plan would be unthinkable...
...Piercy has a loyal following for her novels, which tend to tell at great lengths, in workaday language, about fairly predictable types...
...eight to Jeff, who parachutes into Jacqueline's group of Maquis and ends his career as an artist...
...But the direction of her answer is personal, inward looking...
...This is justified when she tells of our official treatment of the concentration camp survivors...
...The picture is so shocking as to make the most extreme reaction understandable...
...Piercy's most vicious American example is Murray's persecution by his sergeant, with fatal consequences...
...Marie-Charlotte has only one younger sister making her life miserable, but I have two: double trouble, twins, and completely wicked...
...As the end of the book approaches, Piercy's message becomes explicit...
...After meeting a desperate attack from a remnant of wounded Japanese soldiers—on crutches, bandaged and blinded—Murray's unit comes comes upon the trapped civilians: "Some kids were playing catch in a circle...
...More seriously, Piercy's habits of popular writing permit her to let young Naomi Levy-Minot in Detroit see in dreams what Rivka is suffering in a concentration camp...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" " I am the unluckiest seventeen-yearold in my entire deuxième classe at lycée Victor Hugo," Jacqueline Levy-Minot writes in her journal on May 14, 1939...
...11 to upper-class Protestant Abra, who will marry him after being Oscar's lover and OSS assistant in London under siege from buzz-bombs and V-2s...
...Reading Piercy you could never imagine that a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Pastor NiemoUer had ever lived...
...The choice of Louise Kahan for the novel's opening focus is rather misleading—perhaps intentionally...
...As the grenade exploded and the children were torn apart and their bodies hurled through the air, the men around him groaned as one and Murray understood what game the children played...
...Piercy's is clear...
...Against the immensity of her task and her triumph, it seems almost ungracious to note that the novel is not free of a few anachronisms and grammatical flaws...
...Louise Kahan has adopted the nom deplume Annette Hollander Sinclair...
...Piercy, seeing the sinister signs of anti-Semitism rising here again, along with racism, must have felt impelled to give warning...
...As dietary laws, archaic...
...The single good German is a dead one...
...By then the point of no return is long since passed...
...As she runs back "frantic as a trapped puppy" toward the Americans, who shout encouragement, she is killed by her own compatriots...
Vol. 70 • July 1987 • No. 10
