Young Lions

My better half & the mother of my children - Leah Garrett - has a new book coming out today with Northwestern University Press. It's called Young Lions and here's the Amazon listing: 

Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public’s ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new “Jewish” war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism.
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Leah has gotten a couple of early blurbs for the book. Debra Dash Moore, The New York Times best-selling author of GI Jews said this: "Young Lions persuasively presents a fresh interpretation that illuminates previously hidden aspects of these [novels]. Leah Garrett's lucid study will change how we think about World War II, the Holocaust and American Jews." The Harvard Professor of American and African American studies, Werner Sollers, said this: "theoretically sophisticated and probing,Young Lions is full of insights that are of interest to the literary scholar, the historian, and the student of American ethnic relations." I think its of tremendous interest to the general reader too. It's about the Jewish soliders in the US forces in WW2 (500,000 of them served) what they read on the line and what they wrote about when they came home. American war novels until then were in the mould of Red Badge of Courage or For Whom The Bell Tolls. All that changed with the publication of The Naked and the Dead, Catch 22, The Young Lions, Dangling Man, Battle Cry, The Caine Mutiny etc. and those novels influenced my favourite WW2 novel The Thin Red Line. There's also a good bit about Sergeant Bilko. 
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Here's the Northwestern University Press page about the book. 

The Thin Red Line Again

I've been reading The Thin Red Line by James Jones and one of the interesting differences between the book and the Terrence Malick movie is Captain Stein. In the film Malick changes Stein's identity to that of a Greek officer, Captain Staros, but in the book he's Jewish. Stein has one of the most memorable scenes in the novel when he refuses the direct order of his Colonel to suicidally sacrifice his company on a direct attack on a Japanese position during the battle of Guadalcanal. The scene is given all the more resonance in the book because Colonel Tall never lets Stein forget that he is a "Jew lawyer" in civilian life and he, Tall, is a WASP West Point graduate, class of '28. Why did Malick remove this interesting dimension from his film? I don't know the answer but it isn't the first time it has happened. Anyone who has read The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw knows just how rife the US Army was with Jew haters. JD Salinger told his daughter Margaret that the US Army was full of anti-Semitism and racism in World War 2, more so even that in regular life and Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer experienced a great deal of anti semitic taunts and attacks, some of which comes through in their books; yet in Spielberg's Band of Brothers we never hear a single racist or anti-Semitic remark from the saintly fellows of Easy Company. This is surprising, especially when they do plenty of grumbling about their incompetent Jewish C.O. They call him every name in the book but the K word never raises its ugly head.
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Spielberg and Tom Hanks's The Pacific starts playing here this week and its already being praised as the most realistic TV show on the war ever; because of their track record I'm a little skeptical about that and I wonder if we'll ever see a World War 2 movie or TV series that really tells it like it was warts and all. As long as we're continually hero worshipping "The Greatest Generation" I suspect not.