In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 6 Y M Y W A R R U S S E L L F R A S E R The shadow of another world war, looming larger with each decade , hung over my boyhood. An avid reader of the daily newspaper , I was keenly aware of the growing power of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. At least once a week, I clipped and pasted excerpts from the daily paper in a scrapbook, my young person’s ‘‘history of the times.’’ Phil, our family’s best friend, helped me sort out the clippings. He had a full-time job clerking for Consolidated Edison, but every weekend we expected him at our house, ‘‘my home away from home,’’ he called it. In his Plymouth flivver with a rumble seat and running board, we made excursions, to the Rockaways and the ocean or to Luna Park to ride the Ferris wheel. Once in a while my sister Marge and my kid brother Al were included, but Phil always insisted on having me with them. ‘‘Riding shotgun,’’ he put it. My scrapbook involved him almost as much as me. The news of the day put wrinkles in his forehead, and he supplied a running commentary on the events. When we read that Hitler wanted to take over Austria, he grimaced and heaved a great sigh. ‘‘Not good!’’ President Roosevelt and Austria’s Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg protested, but Hitler got his way. Phil and I looked gloomily 3 7 R at the news photo of goose-stepping Nazi soldiers marching into Innsbruck. ‘‘I wouldn’t like to be trampled by those jackboots, would you?’’ he asked me. The news in the paper kept getting darker. Japan, an ally of Germany and Italy, tightened its pincers on China, and France abandoned Czechoslovakia to the Reich. Franco’s rebels reached the coast, cutting Loyalist Spain in two. Some American volunteers escaped by swimming the Ebro. Later I got to know one of the survivors of this Abraham Lincoln Brigade, but by now all are probably dead. Russia invaded Finland, Italy invaded Ethiopia, and Mussolini greeted Hitler in a resplendent Rome. In the Soviet Union, twenty-one former leaders too close to the throne were put on trial and executed. Walter Duranty in The New York Times took a sympathetic view of the Moscow show trials, reporting that all was well under Stalin. I have a photo of him, smiling at the camera, in my scrapbook. The last time I looked, its pages were all but disintegrating, and when I turned them they left behind a scurf of brown paper. Everything falls apart. But my instinct is to see life as cyclic rather than entropic, and I want to say how all things falling are built again. Beware of being excessively cheerful, however. Americans, optimistic by temperament, are guilty of that often. Phil, tutored by his Italian blood, guessed at the darkness of history and was wiser. I called him Phil, short for Ra√aello, the name he was born with. For years he had been at the beck and call of his parents, a crotchety old couple from Calabria, then of a pair of unmarried sisters for whom he served as life support, a sickly brother who took forever to die, Mom and Pop, needy in di√erent ways, and finally me, Japheth in search of a father. Some years after he entered our lives, and after the war was over, he married my mother when she and Pop divorced. That was how be became my stepfather. In contrast to Pop, whose mouth turned down at the corners, his mouth turned up, like a laughing man in the comics. But a hint of sadness in his eyes went with the good humor. He knew that nice guys don’t always win. On the morning of 6 June 1944, I got up early to find that the heavens had opened. That day the Allies invaded Hitler’s Europe, the beginning of the end of the war. What must the German 3 8 F R A S E R Y soldiers have thought as they peered through the mist at the greatest fleet ever assembled...

pdf

Share