Love and Work, Love and War

       At age twenty-five my father has succeeded at his chosen occupation.  The paper business has its ups and downs: product is scarce, then marked too high, customers buy more then less. But these are incidents. He had met the major challenge.

            Still to accomplish is love, lasting love, intimate love. And since he is coming of age in the late nineteen-thirties and early nineteen forties, there is also war, and the draft.

            So it is love and war that run counterpoint to each other in the last two years of my father’s diary, from January 1941 to December 1942.   He dates one girl after another and notes one after another the movement of armies, or diplomatic threats and reprisals in Europe and Asia.

            In May of ’41 he receives a notice to appear before the draft board. He is afraid to let his mother know.

            She, in turn, is desperate to keep him safe and urges him to get married which will perhaps keep him out of action.  Get married, but not to Betty.  A doctor offers to get him a deferment for a problem with a strained ligament. But he is unsure what he wants. Part of him wants to fight.  Brave Daddy. “If not for Mom, I’d have enlisted a long time ago and been a second Looey.”

            In late June he has broken off with Betty for good and describes himself as “still searching.”

           Then the “U.S. is at loggerheads with Japan. Looks serious. The President wants to hold draftees longer than 1 year.”

            Max Abramowitz is a vigorous male, age 25, in perfect health. His draft classification is 1A meaning available to serve. 

            The Selective Service process is as follows:  First you receive a questionnaire, with a date to appear before the draft board. You appear with your questionnaire filled out.  You are given a physical, you receive your classification and a number.  Then, if your number is not called up immediately, this process is repeated a month, two months, five months later.

In January of 1941 the draft board is calling up number 900. My father is 2014. “May be called up soon.”

             In June the Germany army begins its invasion of Russia.  Russia  “isn’t holding out so well,” my father worries into his journal. “They may collapse.  Took my physical.”

            Then, on September 10, 1941 he meets his one and only, Ida Bernstein, except that he doesn’t know it yet. “She’s cute and smart and a good sport. Will see more of her.”

            In a month she has become, “My Ida.”

            Then a second questionnaire, a second visit to the draft board.  Ida has another suitor. He threatens to enlist. But he can’t bear to tell his mother that he’s considering it.

   January 1941, “We’re moving so rapidly toward a war that there doesn’t seem to be any stopping it – it seems so imminent…"

            April, “We’ll be in war by July…. There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do, so why worry. But I do.”

            And the reader, his oldest daughter, knows that all this is leading to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  My father knows something is going to happen.  Everyone, it seems, knows something is going to happen.  But not exactly what the climax will be.

             October 1941, “I hesitate. I forbid any mention of the future.”

            Finally, December 7, the dawn bombing of Pearl Harbor. “It’s come. Everything’s changed.”

  By the end of that same month, Ida Bernstein has become, “my darling Ida.”

            In January  1942 she is “the most wonderful, the most charming, the mostest of the mostest. I always dreamed it would turn out this way but I was afraid to hope.”

            His passion starts to embarrass me.  Finally I feel like the voyeur I have been all along. They go out dancing. They go to shows. Gifts are exchanged, a star sapphire ring, a friendship cocktail diamond, a gold wristwatch.

 “I’ve the right personality for the darling I’m crazy about. At last I can say I am no longer alone.”  

And there, the diary comes to a close. Blank page follows blank page. No more need to talk to a private book when one has a partner who wants to hear your thoughts and dreams.   The diary concludes in 1942 with entries that each consist of a squiggly line, indicating nothing to say. These alternate with one word cursive entries: Ida. Ida. Ida.

            ***

My father never did get drafted.   He lived in the three-room apartment on Eldridge Street with his mother and earned a deferment as “the sole support of a widowed mother.”   Two days before the Allied armies landed on Normandy Beach, on June 4, 1944, he married my mother.   “She’s mine, all mine,” my father told us he was thinking when they stood together under the chuppah. They really were well suited and lived happily.  Except for the trouble caused in later years by their radical and unruly oldest, high-strung daughter, yours truly, Michele Abramowitz Clark.

Max and Michele before she started to cause trouble.