“Don’t begin in 1948. This story is a hundred years old.”

When Herman Wouk, the award-winning Jewish American author, sat down to write a historical novel centered around the history of the young Jewish state, he consulted with his Israeli friends, who had personally experienced the events he wanted to write about. Some were leading Israeli military and political figures, others were unknowns whom the world would come to recognize and who he’d randomly mentioned now and then, including one young fellow by the name of Ilan Ramon. People were generally pessimistic about the book’s chances of success. They felt the story was too complex; it wasn’t simply a war story, but rather something no one else in the world could truly understand; the time frame was too broad because it was impossible to understand anything that happened here without going into way more history than can fit into one book.

But that didn’t bother Herman Wouk. He had already won a Pulitzer Prize for a book that all his friends and acquaintances in the US Army warned him not to write (The Caine Mutiny, 1952), and he had managed to get a 2,000-page historical saga about World War II onto the bestseller lists. Besides, unlike most Jewish-American writers of that generation, he felt he was a Jew first of all, before anything else. He was also an ardent Zionist. In fact, by the time he wrote his books about Israel in the early 1990s, Wouk’s views on Zionism were already considered quite naïve and even somewhat childish in Israel itself.

He simply wanted to tell this story. A story of hope and glory.

Herman Wouk was born during World War I to a traditional Jewish family that immigrated from Russia to the Bronx, NY. As a young man, he was a typical American for all intents and purposes, far removed from any national or religious awareness. But then, his mother’s father, Mendel Leib Levine, fled Russia and joined the New York Wouks. He made his young grandson study Gemara with him and became one of the two most influential factors in Wouk’s life (the other being the US Navy).

Herman Wouk was an incredibly talented young man. As a 16-year-old, he got accepted to Columbia University, where he edited the university’s comedy magazine Jester and wrote several plays that were performed by students. He received his first degree before he was even 20 years old. When he graduated, he worked as a radio host, while simultaneously writing a play – The Man in the Trench Coat – which was not a resounding success.

And then came World War II.

Wouk enlisted in the navy and left the Jewish community of New York behind. He served as an officer aboard a minesweeper in the Atlantic Ocean, saw close friends wounded and killed, and spent long days sailing on the high seas, reflecting and writing.

When the ship docked at a port for repairs, he met Betty Brown. The young officer made quite an impression on the beautiful redhead who ran the office at the port, and she in turn captured his heart. Since Brown was a Protestant (albeit not a particularly devout one) and he was Jewish, it seemed likely to be a short-lived war romance. He returned to sea, with a photo of Betty as a keepsake, and she stayed on dry land, dreaming of the handsome officer she could not marry. While he was off fighting the Japanese and writing his second book between shifts on board the ship, she began to study Judaism. When she managed to contact him, she let him know that she was interested in converting.

Upon his release from the navy in 1945, they got married, despite his father’s reservations. The future looked bright. Betty Wouk supported her husband’s literary career. They spent long evenings together with him reading her the latest chapters he had written, and she would offer comments and corrections. She sometimes erased whole sections that had taken him weeks to write, “but she was always, always right,” Wouk used to say.

Despite the efforts, and even though the book he had written aboard the minesweeper (City Boy)was praised by critics, his first two books didn’t sell well. While he was writing The Caine Mutiny, his loving wife warned him that this was it – if this book wasn’t a success, he’d need to find himself a new job. He had a family to feed, after all.

Luckily, The Caine Mutiny was a smash hit. It was selected for prestigious book clubs, earned its author the Pulitzer Prize, was translated into many languages, made into a Broadway play and even became a Hollywood movie starring Humphrey Bogart.

Herman Wouk was now a household name, and his status and livelihood as a respected writer was guaranteed. In the following years, he wrote various books, many of which focused on the identity complexes of the Jewish elite in the United States. These books met with varying degrees of success. Throughout this time, Judaism occupied an increasing share of his thoughts.

In 1971, after many years spent working and researching, The Winds of War, the first book in a sprawling epic about World War II, was published. “It was a prologue to what I really wanted to write about,” he said once in an interview, although this was seemingly the longest prologue in the history of literature, with over a thousand pages telling the tale of the Henry family, who are swept up in the storm that was the Second World War.

War and Remembrance, the second part of the epic, was published seven years later.  The book is dedicated to his and Betty’s eldest son, who had drowned in a swimming pool before he had turned five years old: 

“In memory of Abraham Isaac Wouk. He will destroy death forever.” 

Wouk continued doing what he did best: telling the story of the deadliest conflict in human history through the eyes of ordinary people, thereby turning the war into something personal, and making that personal experience into something universal. But in this book, he also presented the reader with the complexity of his personal worldview: He was an American patriot to the depths of his soul, a modern liberal, a man of the world, and also, perhaps more than anything else, a Jew.

The Winds of War and War and Remembrance have been translated into many languages, made into a television series that won an Emmy and a Golden Globe, and are Wouk’s most important literary legacy. In America, the books immediately garnered praise, lectures at the Library of Congress have been dedicated to them; and people like Henry Kissinger, Robert Caro, and William Safire have written about the great influence the books have had on their lives.

In the meantime, Wouk’s friendships in the State of Israel, which grew before his eyes, continued to develop. He visited Israel, bought an apartment in Jerusalem, and even received an honorary doctorate from Bar-Ilan University. When his son decided to immigrate to Israel and enlist in the IDF, Wouk started to learn Hebrew.

The National Library of Israel has preserved his correspondence with the famous Israeli author S.Y. Agnon. The letters aren’t very long or complex, since Wouk chose to write to Agnon in Hebrew – in the large handwriting of someone who has just learned to write, using short sentences containing a few spelling errors, unsurprisingly.

In one letter, he told his friend Agnon that he would be visiting Israel for three weeks, that he would be staying at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and wanted to meet up with him. In a later letter, he thanked Agnon for meeting him and sent his condolences for a death in the immediate family.

As an American observer from the sidelines, he was extremely moved by the State of Israel. Though such excitement was shared by many of Israel’s own citizens, for them it would typically, and naturally, fade over time.

Wouk decided to write a large-scale historical novel about the revival of the Zionist idea and the establishment of the State of Israel. In The Hope and The Glory – the two books that together created his Israeli epic, he saw a direct continuation of War and Remembrance, which ends with a story about a passionate Zionist who plans to illegally immigrate to Israel to help establish its naval forces.

Wouk’s dedication of The Glory, which was published in 1994, reads as follows:

 To the Israelis

Valorous in War

Generous in Peace

Above All to Those Who Fell

To Save the Land

Those who tried to warn him that the book wouldn’t do well proved to be partially correct. Although it wasn’t a colossal failure, Israeli history it seems – with all its complexity and social nuances – was of less interest to the American public. The book also failed to capture the hearts of Israelis.

Was it the somewhat naïve, overzealous point of view (though the books also contain some criticisms) that the common Israeli reader – who over time had adopted a slightly more cynical view of the Zionist project – couldn’t relate to? Or was it that Wouk had failed to fully capture the true essence of Israeli society and thus the story felt a bit artificial and foreign?

Either way, this was the Israel that Wouk saw on his visits. Full of grandeur, courageous people who could also be arrogant and heartless, a land for whom the bells of history toll on its streets daily. A land that has enabled the revival of the Jewish People after the Holocaust

The dedication of the Hebrew version ends as follows:

“As for all the dangers and problems that I keep up to date with, in the weekend issues of Yedioth Ahronoth, the Jewish saga that has been unfolding for three thousand years is mostly dangers and problems. And yet, here we are – you, Hebrew readers on the front line, and me, the old chronicler and your adoring fan.”