An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [75]
We read Leon Uris’s popular novels, Exodus, and, better, Mila 18, about the Warsaw ghetto. We read Hersey’s The Wall—again, the Warsaw ghetto. We read Time magazine, and Life, and Look. It was in the air, that there had been these things. We read, above all, and over and over, for we were young, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. This was where we belonged; here we were at home.
I say “we,” but in fact I did not know anyone else who read these things. Perhaps my parents did, for they brought the books home. What were my friends reading? We did not then talk about books; our reading was private, and constant, like the interior life itself. Still, I say, there must have been millions of us. The theaters of war—the lands, the multiple seas, the very corridors of air—and the death camps in Europe, with their lines of starved bald people…these, combined, were the settings in which our imaginations were first deeply stirred.
Earlier generations of children, European children, I inferred, had had on their minds heraldry and costumed adventure. They read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. They read about King Arthur and Lancelot and Galahad; they read about Robin Hood. I had read some of these things and considered them behind me. It would have been pleasant, I suppose, to close your eyes and imagine yourself in a suit of armor, astride an armored horse, fighting a battle for honor with broadswords on a pennanted plain, or in a copse of trees.
But of what value was honor when, in book after book, the highest prize was a piece of bread? Of what use was a broadsword, or even a longbow, against Hitler’s armies which occupied Europe, against Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Hitler’s Panzers, Hitler’s U-boats, or against Hitler’s S.S., who banged on the door and led Anne Frank and her family away? We closed our eyes and imagined how we would survive the death camps—maybe with honor and maybe not. We imagined how we would escape the death camps, imagined how we would liberate the death camps. How? We fancied and schemed, but we had read too much, and knew there was no possible way. This was a novel concept: Can’t do. We were in for the duration. We closed our eyes and waited for the Allies, but the Allies were detained.
Now and over the next few years, the books appeared and we read them. We read The Bridge Over the River Kwai, The Young Lions. In the background sang a chorus of smarmy librarians:
The world of books is a child’s
Land of enchantment.
When you open a book and start reading
You enter another world—the world
Of make-believe—where anything can happen.
We read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, and To Hell and Back. We read The Naked and the Dead, Run Silent, Run Deep, and Tales of the South Pacific, in which American sailors saw native victims of elephantiasis pushing their own enlarged testicles before them in wheelbarrows. We read The Caine Mutiny, Some Came Running.
I was a skilled bombardier. I could run a submarine with one hand, and evade torpedoes, depth charges, and mines. I could disembowel a soldier with a bayonet, survive under a tarp in a lifeboat, and parachute behind enemy lines. I could contact the Resistance with my high-school French and eavesdrop on the Germans with my high-school German:
“Du! Kleines Mädchen! Bist du französisches Mädchen oder bist du Amerikanischer spy?”
“Je suis une jeune fille de la belle France, Herr S.S. Officer.”
“Prove it!”
“Je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont.”
“Very gut. Run along and play.”
What were librarians reading these days? One librarian pressed on me a copy of Look Homeward, Angel. “How I envy you,” she said, “having a chance to read this for the very first time.” But it was too late, several years too late.
At last Hitler fell, and scientists working during the war came up with the atomic bomb. We read On the Beach, A Canticle for Leibowitz; we read Hiroshima. Reading about the bomb was a part of reading about the war: these were actual