#Reviews on every mans battle book free
What do I actually remember about The War? The blue stamps in ration books, shortages of sugar and butter, my mother stitching up the runs in her pink rayon stockings, the indignant reminder “It’s a free country” (now no longer in currency) that kids resorted to when other kids tried to boss them around. Machine shop apprentices, Brooklyn, New York, August 1942 Since neither my father nor my uncles had been drafted, and I had been assured that President Roosevelt would take good care of us and keep The War from coming to America, I felt no real fear of it, although I knew that Hitler hated Jews like me and my family.
#Reviews on every mans battle book windows
Although the air raid drills continued, and blackout blinds were lowered in windows each night, and radio announcers said London was being bombed, and little boys ran around the schoolyard with outspread arms tilting from side to side and yelling ack-ack-ack at one another, enemy planes never flew over Bay Ridge-or over Manhattan, where we moved by the time I was nine-or anywhere else in the country. Which would be worse, I wondered: not being identified or telling our teacher I’d lost my bracelet? Telling her would be worse, I decided.įor the next four years of my childhood, The War-which I thought of respectfully in capital letters-was the offstage accompaniment to my largely peaceful daily life. This presented me with one of the first serious dilemmas of my life.
![reviews on every mans battle book reviews on every mans battle book](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81sk6FJgXYL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
Very soon, my bracelet fell off somewhere. She didn’t explain what “identified” meant. She told us we had to wear these on our wrists at all times, so that we could be “identified” if necessary. Our teacher handed out elastic bracelets with little dangling celluloid discs on which each child’s name and birth date were neatly printed. I didn’t really grasp that we might all be in danger. If you got separated from your class as everyone hurried down the stairs, you would have to wander around forlornly carrying all your stuff until, at last, you found the sign with your group’s special color and number. The basement of the building was enormous and confusing. I hated this new, disrupting feature of school. You never knew when the bell would ring, and you’d have to drop everything and take shelter. Joyce with her mother and grandmother, New York City, early 1940sĪir raid drills became a feature of every school day. There, we first graders stood waiting with all the older kids for an endless stretch of time, until we heard another bell and were allowed back in our classroom. In case we had to suddenly run from the building, she told us to gather up our coats and galoshes, books, and pencil cases before we followed her downstairs to the basement. Only a little while after I sat down at my desk and the reading lesson started, a bell rang, and our teacher told us we were going to have an air raid drill. When my mother took me to school that morning, parents and teachers were talking tensely to one another in the hallways. No one had told me about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which had happened just the day before. But one day, my reading lesson was interrupted. I gobbled up each new word I was taught and made it mine, and could easily reel off all the various members of what my first-grade teacher called “word families,” with their endings of “ing” and “at.” I loved the calm, predictable routines of school and the prizes I was awarded for my progress-little squares of yellow paper with gold stars or stamped-on pictures of rabbits or baby chicks, which I kept at home in a special box. My mother, in her misguided attempts to raise a prodigy, kept me away from other kids and didn’t like me to have playmates, but soon I’d be able to lose myself in a storybook whenever I needed to, without waiting for a grown-up to read to me. It came very easily to me, since it was what I most longed to do.
![reviews on every mans battle book reviews on every mans battle book](https://supadu-wp-content.s3.amazonaws.com/southern-cultures-wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/21092239/Johnson_David-Played-a-Harp.jpg)
By the fall of 1941, I was intent on learning to read. The French battleship Richelieu navigating the East River on its way for a refit at US Navy yards, New York, March 1943Īfter that, I kept hearing the word “war” on the radio, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.