Of Guns, Revenge and Hope by D. Lawrence-Young, Gefen Publishing House, 289 pages, ISBN 9789652295330, price not listed.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO–Although he was killed before I was born, when I first started practicing journalism 50 years ago, I found my hero. His name was Ernie Pyle. He was a war correspondent during World War II, but he left the stories about grand strategy to the other correspondents. He wasn’t interested very much in the generals’ briefings, he wanted to see and report on the war from the foot soldiers’ perspective. The soldiers loved him for it. So did their parents and siblings and sweethearts back home.
Of Guns, Revenge and Hope is a work of historical fiction, telling the story about the Jewish Brigade, drawn mainly from British Mandatory Palestine, that fought in the British Army. It’s not about any supposed swashbuckling leader of the Brigade, whose exploits make Nazis the world over tremble in their boots, it is about three fictional soldiers from Tel Aviv, who’ve been friends from the time of kindergarten, who enlist in the unit, hoping to prove to the world that, notwithstanding propaganda to the contrary, Jews can fight, and fight well. The characters are the kind of people whom Pyle happily would have written about.
We watch these enlistees go through training, become drivers and automobile mechanics, meet Jewish girls in Cairo, push on to Libya, fight sleep and sand storms of the North African desert, itch to get into the fight against the Germans, cross to the Mediterranean island of Malta, and finally land near the heel of Italy to begin a push that will take them and the Germans they are pursuing all the way north to the Alps. We watch as they prepare for their first battle, silently frightened that their courage will desert them when they come under fire. We see one of them killed on the battlefield.
Through the book, we come to understand the ambivalence the Palestinian Jews felt about fighting in the British Army. On the one hand, they are arrayed against the Nazis–who are trying to kill every Jew in Europe–so they are on the right side. But on the other hand, they are fighting alongside the same people who, in league with the Arabs, are doing everything possible to limit immigration to Palestine, thereby cutting off an escape route for Hitler’s victims. So maybe they are not on the right side.
Whenever their unit deals a blow to the Germans–or later when a rogue group decides to take known SS men to the woods and summarily execute them — they feel that, in a small way at least, they are paying back the Nazis for all the depredations, torture and murder committed against the Jewish people.
And wherever they encounter Jewish communities — or the remnants of them — they can feel the pride that others feel in them, the fighting Jews who won’t be victims.
This is the second book by Lawrence-Young exploring the role of Jewish fighting units. His first, Of Guns and Mules, told of the Zion Mule Corps during the Gallipoli campaign of World War I. The current book ends shortly after World War II. Looming ahead–subject for a third book?–is Israel’s War for Independence.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com