Friday, August 19, 2011

Finished 5th book - finding myself inspired to revisit Silver Pages on the Lawn and Herman

Though I keep doing little polishings, basically my fifth book --and third memoir -- is about finished. As my 96th year winds down to October and my next birthday, I am awed at my mind still  being active and creative, and my legs still carrying me around.

This long focus on my life during World War II has left me remembering the terrible weeks that preceeded the invasion of Poland, when my own life fell apart as my young husband succumbed to acute leukemia and left me alone, pregnant with our child and hopeless of the future I would have to live without him. Missing him still, I picked up the book I wrote about our romance when we were students during the years of the Great Depression on the 1930s. As I opened "Silver Pages on the Lawn" to leaf through it, those terrible summer days of 1939 came back full force, and I knew I had to read my own story again, after five years of talking about it to potential readers.

For a week I buried myself in its 400 pages and once more relived those anxious wonderful days of joy and tribulation, rapture and frustration. For nearly three years we struggled to be together, battling lack of approval, money, often distance, seldom ease, until the depression finally began to ease, and jobs made our marriage possible. I reread the any hundreds of letters we wrote each other, 'makimg love by mail,' as Herman put it, and wondered at the constancy and determination that kept us sure of our way despite all the doubts and disappointments that set up obstacles. How did we not submit to the hindrances and part? How were we able to win through to embark what we knew would be a lifetime of triumph and togetherness?

We built our world happily until a cruel fate sent it crashing down. Now at a possible repetition of those meager depression days I am glad to have left a reecord of how we lived with little but were able to love much. It taught us courage once; I hope it will teach it to others now.

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