HERBERT GOLD
637
New York University, and George Sylvester Viereck, a German
propagandist through several wars, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of
the Kaiser and was imprisoned for Nazi activities during World War II.
These were an eccentric choice for a seventeen-year-old's favorite literature.
George Sylvester Viereck's masterwork,
My
First Two Thousand Years ,
was
the story of the wandering Jew, romantic, awed, hyperheated, crediting me
with miracles.
I
took it personally.
As
a mid-Western adolescent,
I
liked the
idea of that special Jewish talent, "the secret of infinite pleasure indefinitely
prolonged."
The sequels didn't live up to the first book; sequels seldom do. Later,
after the war, after his release from prison, I lived on the same slum block of
Manhattan with Mr. Viereck, and used to see the senile old man stumbling
past my ground-floor apartment. And then, at the age offorty, after a second
marriage and new children, I wrote a book, a memoir and essay about how I
grew into being both a Jew and a writer, and called it "My Last Two
Thousand Years." The old Nazi was one ofthe featured players in my story.
I was still inventing myself as a Jew out of unpromising materials. Every
writer needs to be the hero of his own myth, no matter how unheroic the
raw material. ''I'm writing an autobiography" the writer says, and his friend
answers: "I hope you find a subject worthy of it.")
***
The war was over and I was demobilized after three years in the
Army. I was twenty-one, but in the ways that matter for peacetime, the
clock had stopped and I was still eighteen. I was ready to start education
again, start courting and flirting again, start a more real life than stripping and
firing weapons, jumping from parachute towers, interpreting for Russian
prisoners who had chosen to fight on the German side. The Army had
trained me as a Russian expert, and along with these skills carne the notion of
our-gallant-Soviet-allies as one long smiling block ofword (Siege of Leningrad,
haunting flights of geese, meadowlands). The lost souls of General Vlasov's
volunteers puzzled me.
I was a bookish child, bookishly puzzled, and ready to catch up with the
serious business I had missed. My first summer out of the Army was
devoted to loafing, tennis, chasing girls, and reading Proust; an uncle bought
me six ties to welcome me horne. Meanwhile, my parents heard from a
distant Polish cousin who had managed to survive. They filled out forms,
wrote affidavits, sent money. He arrived in Shaker Heights.
He had been an eye surgeon on the staff of hospitals in Warsaw,
