Gone to Soldiers Read Online Free Page A

of the doctor had sustained his interest, but she was reported to have run off with an Englishman who had been supposed to be an agent but who turned out to be a conman, leaving huge debts. Uncle Nat’s letters were full of disasters of incomprehensible proportions, bodies falling like leaves to make the bloodiest of compost as the war went on and on. The Japanese now controlled Shanghai. Uncle Nat described a last contingent of a thousand Polish Jews straggling in to safety. Many refugees were stuck in Shanghai, which required no visa, no passport, no papers, no certificate of rectitude or of past or present splendor. The war was impoverishing them all, Nat reported. Soon he would only be a yang kueitze, the insulting term for a penniless foreigner.
    In Hongkew, Uncle Nat wrote, amid the wrecks of bombed buildings and rubble fields, there was a chamber orchestra, several theaters and an ongoing war of cultural snobbery between the Jews of Vienna and the Jews of Berlin. Daniel was nostalgic. His parents sang the litany of how smart they had been to leave. Only his teacher Pao Chi shared Daniel’s fascination with what was going on in China.
    Daniel worked as an usher in a local theater. Summers he waited on tables in the Catskills. The only time his obsession encroached on his university life was when he was asked to address the Progressive Club about the situation in China. His speech was not a success, for his confidence, often leonine one on one, vanished when he saw those bland anonymous faces. After graduation, the only job he could find was serving subpoenas.
    Still he felt that his rotten speech had paid off when his economics professor gave his name to someone in the Navy, who called in the spring of 1941 to ask him if he might not be interested in a special crash course in Japanese being mounted at Harvard that summer. The Navy was training Japanese-language officers. Most of the students would already know some Japanese but others, like himself, were being recruited for their knowledge of Chinese. Daniel privately thought that was an example of white stupidity, because although the written languages shared many characters, the spoken languages had not as much relationship as Norwegian and Italian. Their assumption rested on a typical American attitude that if you knew one of those funny heathen languages, what was the problem learning another?
    Since he could not rejoin his uncle, this sounded more interesting than the only other option he saw, which was to go on serving subpoenas for his father’s pinochle buddy. He felt as if he were personally oppressing every petty criminal and wayward spouse and luckless witness and suspected bookie on whom he served papers. Twice the servee had taken a swing at him.
    So, on to Harvard. For a City College boy, it would be a look at how the top five percent lived. His parents bubbled joy. Judy was marrying a nice Jewish dentist, Haskel was finishing medical school, and now their boy was going to Harvard. He knew that a crash course at the Yenching Institute was not exactly going to Harvard, but it beat pounding the pavements of the Bronx looking for people who hoped he would not find them.
    His days at Harvard were pleasant. He started in the elementary class, but once he had his teeth into Japanese, he moved up rapidly. He drove his roommates crazy by insisting on speaking Japanese from the time he woke until he fell asleep. By October he was progressing markedly and had been moved ahead. He took long walks along the Charles, across Cambridge, into Mount Auburn cemetery. Sunday night he ate Chinese in Boston with buddies from the program, showing off by ordering from the menu in Chinese. Many of the restaurants were Cantonese, of course, which he could not speak. Someday he would learn: after the war in China, when he could return.
    Still if he could not go to China, Boston would do. His roommate mocked him for preferring Boston to New York, but New York to him did