Word: wouk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...love that Mama and Papa Wouk lavished on him, his sister Irene and his brother Victor warms Herman to this day. Best of all he liked the Sabbath. As a rabbi's daughter, "Mama was treated rather like a princess around the house." But when Friday afternoon came, "she scrubbed the kitchen on her hands and knees until the place shone. The candles were lit, and we sang the joyful Sabbath hymns and drank the sacramental wine; the children, too. My father usually talked about the Bible." As in Marjorie Morgenstern's home, the menu was always gefilte...
...Wouk & No Play. At school, says Wouk, he was "criminally lazy," but he got good grades by cramming for exams...
When his grandfather, Rabbi Mendel Leib Levine, came to the U.S. from Russia, he took over Herman's religious training. Rabbi Levine, now an alert 90-year-old living in Tel Aviv, is one of the two men who, Wouk believes, have most influenced his life (the other: Columbia's late Philosopher Irwin Edman). "For 23 years," recalls Wouk, "my grandfather never ate any meat except fowl, because he insisted on personally seeing the slaughtering done according to the prescribed ritual...
...Columbia, Wouk worked for the college daily, edited the humor magazine (sample humor: "Have you heard of the guy who read Dante's Inferno just for the hell of it?"). He wrote two varsity shows (wrote a collegiate critic: "All Wouk and no play...
...Factory. Wouk majored in comparative literature (like The Caine's Willie Keith) and in philosophy (like Marjorie's Noel Airman). This was the period of what Wouk now calls "the great sophomoric enlightenment ... I discovered the 18th and 19th centuries, and, for a time, I didn't observe my religion very carefully." In time he went back to his faith. His return was not caused by any particular crisis, only "the crisis of living as an adult. I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk...