Word: wouk
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Island of Normalcy. Herman Wouk obviously disagrees. To him, Marjorie is a story he felt he had to tell: "This person has haunted me for years. It's not a girl I was in love with. It is a lot of girls I knew, since I grew up in all this...
Like.Marjorie, Wouk was born in The Bronx, the son of Abraham Isaac and Esther Levine Wouk. Both parents came from Minsk, Russia. Papa Wouk started washing clothes in a basement, rose to be president of one of New York's largest power laundries. One of Herman's earliest memories is playing hide and seek among the machines. The Wouk family was "restless, like most New Yorkers," and while Herman was still a child, made four moves, from one canyonlike apartment house to another, all within what Wouk calls "that romantic, and much overcriticized borough," The Bronx...
Though he was later to toss a nostalgic valentine to his Bronx boyhood in his novel, City Boy, little Herman got off to a depressing start. He was the neighborhood fat boy, forever guzzling chocolate milkshakes. In street fights, "I was clobbered." But he had two powerful consolations: the Wouk home life and books. As soon as he learned to read, he would sprawl on the floor for hours with a tattered old dictionary, glorying in big words like anthropomorphism...
...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...