When It Was Our War: A Soldier's Wife on the Home Front (Shannon Ravenel Books) - Hardcover

Suberman, Stella

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565124030 ISBN 13: 9781565124035

Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book, 2003

Synopsis

When Stella Suberman wrote her first memoir, The Jew Store, at the age of seventy-six, she was widely praised for shedding light on a forgotten piece of American history--Jewish life in the rural South. In her new memoir, Suberman reveals yet another overlooked aspect of America's past--the domestic side of war.

Her story begins in the Miami Beach she grew up in, when hotel signs boasted "Always a View, Never a Jew" and where a passenger ship lingered just off shore carrying hundreds of European Jews hoping for--but never finding--sanctuary. It was a time of innocence, before that war in Europe became our war.

Stella was nineteen when America entered the fighting. By the time she was twenty-three, the war was over. She married Jack Suberman the week he enlisted and set out alone to join him in California. She was kicked off trains to make room for soldiers, her luggage was stolen, she was arrested for soliciting, but she was determined to follow her husband. And she did so for the next four years as he was sent from air base to air base, first training to be a bombardier and then training others. It wasn't until he was sent overseas to fly combat missions that she finally went back home to wait, as did so many other soldier's wives.

This remarkable memoir renders a double understanding of war--of how it matured a young woman and how it matured a country. By personalizing the patriotism of the 1940s, Stella Suberman's story becomes the story of all military wives and serves as a powerful reminder of how differently many Americans feel about war sixty years later.

About this title

About the Author:

Stella Suberman was born in Union City, Tennessee, the setting for her memoir, The Jew Store, and spent her teens in Miami Beach, Florida. After twenty years in North Carolina, she returned to Florida in 1966 as the administrative director of the Lowe Art Museum of the University of Miami. Now retired, she lives in Boca Raton.

From School Library Journal:

Adult/High School-Suberman's first autobiographical work, The Jew Store (Algonquin, 1999), offered readers a portrait of life in the semirural South of her childhood. The story here takes up with her coming-of-age in Florida and her home-front experiences during World War II. The author's Jewish identity didn't mean much to her when she first met her future husband, Jack Suberman, in college. Although he was not religious, he thought deeply and spoke cogently to her about the fact of their Jewishness-what it meant to their peers, what Jim Crow should mean to Jews, and how to reconsider her own prejudices. Marriage and military service happened almost simultaneously for the young couple. Stella traveled to the West to be with Jack as he trained to be a fighter pilot. They had a son. Jack, like some of their friends before him, shipped out to war. Suberman brings a strong and steady voice to this combination memory and unflinching self-analysis. Reflective teens will learn much about human nature's openness to change and moral growth, without feeling themselves confronted by anything akin to preaching. The author's excellent expository style serves as a model, too, for those wanting to create deeper nonfiction collections for high school students.
Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
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About this edition

• Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1565124030
• ISBN 13: 9781565124035
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320