Louise Steinman

Well done memoir by a Jewish woman who lived in a Culver City home not far from where I currently live. She discovers her father's letters home to her mother during his actions during fighting on the Philippine Islands. She does some research and decides to go see the sister of the man to whom her father had obtained a yosegaki (silken good luck banner from family & villagers). The author really attempts to give herself full opportunity to extract as much emotion from her family self-examination.
Steinman goes over the motivations for the US's use of atomic weapons and the mood in Japan in hindsight. Steinman's father was in the 25th Infantry Division. He worked in headquarters and showed great respect for his frontline brothers. Steinman was fully expecting to die in any invasion plan of the Japanese mainland. This book is an attempt to understand her father's silent attitude by understanding the war wounds inflicted on him during the battles against the Japanese occupiers in the Philippines. Steinman, writing in 2001, says that neither the Japanese and the US ever apologized either for the Pearl Harbor attack nor the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings. Sadly in 2016 Obama went to Hiroshima and focused on the tragedy of Hiroshima as a reason to rid the world of nuclear stockpiles. He never spoke about the reason the US entered the war in 1942. Obama said that our racist history was part of the continuum of violence that led to Hiroshima.… (mehr)

I found this book to be a valuable supplement to the holocaust books that are available. It tells of Jewish and non-Jewish descendants of Poland who attempt to trace their relatives. It revisits and reconstructs the past. I was surprised by some of the attitudes and stereotypes that still prevail. It takes us to monuments and museums dedicated to remembering the events of the holocaust. Some searches for family are fruitful and some are not. It is a book of journeys and heart breaks. This is another book everyone should read. It is an important piece of history. I give this one a 4 out of 5.… (mehr)

Louise Steinman's fine memoir/biography cum history, THE SOUVENIR, is a carefully researched and lovingly told look into her late father's experiences as a soldier in the South Pacific theater of operations during WWII. She wanted to understand her father's silence about those years and she found an entry through a cache of letters he wrote to his wife (her mother) and a tattered and bloodstained Japanese flag he'd sent home - the 'souvenir' of the title.

Steinman did her homework, in that she mixed the personal with the historical in such a way that a reader can follow her father's bloody and traumatic path of battles fought in the mountains of the Philippines. History buffs will especially appreciate her efforts in this. I was probably more interested in the personal side, the Norman Steinman part. Like the passage where he writes of the Russian adage, 'Nichevo,' which became his coda, a way in which to endure the constant threat and presence of death that surrounded him every day, taking his dear friends and comrades. Nichevo means, quite literally "nothing." Or as the combat-hardened veterans of Vietnam came to say, "It don't mean nothin'. Drive on."

In reading the stories here, both Louise's and her father's, I was reminded of a couple other books. One was Steve Luxenberg's ANNIE'S GHOSTS. Luxenberg's research turned up some disturbing secrets about his own father's service in WWII (also in the Philippines). The other book is Ethan Canin's fine novel CARRY ME ACROSS THE WATER, about another journey from the present back into those trauma-ridden times of the war with the Japanese.

THE SOUVENIR, however, can stand on its own very well. A fine and readable story by a devoted daughter and a gifted writer. I will recommend it highly.… (mehr)