Leo Litwak Recreates The Medic

This interview originally appeared in The San Francisco Reader, July 2002

By Jerry Karp

When Leo Litwak was my writing teacher and adviser in San Francisco State University's creative writing program in 1987, I knew him as a kind, soft-spoken man who was knowledgeable and passionate about writing and teaching, a dedicated instructor who gave each student his full attention in their turn. The glimpses we got of his past were miniscule and related entirely to his career at SF State, which by then was 25 years deep. We also knew of his novels: To the Hanging Gardens (1964) and Waiting for the News (1969), as well as College Days in Earthquake Country (1971), his account of the 1969 student and faculty strike, in which he took part as a faculty member.

It certainly never occurred to us to place Leo Litwak on a battlefield.

In 2001, Litwak published The Medic, an account of his experiences as a 19-year-old combat medic in World War II during the last days of the European campaign and on into the post-war occupation. It is an engaging and occasionally harrowing account of a young man's journey and is in many ways about displacement—a young mid-Westerner (Litwak is from Michigan) in Europe, a peaceful man in battle, a Jew in an Army with no particular love for Jews, plus the waves of refugees, prisoners, and uprooted souls that Litwak shows us during the course of his narrative.

The Medic, which grew from an article published in The New York Times in 1995, was delivered in the midst of the "Greatest Generation" hoopla. Many of the questions Litwak received during interviews and at his readings dealt with his opinions about the "Greatest Generation" tag and about his specific war experiences. Relatively few of those questions concerned The Medic as a literary achievement. I wondered how Leo, a soldier for two years and a writer for the subsequent fifty, felt about this.

When you were my teacher at San Francisco State,. I knew you as my instructor and as a writer. This chapter of your life, the war, I had no glimpse of. But now there is a whole audience of readers who know you only as a World War II memoirist. Is that an odd feeling, to know there's this one part of your life that's out there in the world?

It's interesting that you mention that, because that has been an experience of my disconnected parts. When I got out of the Army, I was 21 years old. So those experiences happened to a very young man. It's true that when I went on tour for the book, people responded to me in terms of what they knew about World War II. I surely wasn't that guy anymore. And the book to some extent is written from the vantage point of my current existence. I can take an objective and sometimes even disparaging view of my own attitudes, 55 or 56 years ago. So it was odd be greeted as a veteran of World War II, when that was no longer a vital part of my existence.

As opposed to being greeted as the writer who had created this work of art.

Right. I saw the process as a way of shaping an experience to produce a book. Consequently, I really wanted The Medic to be regarded as a personal narrative rather than as a memoir, just to emphasize that these are shaped memories, as all memories are. This writing comes informed by a lifetime of writing. It's a different way of using material than if you were simply writing history or a memoir.

The Medic seems to be much more than the story of a soldier. For example, there's the character Willy. He's a young, Jewish, displaced person who is Dutch but has somehow worked his way into the middle of Germany. He has learned to thrive by dealing on the black market, contemptuous of laws and society. He seems to be almost a counterbalance to you. You're the young war veteran, but interested in going home and living the life of the mind. He's completely disparaging of that life. It almost seems like you've set up the two personalities as mirror images—two young men forming disparate views of the world.

I had remained an incredibly naïve guy. Again, you have to remember that the book describes experiences I had when I was 19 or 20. Willy was the same age, but what he'd been through was far more intense than anything I'd experienced. He'd lost his entire family and survived by his wits—a Jew on his own during World War II. He had every reason to doubt any human virtue. We were about the same age, but he was a lot wiser and a lot older. He was probably born with a temperament more designed for survival. I couldn't have done what he did. I would be dead.

I'm also thinking of your choices as a writer in how you portrayed him, your decision to make him a central character. I'm going to guess that there were many memorable characters that you came across during that time, and yet you chose Willy as one to elevate to that stature within the narrative.

Well, some of the experiences I attributed to Willy were really the experiences of others. I fused them into Willy's experience for just the reasons you suggest. I wanted Willy to be central. I did that in part to emphasize a theme that I think runs through the book—it's not sufficient to characterize the war as a good war. It makes no sense. It was an absolutely necessary war, but if "good war" implies, as it's often made to, that the good people were all on one side and the bad people were all on the other side, then it's nonsense. The guys on our side were neither good nor evil. They were what they were, and there's no simple way of summarizing them. And Willy was a man who knew that. He operated in a world that didn't make those kinds of moral distinctions, where the issue is only survival. And he knew how to survive.

An example would be your telling him, "You encourage the stereotype of the Jew as a money hustler," and his responding, "I do not give a fuck."

I was so concerned with that issue. I thought there was a certain posture I had to assume in order to get along as a Jew, and also as a young soldier. You had to fit in. If you were exceptional, or in any way different, either you had to be very superior indeed, or you were going to be marked. Whereas for Willy, all that had become irrelevant. He had lost his family. He saw that the law didn't deserve his respect or his caution.

There are a lot of places in the book where the dialogue is clearly written by a very accomplished writer who is telling us a great story, as opposed to someone who's trying to recreate the dialogue that occurred at the time.

Sixty years had passed. Most of the dialogue is invented. There are some lines of dialogue, especially from my combat experiences, that I remember vividly, and that I'll remember until the end of my days, but those are relatively few. Most of the dialogue was entirely fashioned by me. Especially considering that many of the characters are composites. My memories of the occupation aren't quite as specific. What I have are dramatic situations that I remember, but the actual dialogue is an invention in service of the drama. That's one reason why I'm a little reluctant about the word "memoir." But I think you're right, that this in many ways is an artful book.

Clearly, you could have written a book three times the length of only your combat experiences. Since you say that your memories weren't as specific of the post-war occupation, what was your thinking in terms of making that such a large part of the narrative?

Well, my combat experience was somewhat limited. It was the last part of the war. I felt an obligation to fact, especially since guys in my unit might read that section. I wanted it to focus really around one central figure, Sergeant Lucca, because his death was the most powerfully traumatic experience I've suffered in my life. He was severely wounded in a rocket attack, landed on top of me in a trench, and subsequently died. I spent a night in the trench with him and with the platoon messenger, a man named Haas (called "Billy Baker" in the book) while they were wounded. That experience was the focus of combat for me. If I'd continued describing much beyond that, then I think I would have lost the force. It becomes an account of one experience after another, and the reader becomes deadened to it. I think I shaped the story in terms of what I thought was the best rhythm and pace of the dramatic account. I felt that if the book were any longer it would lose its force. My inclination now is to keep things pretty short.

There is an infinite number of ways you might have chosen to portray certain people or incidents that you have included—or not included. Is it an odd feeling to realize that the choices you made are now frozen on the page?

Not only for the reader, but for me. It's very strange what happens. Before the book was written, I had what I thought were vivid, absolutely authentic memories. Now my memories are almost all memories of what I've written. In many cases it would be possible to recover the original experience only through inference, deduction, and going back to letters. For instance, Billy Baker, who dies in the trench with Lucca, was, as I mentioned, in fact a different guy, a man named Haas, who I identified in the New York Times article. I can only find the actual Haas now by going through sources. What's in my mind, what's in my experience, is the character I created.

Do you find that disturbing?

Well, it becomes an analysis, as I suppose all writing is, of the nature of memory. It makes me realize how different points of view about what indeed happened may be discordant, and you may not be able to locate the "true" version from the "false" version. All versions come from experience, and all experiences are constantly being reformed. The actual facts probably can't be recovered. Perhaps one might recover an original perception of what happened. When the Times article came out, I did get a letter from someone who'd been in my outfit. He enclosed a copy of the article on which he'd drawn an arrow pointing to the section that described my being in a trench with two dying men and a rifleman I didn't know. And he said, "That rifleman was me." He then went on to tell me the name of the sergeant who had pointed in the air and called out, "Rockets." In the book, I called him Maurice, but it was someone else, and he told me that man saved our lives. He said that I had used his belt as a tourniquet on Haas' leg. He provided me with all kinds of surprising detail. The experience has become so much mine that it was a surprise and even a shock to discover that someone else shared it, and shared it very closely, so that the point of view was very much alike.

The final words of the book refer to your desire to leave the war behind. You wrote: "I wanted us to be scattered and never reassembled. No more armies or divisions or regiments or battalions or companies or platoons. No more theaters of war. No veterans' groups, no reunions, no visits to old battlefields, no celebration of what we once were compelled to be. Let that all be in the past, cleansed by recollection." Reading that, the last thing I would expect would be a book about those days.

The book is the cleansing by recollection. To a great extent, that line is a summary of everything we've just been talking about. The narration of experience really transforms the experience. And insofar as it provides a neat format for it, a drama, a context for it, it cleans it up, it tidies it. It takes that mess of experience and structures it, dramatizes it, gives it rhythm, and, if you will, a kind of music. It provides you with memories that are reformed and are now bearable.

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