Old Letters in a New Age: An Essay by Sarah Turbin

I decided now might be as good a time as any to read through all of the letters that I inherited from my long dead great uncle. The letters were kept by his younger brother—my grandfather—who passed away when I was a baby. I always knew I had a relative who fought and died in World War II, but I didn’t know much else. My dad told me his father rarely talked about it, though I later found out my grandfather had kept his brother’s letters for his whole life. In college, when I asked about them, my grandmother gave these letters to me along with a few photographs and my great uncle’s Purple Heart, which he received after he died in France.

The letters come in all lengths and sizes, some ribboned with bold red and blue airmail stripes and others reproduced from negative microfilm on little swatches of paper, as carefully folded into their shrunken envelopes as origami. They are all addressed to my great grandparents. When they first became mine, I grabbed fistfuls of them and sat down to read on the floor of my college apartment. Quickly and without any warning, my great uncle went from being a ghost story to a real person, one who wore glasses and started all of his letters with “Dear Folks”. I stopped reading abruptly, overwhelmed by a stupefying grief. We were both 19 years old. In these letters I’d expected a time machine but received a mirror instead.

That mirror also warps and shifts. Like me, my great uncle was Jewish, and of the Nazis, he writes, “Mom dear, as you said in one of your letters, I will do my level best to ‘Give ‘em hell.“ He also writes about how he’d like to fight the “Japs” after reading horrific news reports from the Pacific Theater. A little complicated for me, to say the least, since the other side of my family is Japanese (surprise!). In turn, when I think about Americans during World War II, I also remember the Japanese Americans who were forcibly incarcerated here by their own government. I wonder if I would get along with my great uncle, or if he’d mind that I’m reading his letters. I never have to find out. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering. I only know that he wouldn’t be able to imagine me or my strange circumstances, just as I can’t imagine fighting in a war or being imprisoned for who I am.

I’ve been thinking of my great uncle when I see World War II evoked in the news, which feels frequent right now. I’ve decided this is either true for everyone or because of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, especially now that the only things I read are these letters and the daily updates from the New York Times article that tracks the coronavirus cases in my state. Everything from Wimbledon to See’s Candies has shuttered for the first time since the 40s. The surgeon general compared one week in April to Pearl Harbor. The President has evoked World War II in the White House briefing room along with a directive to “sacrifice together.” I find these comparisons instructive on some levels but also utterly unintelligible on others. What I’m going through doesn’t feel like a great sacrifice, not when I’m still employed, healthy, and lifting a single finger to Venmo mutual aid funds from the comfort of my living room.

Before I started on this quest, I expected the letters to be too sad to read right now. I remembered so clearly what it was like to first receive them, and how difficult it was for a while after that to make my way back to them. The earliest letters are filled with the quotidian rhythms of basic training, where my great uncle makes friends and prepares to leave for Europe. He reassures his parents that his eyeglasses prescription hasn’t changed. He asks after his fiancee. He thanks them for sending salami and cigarettes. He bemoans missing my grandfather’s bar mitzvah. This is when I feel like an antennae, receiving snatches of the grandfather I never knew in the runaway sentences when he’s mentioned by his older brother.

Mostly grief sits quietly by my side for all of it, an emotion that has become familiar to me right now in ways I never could have anticipated, refracted back at me like I’m sitting in the center of a great empty prism. It comes to me at odd moments, like when I walk through the empty intersection near my apartment that’s usually clogged with commuters or when I notice that the flowers that used to sit at the front of my grocery store have been replaced with a mountain of toilet paper. Meanwhile, in 1944, my great uncle tells his mom to stop worrying. He complains about the Cubs to his dad. He thanks his parents for the stamps and says one will be on the very letter they’re reading. I think about my own parents, who I haven’t seen since the winter. When I read that page, I scrambled to pick up its envelope and looked at the postage, half-hoping, maybe, for some cypher from my great-grandparents. The stamp was an illustrated plane the color of rust, but this got me. I don’t know. It’s just a stamp, handed down from parent to child then given back to them then given to me. It’s like proof of something—life? Love?—and I guess that’s because it is.

While I read, I also feel like a quack historian Catch Me If You Can-ing my way through almost a year’s worth of correspondence. But the letters are a respite in this way: When I read them I know what’s going to happen. My great uncle isn’t allowed to say exactly where he is or what he’s doing, so that’s how I opened an envelope that I only later realized was postmarked on the eve of D-Day. Its contents are so markedly vague that it is both vast in its emptiness and yet every word is imbued with some prophetic secret meaning, shimmering just out of reach for my great uncle, who was part of the invasion of Normandy and would die two months after it: “Even if most of the time I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, I myself certainly wish something would happen. I came over here to get in this darn war, and thats exactly what I aim to do. At least I hope that’s what I’ll do.” I read this and soon after opened my diary to deliberately print the date, writing “PANDEMIC!!!” in my crummy 21st century handwriting so anyone reading it can reflect upon it in whatever way they see fit. Hopefully there are still personal essays 75 years. To any descendants reading this: I’m sure we’d get along.

Even if what I feel right now is only some fraction of the longing my great uncle describes, I think we can both understand what it feels like to want something impossible. In one of his last letters, the great thrill of his life is that he is unexpectedly reunited with his friends. “I’ll bet you can never guess what. All my old buddies are in this regiment. Al, Mario, Bob, Joe, and all the rest…No bunk, I thought I wouldn’t see them again until I reached the states. But as you always say, mom, is that everything happens for the best.“ I don’t know if that’s true. But what I wouldn’t give now for a surprise like that.