Books: More Chicken Soup

(2 of 2)

Reuven mopes over the Battle of the Bulge; no American kid doubted for a moment that the Bulge would bend the other way, and quickly. No American kid really wept with horror when the bombs went off over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he grabbed two garbage-can covers and clashed them together and cheered. All that doubt and grief came later, much later than Chaim Potok remembers it. In that sense, this book is the way things were not and more's the pity.