The premise of “Love in the Blitz: The Long-Lost Letters of a Brilliant Young Woman to Her Beloved on the Front” (Harper) may strike you as a novelist’s contrivance. Eileen Alexander, a graduate of Cambridge University, picked up a pen and started to write letters to a college friend named Gershon Ellenbogen a month or so before the outbreak of World War II. Their correspondence lasted throughout the war and amounted to some 1,400 intimate and illuminating letters. Remarkably, the book is a work of nonfiction, and the correspondence turns out to be a unique and vivid account of both love and war.
Alexander was born into a Jewish family in Cairo in 1917. While Ellenbogen served in British military intelligence in Egypt, she worked as a civilian in the Air Ministry. They married after the war, and she worked as a teacher, a writer and a translator whose work included several of the “Maigret” mysteries by Georges Simenon. Long after their deaths, the cache of letters that Alexander wrote to Ellenbogen during the war surfaced on eBay, where a collector named David McGowan found them and set himself the goal of arranging for their publication.
Both credit and praise are due to McGowan as the discoverer of Alexander’s letters and to David Crane, his co-editor, but Alexander herself is rightfully acknowledged as the author of “Love in the Blitz.” Indeed, the book reminds us of the lost art of letter-writing, which first was replaced by email and now by the even hastier and more forgettable text. Alexander is a master of the art, and her letters are a treasure — artful, eloquent, deeply informed, emotionally alive and full of life.
“We plunge into the correspondence and follow the then-young writer’s experiences day by day with little knowledge of what lies ahead,” explains Oswyn Murray, whose father is mentioned in the letters and who worked with McGowan on preparing the letters for publication. “Slowly we learn to know her idiosyncrasies, her growing love, her relations with her rather ‘odd’ — as she describes them — family, her experience of the Blitz in London. We are amazed at her naivete and her ignorance of sex. We may admire her independent stance on Judaism and some of her progressive views on politics.”
Murray credits Alexander with several motives, all of them admirably fulfilled in her letters. “The first is to enmesh her beloved in her life … and to prevent him from straying during the long separation.” The second is to write a Bildungsroman based on “the daily experience of a young woman setting out on life.” The third is nothing less than “fashioning a feminist vision of war.” Alexander herself takes a different view: “I once thought that I had a genius for writing,” she wrote, “but I find instead I have a genius for love.”
As much as she thinks and writes about the weighty issues of wartime, her tender feelings for Ellenbogen serve as the thread that runs through all of her letters.
From the outset, Alexander and Ellenbogen appear to be star-crossed. Their love affair — and their correspondence — began by accident — quite literally — when Alexander was riding in Ellenbogen’s car when it collided with another car on a London road. The “remarkably forgiving” letter that Alexander wrote to Ellenbogen from a hospital bed was the starting point of “an unstoppable flood of words that passed between them over the long years of war,” as co-editor David Crane writes in his introduction.
The rest of the book flows from Alexander’s pen alone. She can be funny (“My face is now fully exposed to the world & it looks like the rear elevation of a baboon”) and flirtatious (“I was saddened to hear that you had had my blood cleaned off your suit — but I do see the position”). She praises Ellenbogen for his ability to “follow the Hebrew in the prayer book without using your finger,” and she asks him for advice on kashrut: “Tell me, darling, is tripe Kosher or is it not?” And she yet she also ventures her own bold assessments of the world in crisis.
“When Italy attacked Abyssinia, I’d have put two nasty, bristling battle cruisers across the Suez Canal,” Alexander wrote, “and then I’d have cocked a snook at Mussolini (I never liked his face anyway) and I’d have written a rude note to Hitler.”
Alexander clearly feels obliged to show pluck. “We walked into a shelter in a leisurely way,” she writes on one air raid during the Blitz, “sat down on one of the benches — and I did my knitting until the All Clear sounded an hour later.” But when the war is going badly for the Allies, she confesses that “I’ve just fled upstairs to escape the news. Cowardly, dear? — but the tension here is growing & growing.”
She reminds us that the human cost of the Holocaust, if not the full extent of its horror, was known during the war. When her mother displays “the newspaper account of the appalling Jewish butcheries on the Continent,” however, Alexander finds it within herself to acknowledge “that it was possible to feel, not only of the tortured Jews but of the Germans that there but for the Grace of God go I.” Looking forward confidently to “postwar regeneration,” she writes that “the German people, as human material, were exactly like our people — fickle, gullible and intellectually lazy.”
As much as she thinks and writes about the weighty issues of wartime, her tender feelings for Ellenbogen serve as the thread that runs through all of her letters. Contemplating their future marriage, she assures him that she doesn’t want to consult a sex manual: “All the technical knowledge I need, my darling, I shall get from you.” As for herself, she insists that “I believe I know a good deal more about emotional love than most of the doctors who write about it,” although she feels that “I must read one Good Book on Wantonness and one on Contraception before we’re married, my dear love, as a basis for your instruction.”
The story is haunted by the dire uncertainties of life in wartime, but author (and the reader) are rewarded with a happen ending. “Good luck, Gershon darling, and may we soon meet again in Peace,” she wrote at the outbreak of the Second World War. As the end of the war approaches, her anticipation wells up: “Darling, darling, I love you so terribly that at the thought of seeing you & hearing you & feeling the touch of your mouth against mine and of your hands on my body I feel dizzy & dazzled & bewildered.” By now we have come to know Alexander as intimately as any character in a work of fiction, and we are privileged to share her hard-won moment of joy and pleasure.
Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.
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