THE WILL TO LIVE ON: This Is Our Heritage.

• Author: KREYCHE, GERALD F.
• Position: Review

THE WILL TO LIVE ON: This Is Our Heritage BY HERMAN WOUK CLIFF STREET BOOKS 2000, 308 PAGES, $25.00

Herman Wouk, now 84, is an American legend to literati. His books, mostly fiction, have become bestsellers over the years, including Marjorie Morningstar, The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance. Some have been made into movies, others into TV miniseries and plays.

Forty years ago, he produced a nonfiction work entitled This Is My God. Now, his second work of nonfiction, The Will to Live On, is essentially an autobiographical reflection on Wouk's heritage as a Jew and the problems Judaism faces in a changing world. It does not have the compass of Abba Eban's The Jews and Civilization, a marvelous commentary on what the Western world owes to the Hebrew heritage, but it is a personal appraisal of the Jewish tradition and whether or not it will continue. Wouk answers in the affirmative, of course, but presents the problematic side of this question as well.

Wouk personally knew David Ben-Gurion, the father of Zionism, and the martyred Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was one of his dearest friends. Wouk's reflections draw upon a life of Judaism and an intimate contact with worldwide Jewry.

This distinguished author, very much feeling his "Jewishness," divides the book into three...