This was Herman Wouk’s God

One morning in the 1980s, the American Jewish novelist Herman Wouk woke in a hotel in Krakow. His presence in Poland at that moment was a testament to his astonishing success: One of America’s bestselling authors, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he was visiting the Eastern Bloc to supervise the filming of a lavish television series based on his novel War and Remembrance. That morning, like every other, Wouk engaged in a ritual performed by no other American Jewish literary figure of his time: He bound phylacteries, tefillin, to himself and devoutly uttered the morning prayers that his ancestors had said for millennia, a reflection of the Jewish Orthodoxy that was his watchword. Wouk then left his hotel and explored the city, ultimately coming upon a small Jewish museum. There he suddenly saw tefillin on display, bearing this description: “These are tefillin which used to be worn by Jews while they prayed.” Wouk later told Alan Dershowitz how moved he was, for here was an obituary for the Jewish faith, one belied by his own prayers that very morning.

Rightly understood, the moment was a metaphor for his own religious journey. As a young man, Wouk had imbibed Judaism from his rabbinic grandfather, but his observance had waned in young adulthood. It returned, strikingly, when he joined the Navy and prepared to fight against the greatest enemy his people had ever known. Wouk once wrote that it had not been easy “to hold the simple faiths of our fathers, and until the war came, it did not seem important.” But after he and his country were compelled to engage in the unprecedented war effort to save civilization, he decided “to believe the clearer and more obvious answer—that God is on the side of those who call on Him.”

As the historian Zev Eleff notes in a fascinating essay, Wouk had sent these remarks to the New York Orthodox rabbi Leo Jung, who in turn encouraged the younger man to use his talents to “improve the Jews by the application, in a most encouraging and enjoyable manner, of unalloyed Judaism to their hearts, mind, and life.” After achieving fame for his novels, Wouk published This Is My God, an explanation of Torah observance and an unabashed defense of Jewish Orthodoxy. It sold 200,000 copies in the year of its release, 1959, and reached number two on the New York Times bestseller list.