A Few Reviews:

Great read, enlightening, historical recollections

“Beautifully written story. As a reader I was taken by the mastery of the word into a journey that I had to see through.”—Amazon review.

"A family drama, unsentimentally sweet and shockingly severe. It's a family album that's a page-turner, a true case of "you can't make this stuff up." It's also a parable about histories, about survivors' expressions of what they lived through. This tale is told in the author's father's voice of his war stories and in the trim prose of a tomboy who will become a poet.” —J. D. Muller

Special Meaning

“This book has special meaning to me since I purchased her childhood home from her family’s estate. I currently reside in the house and neighborhood she wrote about in her memoir. Thank you Virginia for sharing your childhood story with us.”—Amazon review.

Virginia Slachman Reads from her new book Many Brave Hearts

by Diana Davis (Walrus Publishing)

Virginia Slachman, a gifted poet and talented novelist , has written a sensitive memoir about growing up in the years following World War II. Her mother, Vicki, had served as a nurse anesthetist in the first evacuation hospital, just behind the front lines of Patton’s Third Army in Germany.  The sights that she saw, the men who cried for their mothers and died before she could get them out of surgery, the horrible wounds of the soldiers, and of the children injured in the war,  left her emotionally crippled.  Vicki never ever talked about the war; not one word, ever.

She was a victim of war-time,  post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in an era when psychiatrists lacked a name for the illness, let alone a treatment.  She lived during an era where a family looked after its own and where mental illness was not understood. Her suffering was treated with Compazine and shock therapy.  She was, for a time, committed to a locked psychiatric ward.

A victim of mental illness does not live in isolation.  The illness expands to affect the lives of all with whom the ill person comes into contact, especially the immediate family.  In Slachman’s case, her illness expanded to include her husband and children.  Virginia’s narrative cobbles two voices together—hers and her father’s—and we read first the experiences, panic-stricken thoughts and feelings of the child; then the calm, recorded reminiscences of the father, who told war stories repeatedly, beginning with, “Did I ever tell you the story about the time……?” The father, Norman, used to frequently end his stories by singing the lines from “Asleep in the Deep.” “Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep, beware, beware,” and that’s where the book gets its title.

One of the most poignant scenes in the book was when Virginia had a talk with God on the day before her birthday, saying, “You know, things haven’t been so good around here. You know I really have tried, but I don’t know what to do. I’m just a kid, God. If you would just tell me what to do to make her stop drinking, to make her happy, you know, I’d do it. But you never told me what to do. Tomorrow is my birthday; please, God, don’t let her get drunk tomorrow. Just one day, that’s all I’m asking. One day. Please.”  Her heart-breaking prayer went unanswered.

“Yes, it’s a grim tale,” Virginia says.  It is a tale filled with suicide attempts, debilitating depression, and chronic alcoholism. But it’s also the story of redemption and healing.

Virginia Slachman tells the representative story of the collective American experience of American families whose members came home from World War II (or any war) with PTSD. Family members are forced to deal with the consequences of the trauma. This is a must-read for military families. As with her other work,  I suspect that this book will also be an award-winner because of its honesty and because of the skill of the writer.

For more, see B for BookReview, a Belgium reviewer, who spotlights Many Brave Hearts, here:

https://bforbookreview.wordpress.com/2024/10/06/many-brave-hearts-a-memoir-by-virginia-slachman-spotlight/