Some We Loved

About the Book

Just after WW II ended in Europe, the Army gives Dave Hartfield special training for two clandestine “wet-work” assignments relating to the growing Cold War in Europe. He carries these out with success, but once past the flush of youthful excitement and the trumped-up patriotism, Dave is haunted by the horror and uselessness of what he’d done. According to documents he’d signed, and direful warnings from those in charge, the events “never happened” and he is precluded from ever “breathing even a word” about them. After his mustering out, he goes to university, earning a degree in English and French literature and obsessed with the dream of becoming a writer, a dream fed by the fact of several of his poems being accepted for publication. From university, he returns to his home city of New York, settling for a time in Greenwich Village with Carla, a young woman with whom he has been corresponding. Yet there are others in his life, either painful memories or current relationships: Clothilde, Irmgard, Renata, Trudi, Lilly (a celebrity from earlier days in New York night life), Charlotte, Silvy, Betty, and Renie. But he lives his life under the raging storm cloud of his past and, despite occasional moments of pleasure, at times wildly abandoned, he can’t seem to find a real focus, which results in his inability to do the sort of writing, to be the “artist,” he had imagined. In a strange way, much of his inner life seems governed by the French poet, Charles Baudelaire. Further, the issue of identity, most particularly the ambiguity of his Jewish origins, deeply troubles him. Some We Loved takes the reader through Dave’s tangle of sorrows, joys, confusions, and menagerie of demons, to …? In essence, Some We Loved is, like all serious literature, about the anxiety of human relationships.