The Essay: Our Fathers' War

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The Essay: Our Fathers' War: Enough About the War, Dad

Enough About the War, Dad

Our Fathers' War

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Our Fathers' War, Enough About the War, Dad

Dr Howard Shevrin was a psychoanalyst whose war story influenced his later career.

Michael Goldfarb tells the stories of Americans who fought and lived through World War II. Dr Howard Shevrin was a psychoanalyst whose war story influenced his later career.

7 December 2021 marks the eightieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and with it America's entry into World War II.

Americans' war experience was substantially different from that of Britons. Michael Goldfarb's father was among the World War II generation christened "The Greatest Generation" in popular culture. He uses the stories he heard growing up from the Americans who fought the war to explore those differences both during the conflict and in the years immediately following. 

Dr Howard Shevrin was a psychoanalyst whose own war story influenced his later career. He bored his family with his relentless telling of throwing his sidearm at a German machine gun nest, rather than firing it, when he finally faced the enemy, during the Battle of the Bulge. While in a field hospital, he came across a copy of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams - how consciousness arises from the interface with the physiology of the brain became his life’s work. 

These are memories imperfect and embellished but they create a picture of what America was like during the war years and how the war came to be woven into America's national myth. He acknowledges just how mighty the forces were that propelled the children of these veterans away from that myth when the call came to serve in Vietnam.

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Michael Goldfarb tells the stories of Americans who fought in World War II.

7 December 2021 marks the eightieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Michael Goldfarb tells the stories of Americans who fought in World War II.

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