In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices his father faced on the battlefield, in the courtroom, and in love, Stewart gains a closer understanding of his past, of his father's character, and of the brutal nature of war itself.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
November 2005
384 pages
ISBN: 0374184216
Hardcover
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Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II.
And he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had
Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had
rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen
concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his
father's death, a packet of wartime letters to a former
fiancΓ©e, and learns of his father's court-martial and
imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his family's
secret history and driven to uncover the truth about this
enigmatic, distant man who'd always refused to talk about
his war.
As he pieces together his father's past through military
archives, letters, and, finally, notes from a memoir his
father wrote while in prison, secretly preserved by the
officer who defended him, Stewart starts to assemble a
dramatic and baffling chain of events. He learns how Dubin,
a JAG lawyer attached to Patton's Third Army and desperate
for combat experience, got more than he bargained for when
he was ordered to arrest Robert Martin, a wayward OSS
officer who, despite his spectacular bravery with the French
Resistance, appeared to be acting on orders other than his
commanders'. In pursuit of Martin, Dubin and his sergeant
are parachuted into Bastogne just as the Battle of the Bulge
reaches its apex. Pressed into the leadership of a
desperately depleted rifle company, the men are forced to
abandon their quest for Martin and his fiery, maddeningly
elusive comrade, Gita, as they fight for their lives through
carnage and chaos the likes of which Dubin could never have
imagined.
In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices
his father faced on the battlefield, in the courtroom, and
in love, Stewart gains a closer understanding of his past,
of his father's character, and of the brutal nature of war
itself.
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