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EW OF THE LOCAL amenities existed or were accessible to my parents when they settled in Boston's West End in the first decade of the century (though a streetcar line was built in 1910, the year of my birth), and they soon abandoned its noisy, crowded streets, to join the trek of Jewish immigrants to the green pastures of Dorchester and Roxbury. The Jews prospered in their new, more placid neighborhoods, profiting from the expanding economy of the World War I years, and there their children reached adulthood. We graduated from elementary schools run by shrewd Irish spinsters who maintained discipline through discreet application of a rattan switch in the privacy of a cloakroom. The more proficient students went on to Boston Latin School, and in due course on to Harvard.

The curriculum in Boston Latin was based on the study of languages and literature, to the neglect of science. And when I landed at Harvard I continued my literary studies, along with polishing the oratorical skills I had exhibited at a very early age. In sermons delivered in Yiddish or Hebrew in a Roxbury synagogue on Sabbath afternoons I displayed my prowess - and won the resentment of my peers.

The pogroms in Eastern Europe that followed World War I had heightened Jewish consciousness, and the rise of fascism in its German form in the 1930s brought into the fold assimilated Jews who were members of Reform synagogues in the wealthier suburbs of Boston such as Brookline and Newton. A Board of Jewish Education expanded the traditional charitable Jewish functions, which had concentrated on the aged and the impoverished, and founded a Hebrew College, giving young Jews an opportunity to continue Hebraic studies on a level as sophisticated as that of Harvard courses. My days were divided between two establishments of higher learning that vied with each other for my time and interest. Complicating further my intellectual adolescence was the Jewish trade union movement, in which my father played a significant role. My soul was thus fragmented by allegiance to trade unionism tainted with radical politics; enthusiasm for Zionism, its propaganda enhanced by the Balfour Declaration; occasional ritual observance of traditional Judaism; and absorption with new fields of thought opened up by my college studies.

Harvard generously awarded me traveling fellowships that exposed me to the performances of an enraged, screaming Hitler and the nascent fascism that seemed bewitched by his oratory. Back in Boston after a European sojourn, I found an academic market shriveled by the Great Depression. After some patchwork appointments leading nowhere, I saw an outlet for my explosive energies in journalism, and undertook to be a correspondent in Spain for the Nation. My prediction of an imminent clash between the defenders of the republic and the phalangists went unheeded, and when the civil war broke out I was on my way to France and the United States. As the war continued, I turned into an ardent protagonist for the Loyalist cause. During a debate in Boston's Copley Plaza Hotel I caught the attention of Felix Frankfurter, and he used his good offices in Washington to have me installed as regional director of the Federal Writers' Project. I thus joined the cohort of Roosevelt's New Dealers, an invasion of academics, including Jews, who were something of a novelty in the halls of government. World War II had broken out in Europe, and we were in the vanguard of civilians active in enlisting the United States on the side of the British and the defeated French. After leaving the Writers' Project I repaired to the capital, which was already humming with activity and where I discharged diverse functions related to preparing America for combat and ensuring victory: I barnstormed around the country, hoping to convert with my impassioned speeches groups who were not happy at the prospect of an American entry into the war; as that eventuality came closer and was then realized, I shifted my efforts to the Office of Price Administration, where we aimed to attract workers to critical industries by stabilizing their rents. In a few months we created a unique vocabulary of "defense rental areas," "in-migrants," "out-migrants," and "major capital improvements" to judge the merits of landlords' petitions for rent increases. Never had I worked so hard, and the zeal with which I defended our regulations was notorious. Twitted because my scholarly training had not included courses in real estate, about which I admitted total ignorance, I would retort saucily that one needn't be a lion to be a lion tamer.

Except for a brief stint at the Office of War Information, where I listened aimlessly to long handouts designed to counter Nazi propaganda, I remained among the administrators of price controls until 1943. But with our manpower and economy now wholly committed to the war, there were mutterings about draft dodgers and scores of us joined the armed forces. Before I had a chance to convince the navy of my fitness for a commission, the army snatched me away to Camp Barkeley in the heart of Texas, where I learned the rudiments of basic training as a private. My excess weight and bureaucratic sloth made it hard for me to keep pace with far younger men. I was moved about from Clerk's School, where my atrocious typing could have only retarded the war effort, to the Medical Corps, for which my Harvard doctorate in the history of ideas was no preparation. Finally I was sent to Camp Ritchie, the Military Intelligence Training Center in Maryland, where I was taught how to interrogate French-speaking prisoners. But our troops were advancing rapidly and it was decreed I be retrained as an interrogator of German prisoners. After the passage of months I was commissioned a second lieutenant and shipped out to England, where this memoir begins.

From "somewhere in England" in November 1944, as Roosevelt's re-election for his fourth and last term was being celebrated in the Allied world, I wrote the first in a series of letters to my wife, beginning with "Dearest Fritzie" and concluding with an homage of love. Throughout the period of our correspondence she worked as an investigator for the Congressional committees on the mobilization of manpower and industrial resources.

For my part, the frequent V-mail communicated my loneliness. "Time passes washing, eating, and keeping warm. I am just getting settled - rather too comfortably - before a successful fire. For the moment, it is too good, so I expect to get going soon. I saw the sun today. A tough little people, the English, but the American invasion will leave quite a dent."

The final letter from England is postmarked December 19, 1944. The next letter - my address changed from "somewhere in England" to "somewhere" - had an almost wistful tone. "What are you eating and wearing? What are you drinking? What are you doing? Has everyone forgotten about me already? Wear your white nightgown for me tonight."

Two weeks later I was in Paris during the opening of the Rundstedt offensive and the real show began for me.