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persuaded to publish it by his wife, who said it would touch something in people. Diana Baum was an important influence on her husband though she very seldom appeared at the offices. She devoted herself to their child, a son named Julian, and to literary criticism, writing a column for a small, liberal magazine, influential beyond its numbers, and she was a figure as a result.
    Baum had money, how much was uncertain. His father, a banker who had immigrated to America, had done very well. The family was Jewish and German and felt a kind of superiority. The city was filled with Jews, many of them poor on the Lower East Side and in the boroughs, but everywhere they were in their own world somewhat excluded from the greater one. Baum had known the experience of being an outsider and more at boarding school, where, despite his open nature, he made few friends. When the war came, rather than seeking a commission, he had served in the ranks, in intelligence, as it happened, but in combat. He had one near-death experience. They were in the flatlands of Holland at night. They were sleeping in a building where the roof had been blown away. Someone came in with a flashlight and began moving among the sleeping men. He tapped one man on the arm.
    “You a sergeant?” Baum heard him ask.
    The man cleared his throat.
    “That’s right,” he said.
    “Get up. We’re going.”
    “I’m a supply sergeant. I’m a replacement.”
    “I know. You’ve got to take twenty-three men up to the front.”
    “What twenty-three men?”
    “Come on. There’s no time.”
    He led them along a road in the dark. There was the sickening sound of firing up ahead and the heavy thump of artillery. In a slight decline a captain was giving orders.
    “Who are you?” the captain asked.
    “I’ve got twenty-three men,” the sergeant replied.
    In fact there were only twenty-one, two had slipped away or become lost in the darkness. There was firing going on not far away.
    “Been in combat yet, sarge?”
    “No, sir.”
    “You will tonight.”
    They were supposed to cross the river in rubber boats. Almost on hands and knees they dragged the boats down to the bank. Everyone was whispering but Baum felt they were making a great amount of noise.
    He went in the first boat. He was not filled with fear, he was almost paralyzed by it. He held his rifle, which he had never fired, in front of him as if it were a shield. They were making a fatal transgression. He knew he was going to be killed. He could hear the low splashing of the paddles that was going to be drowned in a sudden outbreak of machine-gun fire, the whispers he knew they could hear. Paddle with your hand, someone said. The Germans were waiting to open fire until they got halfway across, but for some reason nothing happened. It was the next wave that was caught midway. Baum was on shore by then and the entire bank above his head and further back exploded into firing. Men were shouting and falling into the water. None of those boats made it.
    They were pinned down for three days. He later saw the captain who had given them orders in the ravine lying dead, a half-naked body with a bare chest and dark, swollen woman’s nipples. Baum made a vow to himself, not then but when the war ended. He vowed never to be afraid of anything again.
    Baum did not seem the sort of man who had been through and seen that. He was domestic and urbane, worked on Saturday and in deference to his parents appeared in synagogue on the holiest days, in deference also to those more distant in obliterated villages or mass burial pits, but at the same time he did not represent the Jewishness of black hats and suffering, the ancient ways. The war, he imagined, from which he had emerged whole and unharmed, had given him his credentials. He was almost indistinguishable from other citizens except in inner knowing. He ran his business in an English way. In his sparsely furnished office there was only a desk, an old couch, a table, and some