Telling War Stories: An Infantryman's Account of Life and Death in World War II

by Donald Weinstein

Donald Weinstein was one of the most prominent Italian Renaissance historians of our time, but long before becoming a scholar, he was a Jewish-American boy growing up under the looming threat of the greatest war in human history. In Telling War Stories, Weinstein employs his scholarly and authorial gifts to relay this coming-of-age in World War II story. Raised in an insular immigrant community in the early twentieth century, Weinstein often acted as an intermediary between his parents and the America of their day. But the tight-knit society of his Jewish neighborhood couldn’t shield him from the discrimination and anti-Semitism he inevitably experienced as he grew into adolescence. Determined to eradicate the deadly ideology of Fascism and to demonstrate his fiercely felt patriotism, Weinstein enlisted in the US Army right out of high school. Soon, as an infantryman in the Fourth Division, he would come face-to-face with the reality of combat and its inevitable horrors. In this courageous, honest memoir of his wartime experience at home and on the battlefield, Weinstein paints a poignant picture of Jewish-American life during World War II and one boy’s determination to risk his life to fight for what was right.

93 pages, Paperback

Published March 12, 2021

About the author

Donald Weinstein was a leading USA historian of the Italian Renaissance.