Voices of a Summer Day

by Irwin Shaw

Four decades of American life are re-created through the dramatic reminiscences of Benjamin Federov, son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Main theme at a political level is anti-Jewish prejudice in the US and the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. At a personal level, relationships with family and women provide the bulk of the story.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels, American

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Shaw was born Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff in the South Bronx, New York City, to Russian Jewish immigrants. Shaw was a prolific American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author whose written works have sold more than 14 million copies. He is best known for his novels, The Young Lions (1948) and Rich Man Poor Man (1970).

His parents were Rose and Will. His younger brother, David Shaw (died 2007), became a noted Hollywood producer. Shortly after Irwin's birth, the Shamforoffs moved to Brooklyn. Irwin changed his surname upon entering college. He spent most of his youth in Brooklyn, where he graduated from Brooklyn College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1934.

Shaw began screenwriting in 1935 at the age of 21, and scripted for several radio shows, including Dick Tracy, The Gumps and Studio One.

Shaw's first play, Bury the Dead (1936) was an expressionist drama about a group of soldiers killed in a battle who refuse to be buried. During the 1940s, Shaw wrote for a number of films, including Talk of the Town (a comedy about civil liberties), The Commandos Strike at Dawn (based on a C.S. Forester story about commandos in occupied Norway) and Easy Living (about a football player unable to enter the game due to a medical condition). Shaw married Marian Edwards. They had one son, Adam Shaw, born in 1950, himself a writer of magazine articles and non-fiction.

Shaw enlisted in the U.S. Army and was a warrant officer during World War II.He served with an Army documentary film unit. The Young Lions, Shaw's first novel, was published in 1949. Based on his experiences in Europe during the war, the novel was very successful and was adapted into a 1958 film.

Shaw's second novel, The Troubled Air, chronicling the rise of McCarthyism, was published in 1951. He was among those who signed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo convictions for contempt of Congress, resulting from hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Falsely accused of being a communist by the Red Channels publication, Shaw was placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the movie studio bosses. In 1951 he left the United States and went to Europe, where he lived for 25 years, mostly in Paris and Switzerland. He later claimed that the blacklist "only glancingly bruised" his career. During the 1950s he wrote several more screenplays, including Desire Under the Elms (based on Eugene O'Neill's play) and Fire Down Below (about a tramp boat in the Caribbean).

While living in Europe, Shaw wrote more bestselling books, notably Lucy Crown (1956), Two Weeks in Another Town (1960), Rich Man, Poor Man (1970) (for which he would later write a less successful sequel entitled Beggarman, Thief) and Evening in Byzantium (made into a 1978 TV movie). Rich Man, Poor Man was adapted into a highly successful ABC television miniseries in 1976.

His novel Top of the Hill, about the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid in 1980, was made into a TV movie, starring Wayne Rogers, Adrienne Barbeau, and Sonny Bono.

His last two novels were Bread Upon the Waters (1981) and Acceptable Losses (1982).

Shaw died in Davos, Switzerland on May 16, 1984, aged 71, after undergoing treatment for prostate cancer.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nick and Sheila were our neighbours in 1952: a wonderfully neat and tidy young Jewish couple. They pretty much kept to themselves, and I often used to wonder why. Now I know.

I was 2 and a half years old, and my parents kept their memories of the war years from us kids. The prevailing WASP wisdom was to shelter your tots from such horrors (did their literary guru, Dr Benjamin Spock, advise that?).

When I finally tried to read this book in 1994, I was taking a break at the Antigonish, Nova Scotia Highland Games from a waspishly insensitive senior manager whose shadowing I had been cursed with since I was a New Boy. It wasn't his fault...

He was just a stern disciplinarian, like my Dad.

He was also a gung-ho, born-again clock watcher - timing the junior managers' (as I was back then) smoke breaks (also guilty) to the millisecond.

So I was wrong all the time, at first. It hadn't originated with his trusty 2-IC in our own backwater, whom some smokers mocked. Couldn't have. I loved and respected that guy. It was the Big Fish.

It started with this guy with the millisecond hand - named Mack (my nom de guerrre for him). Mack was the veritable cornerstone of our division. And he watched his subalterns like a HAWK. HE was the guy with the millisecond hand on his Rolex.

Bless him, Mack's now pushing up daisies. But smoking didn't kill him - could it have been complications from stifled rage for those who did smoke?
***

So that's why I left Summer Day unfinished. I was stressed to the max. My rage was stifled like Mack's. Humbled, I’m rereading it now.

I loved Shaw, a member of the WWII Greatest Generation, when young. Don't get me wrong - but he was a dreamer, and here he capitalizes it - The American Dream. It had now become a flawed dream for him, because of its tacit racist overtones.

And violence.

Shaw had seen the Dream turn Nightmarish in his brave, feisty life, and the hero of Summer's Day too has seen its ugly side, its glory now tarnished...

But I was now rudely awake in Antigonish, when I only wanted to rest. I saw my pitiful life as a junior manager clearly: a Dreamless dog's breakfast now. Ever had one of THOSE existential crises in your life?

Thought so...

So my doc had given me a childishly simple Rx for me:

REST.

Therefore, my rest itself was now just a dog's breakfast.

Reading Shaw, Mack's Milliseconds hounded me to northern Nova Scotia.
***

You know, there's no rest for the wicked. I guess I had a mean streak back then...

And with the Holocaust so real and vivid in the 1950's Shaw could get no rest either. In 1952, with such anti-Semitic traces, folks like Senator McCarthy had guys like him in their witch-hunting sights.

So the inner, hurting voices of this summer day are present here too, echoing my own hurt in Antigonish. And my Mom, too, had hurts in the fifties, with parents of mixed religious backgrounds.

Can such scars heal?

I believe so.

For I believe that, at last, that blessed Final Voice of an Endless Summer Day will lay down the Law of Love to us all -

So, like Kafka at the end, we will all finally find peace - with our convictors now silenced -

And at last smile about it all, having found our ultimate Rest.

***

When I went to Antigonish I was in my midage. Now I’m almost 75. I’m in my dotage!

What comes around goes around…

And now, in my wide awake second childhood I see Mack was no Fascist.

He ran a clean ship, is all.

I shoulda done the same in my bipolar years, as a middle manager…

And I shoulda sweated out my purgatory, just like him, all along -

No matter how high God racheted up the flames!

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am closing in on finishing my reading list for 1965. I put 74 books on this list and I have been reading from it for nearly two years. 1965 was a pivotal year in my life, the year I graduated from high school and went off to college to begin reinventing myself.

Irwin Shaw got on the list because he had three bestsellers between 1948 and 1960 and I came to like his writing by reading those earlier. Voices of a Summer Day features Benjamin Federov, son of Jewish immigrant parents, now looking back over his life. He became a successful businessman, created a family with the love of his life, but had much difficulty remaining faithful to his wife.

I still enjoyed the writing and the story of American mid-20th century life, but reading about a man's justifications for his infidelities grew tiresome after a while. It is all fine and good for a male to "be his own man" but the women are either long-suffering, of loose morals or just flat as characters. He did cause me to examine my own marriage and our commitment to remaining faithful after finding each other amid the wreckage of our wild youths.

So I can thank Irwin Shaw for the memories.

[notgettingenough · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hope this is Shaw as his worst.

From a political/sociological point of view this could have been interesting and I suppose it must have been strongly based on his own experiences. Maybe that's why he couldn't write it effectively. The structure of it doesn't work at all - presumably necessary as a way of threading together all the bits and pieces, but it fails.

[Gigi Ann · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the first time I've read anything by this author, Irwin Shaw, of a few decades ago. Being in the mood to read a "Vintage" book from my "Vintage" bookshelf I chose this book. This book is copyrighted 1965. What I have researched and read about Irwin Shaw, after I read the book...most reviewers say this was not one of his best works. And I have to say I totally agree, however this is the only work of his I have read. Irwin Shaw was born (February 27, 1913 and died May 16, 1984) he was a prolific American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author whose written works have sold more than 14 million copies.

Overview...
Four decades of American life are re-created through the dramatic reminiscences of Benjamin Federov, a typical yet very special man, son of Immigrant Jewish parents, a husband, a father, an admirer of women, a one-time soldier ... and finally, and always, his own man. Federov's story is relived while watching his teen-age son play baseball in the sunshine of a summer day. It tells of the intrigue and exultation of his first love affair, his war experiences, the volatile warmth of his marriage, and the special meaning of his infidelities. Through it all is his quest for a point of balance as he stands on the edge of conventional society, desirous of entering, refusing always to do so.

My Thoughts...
This book is what I call "A Blast From The Past" kind of book. It was long before cellphones, texting, and email. It kind of brought back memories of when we needed to call someone. Sometimes we agreed to a time to call and discuss when and where we would meet, or whatever was needed to discuss. No instant messaging back in the 'good ole days'.

I didn't find this a very interesting book to read, I actually didn't finish it, I read to page 173 of a 253 page book. I figured it was a waste of my time reading this book, so it got thrown on my "pile of never to be finished reading pile." On a scale of 1-5, I gave it 1 star. I would say it was not a favorite book of mine.

[Thomas McDade · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Dozing, almost alone on the rows of benches, one game slid into other games, other generations were at play many years before . . . in Harrison, New Jersey, where he had grown up; on college campuses, where he had never been quite good enough to make the varsity, despite his fleetness of foot and sure-handedness in the field. The sounds were the same through the years—the American sounds of summer, the tap of bat against ball, the cries of infielders, the wooden plump of the ball into catchers’ mitts, the umpires calling “Strike three and you’re out.” The generations circled the bases, the dust rose for forty years as runners slid in from third, dead boys hit doubles, famous men made errors at shortstop, forgotten friends tapped the clay from their spikes with their bats as they stepped into the batter’s box, coaches’ voices warned, across the decades, “Tag up, tag up!” on fly balls. The distant mortal innings of boyhood and youth . . ."

[David Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shaw was one of a very fortunate generation of writers. He saw service in World War II, survived with some good stories to tell, and wrote a novel that made him famous. He was then at the outset of a half-century-long publishing peak during which writers became rich and famous who today would struggle to even get published.

He's famous for his war novel, 'The Young Lions' and for 'Rich Man, Poor Man', but his greatest contribution to literature may have been his short stories, 64 of which were collected in 'Five Decades'. How incredible - a writer could get scores of stories published in those days and make a living out of it!

His milieu involves being a Jewish American in a culture of institutionalized antisemitism, cocktail parties, white-collar alcoholism, wives cheating on husbands, husbands cheating on wives, men feeling they're wasting their lives in the struggle to get ahead. He writes with a kind of authorial authority, always with this sense of a carefully crafted weight of meaning to his well-ordered sentences, perhaps also with an eye to attracting Hollywood to hire him to write the screenplay. He's easy to read; clear, suggestive but not ambiguous.

The above pretty much sums up 'Voices of a Summer's Day' (I read it because it has that some evocative kind of title as one of his greatest stories, 'The Girls in Their Summer Dresses'). I don't know how autobiographical it is, but the protagonist is the same age as Shaw and it's hard not to believe it reflects issues in his life. The story doesn't really go anywhere, nor have a point, and not all readers will admire the way it dances back and forth in time, but it's an easy read and ultimately affecting. It won't change your life but it's an authentic portrait of a certain kind of mid-twentieth-century USA and a fine novel.

[Jack Goodstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although certainly not Shaw at the top of his form, the book moves quickly as Benjamin Federov spends a summer day in 1964 watching his son play baseball and daydreaming about the highlights and lowlights of his life. Shaw uses him to stand in as the type of the second generation Jewish immigrant. The emphasis is on the continuing gulf between the American gentry and the new immigrants and their offspring.

[Sergey Tomson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Это книга-воспоминание. Просто о жизни одного рядового американца. Лаконично и талантливо рассказанная чисто американская история. Та же самая Золушка, только про мужика.
Наверное, эту книгу читают американские школьники старших классов. Наверное, это своего рода стандарт: бейсбол, американский футбол, примерная жена-домохозяйка, дожидающаяся мужа с военной службы, чтобы до конца жизни потом вставать в семь утра и готовить классический американский завтрак, каждое утро в новой сорочке, с идеальной причёской - волосок к волоску. Его это бесит, она ненатурально плачет на кухне...

Всё начинается и заканчивается в один тёплый летний день на залитой солнцем бейсбольной площадке. Бейсбола в этой книге, пожалуй, даже слишком много. Словно мы не знаем, как важна эта игра для истинного американца - прямого потомка иудея из России времён октябрьской революции. Главный герой, Фердов, превозмогая все тяготы и последствия великой американской депрессии, претерпевая нищету и предрассудки, получает приличное образование в колледже, а потом, смиряя гордость и роняя достоинство в грязь на глазах собственной матери, устраивается грузчиком. "В объявлении в «Нью-Йорк таймс» говорилось, что им нужны только белые мужчины приличного происхождения", а он, хоть и сложен, как Олимпийский бог, не может получить даже работу школьного учителя - любая комиссия по профпригодности ставит несчастному атлету диагноз "ожирение".

Свой билет в "красивую" жизнь юный Фердов получает, попав на работу официанта в элитном загородном клубе, где до рвоты красной икрой веселятся его неприлично богатые сверстники. Ослепительной красоты блондинка в белом платье поднимается по лестнице наверх, на чердак, в комнату прислуги, то с одним мужчиной, то с другим, то с третьим. Позже Фердов обнаруживает, что именно его комнатушка на чердаке пропитана запахом секса. Обессиленный от унизительной работы он падает на набитый сеном матрас, на простыни перепачканные спермой, на наволочку в разводах красной губной помады и решает для себя, что всю жизнь он будет искать только таких женщин.

Идеальная Бэтти (Бэтти, Пэгги, Пэтти - у всех идеальных американских жен схожие имена) говорит юному Фердову, что его происхождение для неё не имеет никакого значения. А какая-то бесцветная блондиночка шепчет ему на ушко, что может испытывать оргазм только с евреем брутального типа.
Идеальная Бэтти настаивает, чтобы муж каждый день в семь вечера был дома и сидел за изумительно сервированным столом. А сногсшибательная блондинка, по которой и не скажешь, что ей уже за сорок, сообщает ему за ленчем, что "по ночам любовью занимаются только крестьяне".
Но, в конечном итоге, любая блядь, начитавшись книжек, однажды может произнести своими густо напомаженными губами: "Я что, ужасно буржуазна, если хочу иметь своего собственного мужа, а не чьего-то там чужого?", а потом выйти замуж за умного и красивого инженера. Потом они будут дружить семьями и ходить друг к другу на коктейль. У него идеальная жена, у неё идеальный муж, над головой у них идеальное голубое небо и дети играют вместе в бейсбол - их голоса, как эхо летних дней каких-то там лохматых годов.

Чудо, как хорошо написано!

[Dave Rhody · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Irwin Shaw wrote Voices of a Summer Day, he didn’t mean it to be historical fiction, but it has become just that. Shaw captures the lives and attitudes of post-WWII Americans and makes it personal.

Benjamin Federov is experienced, a WWII veteran, successful with both business and women. He is a nicer version of Don Draper (Mad Men) or maybe it’s just that he doesn’t drink as much. He’s sitting alone in the bleachers of a small town ball park watching his son play a late summer baseball game in 1964, reflecting on his life. He’s joined later by a woman who also has a son on the ballfield; she’s Ben’s former mistress.

To the outside world, Ben’s life might have seemed charmed, the son of hardworking immigrant parents successful enough to send him away to summer camp and later off to college. But Ben’s memories of summer camp are rife with discontent. He chafes at the racial injustices he witnesses, refuses to envy class privilege and shies away from sexist bravado.

Still bothered by it forty years later, he recalls a boy bragging, then making a ballad out of his conquest, “I took her cherry under a cherry tree . . . her, cherry, cherry, cherry, under the cherry, cherry tree.”

Ben found it crude to brag and he hated dishonesty. The first time he had sex he enjoyed it so much he vowed to be promiscuous his whole life, but to never lie to his lovers. When he met Peggy, he knew he would marry her and she knew he would wander.

“They made love three weeks later, on a Saturday night, in the warm dark garden behind the tennis court. Peggy was not a virgin. ‘Remember,’ she said later, enjoying her own candor, ‘I have a BA from Stanford. They don’t give degrees to virgins in California. It’s a state law.’”

It was 1942. Their college degrees didn’t matter. After a quick wedding and brief honeymoon with Peggy, Ben went off to war. It would be three years before he saw her again. By the time he returned they were strangers to each other, groping forward but committed.

His reverie in the bleachers hit one snag after another. All of them are about the stupidity and injustices he’s witnessed in the world. Of his experience with war and the Vietnam conflict just beginning, he says, “War does not teach you much as one would like to believe. The guns fall quiet but the soul trembles on.”

When asked why he’s not more riled up about the prejudice he suffers as a Jew, he admits that it bothers him, but points to those with bigger fights on their hands, noting the Civil Rights Movement he’d been quietly cheering for since the mid 50’s.

All his thoughts are balanced by the pleasant late summer day watching a pick-up baseball game. “His tall son glided like a stranger, ageless, a memory, across the green grass; his own father for a moment or two in a vanished September was alive . ..”

But in the end, after the baseball game is over, he’s pushed to the breaking point. On a twilight stroll, nearing a Long Island beach club, he sees two boys too far out in the rising ocean waves. They can’t hear his warning, so he rushes into the club – a place that has never allowed Jews as members. All he wants is the oars to the boat on the beach so he can rescue the boys. The club manager looks out, squints to see that one of the teen boys is black. He claims they have no responsibility for such people, “They are not members.”

All the sour memories come rushing back, all the people who were not members and all the people who had joined the club and given up their souls in the process.

The last pages of Voices of a Summer Day made me cry. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that there are good men, and better women, in every age, but always far too many who have joined the club.

[Maryna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Книга о воспоминаниях, ушедших и в то же время близких, затертых временем, но порой все же ярких и четких...

Звучали голоса, мелькали лица, сцены и образы представали перед глазами и уносились прочь — невыполненное обещание, фальшивая улыбка, могила, свадебная ночь, солдат в шлеме под дождем, отец, пляшущий казачок, сын с этим своим словцом «выпендриваешься», пятно от вермута на розовом платье, помада на простынях, злобные рты, предательский шепот.

Главный герой книги, Бенджамин Федров, сидит на залитых солнцем скамейках стадиона, наблюдает за тем, как его сын играет в бейсбол, и вспоминает всю свою жизнь. В этом небольшом по объему произведении Ирвинг Шоу показывает довольно большой промежуток времени. Мы узнаем и об отце Бенджамина, Израиле Федрове, который раньше жил в Киеве, а потом эммигрировал в США. История начинается еще в конце 19 века и, перескакивая с воспоминания на воспоминание, ведет нас к жаркому летнему дню 1964 года. Каким был этот путь? Что довелось пережить еврею Бенджамину в США, что мучило его душу и что доставляло ему радость? Шоу - потрясающий рассказчик, и ответы на эти вопросы складываются в невероятно гармоничную картинку, от которой невозможно оторваться.

В книге очень много спорта. Но это не книга о спортсмене и о пути преодоления себя. Спорт - лишь символ. Это символ упорства и несгибаемости, выносливости и тяги к победе. "Голоса летнего дня" - образец очень хорошей неспешной психологической прозы, чем-то отдаленно напоминающей Стейнбека или Торнтона Уайлдера.

9 / 10

[Mark R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a few years since I last read a book by Irwin Shaw. He's one of those authors I go back to now and then, look over his bibliography, figure out what I haven't read yet, and take a look. This book I found at the Ohio Bookstore in Cincinnati, a five-story outfit in an old building, with those university library lights that come on overhead when you enter one of its upper floors.

I never see Irwin Shaw books at Barnes & Noble. The library doesn't carry many of his titles either. I don't know why this is, why some authors who were wildly popular in the 50s and 60s, or beyond, fall completely out of favor with audiences. I'll never understand why his name isn't held in higher regard.

"Voices of a Summer Day" is one of his briefer novels. It takes us through about four decades of life in a Jewish family. The narrator sits on the sidelines of his kid's sports game, reflecting on his family and their life, sometimes troubled, over the years.

[Elisaveta Ilieva · Rating 5 out of 5]

As you read the stories of the main character’s past, you begin to unravel the truth behind how shallow and incapable of change a person can be. And that may not sound very appealing but for those of us who love the to see a good portrayal of the truth behind a human being’s thoughts and mind, this is the right book.

[Sylvia · Rating 3 out of 5]

En una tarde de verano, el protagonista, un judío americano hijo de emigrantes, rememora su infancia, la crisis del 29, la guerra, sus amores y sus vivencias. A pesar de que sobran algunas crónicas deportivas, soy bastante fan de la literatura americana y me ha gustado.

[Polly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A day.

[Maureen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was OK but too many baseball and soccer terms which I did not understand.

[Mikko Peralta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nostalgic... :)

[Sreeram_r · Rating 2 out of 5]

it takes you somewhere and drop you in the middle of the trip that's what i felt ... shaw not at his best. waste of time...!!!

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read in high school.