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Letters
Let Children Know Their Dad
By
Ana Veciana-Suarez
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The
letters are, first and foremost, an epistolary love story
of two people devoted to each other, separated first by the
Depression, then war, but always sustained by faith and courage.
They are also a fascinating window into the lives and dreams
of a couple struggling through
the typical travails of that time.
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"Please hurry, my darling,"
wrote M.J. "Mike" Klein in March 1931 to his beloved,
Jacqueline Coleman. "I want you so. I'm sending a multitude
of kisses by our stars." Twelve years and many letters
later, on Oct. 6, 1943, Mike Klein's darling penned: "There
aren't enough roses grown in all the world that mean as much
to me as this dear, lovely letter telling me your thoughts and
love for me." The Bureau of Naval Personnel, though, eventually
returned Jacque Klein’s letter. Reason checked: Deceased.
On Oct. 9, Lt. Cmdr. Mike Klein's USS Buck was torpedoed by
a German U-boat and sunk off Salerno, Italy. Ninety-four of
the 260-man crew survived; Klein went down with his ship.
Kay Brigham was 7 years old when her father died. Her mother
never forgot the war hero and continued to speak lovingly to
her children of their lost father. But it wasn't until 1995,
on the 50th anniversary of the World War II victory in Europe,
that Brigham realized how true and deep her parents' love had
been. That's when she began to read her parents' 13-year correspondence,
letters kept by her mother in a cardboard box and given to her
eldest daughter upon her death in 1971. Last year, Brigham,
a historian and a Columbus scholar, published the riveting and
poignant "For Those Who Love, Time is Not: A World War
II True Story of Unconquerable Love and Faith,” a compilation
of letters by her parents, diary entries from her mother, declassified
naval records and telling correspondence with the German submarine
captain whose boat torpedoed the Buck. "I always knew about
these letters," Brigham says, "but I was reluctant
to read them. I didn't want to grieve again."
Letter by letter, the old world of her parents opened up. She
learned about a father she barely remembered and about a mother
whose heroism on the home front was underscored by a wifely
anxiety that she rarely revealed while raising three children
alone. For Brigham, who had read countless historical documents
as a writer of six books (four of them on Columbus), this intimate
look proved to be a comfort she never expected. "Getting
to know him was a healing process for me," Brigham says.
"I now feel like I really know my father." Her brother
Mike Klein, a retired FBI agent, had the same reaction: "The
letters personalized him for me, but it also reminded me of
the sacrifices our fathers gave for this country and how that
kind of sacrifice is still happening."
It was the stoic heroism that touched Brigham's daughter, lawyer
Amy Boulris. For Boulris, pregnant with her third child and
about the same age her grandmother was when her grandfather
died, reading the letters has prompted her to look inward. "It's
made me ask myself: If my grandfather and grandmother did this,
would they be proud of me? Am I doing something that's worthy
of their sacrifice?"
Brigham's original intention was to compile the letters for
her immediate family -- Mike, sister Cissy, her four children
and her nephews and nieces. But her Barcelona editor, a naval
history aficionado, became intrigued with her discovery. He
convinced her that the message of love and faith deserved a
bigger audience, particularly with this generation's growing
interest in World War II.
"I'm fortunate to have these letters, but there are a lot
of war orphans who don't have anything," she says. "They
know very little about their fathers."
Brigham's younger sister, Cissy Peters, who lives in Canada,
considers the letters a precious gift. "When I received
the original manuscript, I knew it was special, but I was unprepared
for the profound effect it would have on me. I was on holiday
that August, and I sat alone on the shores of Lake Erie in southern
Ontario, and I read and sobbed for three days."
Brigham feels grateful to her mother for saving them. Jacque
Klein even wrote a foreword to her children, which Brigham discovered
while scrambling to save heirlooms during Hurricane Andrew:
"He is an attractive acquaintance to you, and I want you
to know and love him as I did. I learned to know and love him
through his letters ... I shall tell you our story through his
letters and, as well as I can remember, my answers to them."
History has always carried a touch of the personal for Brigham.
As a child growing up in Virginia, Christopher Columbus fascinated
her when a friend of her father's wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning
biography of the man. After attending Rollins College as a Spanish
major, she pursued her love of Spanish literature and history
as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Claremont Graduate School. Perhaps
it is her historian's background that helped her communicate
with the German captain of U-616 in 1999, when she wrote him
a letter introducing herself. He wrote back immediately. Both
letters are included at the end of the book. Though they had
an opportunity to meet, Brigham decided the brief correspondence
was enough for her. "It was war, and this is what these
men did. I could understand that, because my father was a man
of war, too." Brigham worries about the lost art of letter
writing at a time when the United States is involved in a different
kind of war. In this era of technology, young soldiers call
and e-mail home, a wonderfully instantaneous form of communication
but something that might not weather the test of time as well.
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