War and Remembrance was published by Little, Brown in 1978 and completes the story begun in The Winds of War, following the Henry family from December 1941 through August 1945. The novel is even more massive than its predecessor (over 1,000 pages) and more ambitious in scope: it encompasses the major campaigns of the war (Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, Stalingrad, D-Day, Iwo Jima) while also depicting the Holocaust through the experiences of Natalie Henry and her uncle Aaron Jastrow, who are deported to Auschwitz.
Wouk’s depiction of the Holocaust — Natalie’s journey from Italy through Theresienstadt to Auschwitz — is among the most harrowing passages in American fiction. Wouk, himself an Orthodox Jew, researched the subject exhaustively and renders the machinery of genocide with unflinching precision. The contrast between the military narrative (heroic, purposeful, ultimately victorious) and the Holocaust narrative (meaningless, industrialized, incomprehensible) is the novel’s deepest structural tension.
The “remembrance” of the title is both personal (the characters remember and are changed by what they have witnessed) and collective (the novel is itself an act of remembrance, preserving the memory of events that must not be forgotten). Wouk considered this his most important work — the book he had been preparing to write since the war ended — and its scale and seriousness of purpose justify the ambition, even when the prose does not always match the subject’s demands.
Collecting War and Remembrance
First edition (Little, Brown, Boston, 1978): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$15
- Signed copies: $75–$200