The Journey Home

This novel, published in 1945, is an account of a train journey from Florida to New York. The central character, Lieutenant Don Corbett, is on three weeks’ leave from service as an Air Force bombardier in Europe. During the train journey, he moves from carriage to carriage, engaging in conversation with a wide variety of characters. Through doing so, he gets an insight into the mood of America’s home front and some of them see beneath his steely veneer the frailty and fatigue of a war-weary fighter.

The author, Zelda Popkin (née Feinberg, born 5 July 1898), grew up in and around New York City. Her parents were both Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. On leaving school, she worked as a newspaper reporter. She wrote regularly for magazines, such as The New Yorker, before she wrote her first novel when convalescing from a long illness. Published in 1938, it was the first of five detective novels featuring Mary Carner, one of the earliest female detectives in fiction. After those novels, she wrote this novel, focused on American attitudes to the Second World War; then Small Victory (published in 1947), one of the first American novels on the Holocaust; later Quiet Street, the earliest novel in English about the creation of the state of Israel, for which she received a National Jewish Book Award in 1952. Small Victory  was largely informed by her own experiences of post-war camps for displaced people in Germany, which she visited on behalf of the American Red Cross in the winter of 1945-1946.

The central character, Don Corbett, befriends Nina, a young New York woman, on the train and she tries to connect to this experience of war. Towards the end of the novel, part of the train is derailed and in conversation with Don, she tries to use the disaster as a means of understanding the horrors of war:
“I feel as if I'd been through the war. Why, it's something like that, like that wreck, isn't it?”
“Something. Only more so. All the time.”
“Oh, no!... but then how do they stand it?"
“Some do. Some don't. Depends on what kind of person you are. If you're one kind, you pull up your guts and do something to help. If you’re another, you sit down and cry and say why did it happen to me?”