Literary Historical Fiction
The Dead of Winter, by Paul David Bauer
Vol. 4 in The Coldest Winter in a Century
One of the great privileges of my life is to serve as the first reader for my husband Paul, who has just published The Dead of Winter, the fourth of seven planned volumes in his epic series The Coldest Winter in a Century. Coldest Winter follows four characters during the second World War: Captain (and later Major) Ed Rybowski, a Jewish company commander in the 1st Battalion of the 22nd Infantry Regiment; Ed’s college friend Billy Randolph, son of Virginia’s senior senator and an intelligence officer at SHAEF; Billy’s younger sister Mary, a hard-working Washington insider and Ed’s soon-to-be ex-wife; and Ed’s former girlfriend Cathy Quinn, a nurse from a big Irish Catholic family who is caring for wounded soldiers on the home front. Coldest Winter takes us into the heart of the European conflict via the Hürtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, and the prisoner of war camps (in a remarkable passage in the third book, Be Not Afraid, Billy Randolph visits Treblinka under the guidance of Ukrainian-Jewish novelist and journalist Vassily Grossman). Meanwhile, Mary Randolph is sent on a mission to Alaska to reconnoiter a site for a dam—a massive New Deal project destined never to be completed. And Cathy, who has married the wrong man on impulse, keeps an eye on her nursing cohort and her colorful brothers while making frequent confessions.
Coldest Winter is a brilliantly-researched passion project that sits somewhere between Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series and Hilary Mantel’s Henry VIII trilogy. The story has been the undercurrent of our marriage: when I first met Paul, he was writing what would later become Mad River Run, a prequel to Coldest Winter set in Princeton, New York, and Vermont in December of 1939. Here, we meet the characters in their idealistic youth. Billy, who harbors Communist sympathies despite his patrician origins, dreams of fighting in the Spanish Civil War with the Lincoln Brigade, while Ed, who is Jewish and from Brooklyn, broods over the ongoing German invasion of Poland. As a young person, Billy has many flaws—he’s impulsive, grandiose, and a womanizer to boot—but he is utterly loyal to Ed, the smartest person he knows. In Mad River Run, Billy leads Ed into all sorts of misadventures, beginning with some pool shark action at Princeton’s Ivy Club and ending with an ill-advised episode of night skiing at Mad River in Vermont. Meanwhile, Ed tries to come to terms with the violent death of his father, Wladislaw Rybowski, whose true business Ed does not yet understand.
Through it all, Ed is our polestar, the figure around whom all the disparate characters revolve. His voice is laconic, introspective, sometimes fierce. Here’s a sample from the early pages of Mad River Run, in which Billy and Ed, both lacrosse players, have just finished a punishing afternoon run and are lying under what Billy calls the “Tree of Doom:”
Randolph said to concentrate on the sky to forget the pain. Billy was always talking that way. Announcing theories. Commanding commitments. Calling in the chits of manhood. It was his manner of friendship. Looking up through the black branches of the old tree, he said the late afternoon sky was like some girls’ eyes when the music stopped, an expectant blue, “full of potential.”
There was always potential in blue-eyed girls for boys like Billy Randolph, Ed thought.
Life will darken in time for all of these characters; both the male and female protagonists must confront the physical and moral perils of the times in which they live. Here is Mary in Alaska, after having suggested that a Russian flyer might have revealed something interesting to her while in his cups:
It was the disease of government that people often pretended to possess more information than they really did; it was a badge of status in Washington to be “in the know.” She had always despised people like that, peripheral nobodies who claimed to have inside dope. They were dangerous too: loose lips, sink ships and all that. But she had fallen into the same trap, pretending to know something about Hipp’s shipment. And now she had probably put someone else on the hot seat to boot. It was pride, nothing more, and she felt herself redden with embarrassment.
From the beginning, Mary Randolph is beautiful, brilliant, ambitious, and tough; and one wonders whether, like Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch, she is destined for some great act of self-sacrificing love. And Cathy Quinn will someday discover what an object of devotion she herself has been. The Coldest Winter in a Century will immerse you in some of the twentieth century’s most notorious conflicts, along with a few harrowing episodes that have only recently come to light. You’ll be eagerly awaiting the next installment—and lucky for me, I’ll be reading it first.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 