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March 26, 2004/Nisan 4 5764, Vol. 56, No. 27
Novel brings enduring satisfaction
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
Maxine and Jonathan Marshall relax in their Scottsdale home.
Photo by Ellen Nusbaum
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What makes a book?
A compelling chance encounter? An abiding interest? An elusive desire?
For Jonathan Marshall, it was perhaps all three. Marshall, longtime journalist and former publisher of the Scottsdale Daily Progress, is the author of "Reunion in Norway" (Ruder Finn Press, $14.95 paperback, available at www.amazon.com). The book, released earlier this year, tells of a small group of men who were part of the Norwegian resistance in World War II. Their little-known story piqued Marshall's curiosity after stumbling upon a tiny museum in Bergen, Norway, during a visit in 1992. The museum, located in a small room upstairs from a restaurant on Bergen's harbor, is the restored site of a radio service used during the war by the underground. It was here that the Theta group, or Fishermen, as Marshall called them in his fictionalized account, tracked German naval activity in the area and communicated with the Norwegian government in exile.
During Marshall's brief visit to the headquarters, a guide related the tale of wartime heroism.
"I was fascinated by what these young men had done," says Marshall during a recent interview in his light-filled Scottsdale home that he shares with his wife, Maxine. "It stimulated my interest."
Marshall, born in 1924 in New York, was 17 years old in 1941, when his book opens. He recalls that he had just finished his freshman year at Swarthmore College, where he admits that he was not happy. An attempt to enlist in the army was foiled by chronic asthma, and Marshall was eventually lured west, earning a bachelor's degree in economics and political science in 1946 from the University of Colorado.
Marshall says that he regrets not having served in the war, like the main character in his novel, Royal Canadian Air Force Sergeant Olaf Larsen. Larsen, readers learn, a small-town boy from Minnesota, enlists not only as he says, "to start seeing the world," reflecting Marshall's own wanderlust at that age, but because he has a German Jewish grandmother.
"I (still) feel some guilt that I was turned down and not part of the war," Marshall says.
The war and the plight of the Jews in Europe were distant, he says now. Both his grandparents and parents were born in the United States, his father's family coming from Bavaria, his mother's from Austria. He recalls his family helping relatives from Germany when they emigrated in the 1930s and later hearing talk of the worsening situation in Europe.
"We knew that Hitler was doing bad things to the Jews," says Marshall, who is Jewish. "We heard of concentration camps, but we had no reality of what they were."
It was not until years later when Marshall visited Dachau that he said he truly understood the enormity of the atrocities.
"It made it real," he says. A later friendship with Holocaust survivor Gerda Klein and her late husband, Kurt, has also enhanced his understanding.
"Knowing Gerda has made the Holocaust personal," he says.
And history, especially Jewish history, remains an abiding interest.
"History is important to the Jewish people," he says and notes that travels have taken him to a number of Jewish historical sites in Europe. "It makes me proud to be Jewish."
Too, Marshall notes that his propensity "to make the world a better place" also informs his perspective.
"My family inspired the philosophy to do what you can to make your small part of the world a better place."
After selling the Progress in 1987, the Marshalls went on to found a philanthropic foundation that allowed them to animate their commitments to social issues, the arts and the environment.
Issues of fairness, justice and moral responsibility play out in "Reunion," as Marshall intersperses the Fishermen's wartime exploits with a modern day plot to avenge their Nazi tormentor. Chapters alternate between November 1941 and June 1998.
Marshall, who wrote more than 12,500 columns and editorials as Progress publisher, knows well the power of the written word. He credits an editorial writing professor at the University of Oregon, where he earned a master's in journalism before purchasing the then bankrupt Progress in 1963, with teaching him what good editorial writing can and should be.
But he is quick to acknowledge that writing editorials is very different from writing fiction.
"When you write an editorial you have to be quick, to the point, think about it and put it down," he says. And you have to make your argument in a limited number of words. Marshall's writing style reflects that spareness. "Reunion," which packs a lot of action into its slim 113 pages, is characterized by its simplicity and economy of word. Descriptions are honed down to their very essence, the dialogue direct and unadorned.
It took Marshall nearly five years to complete the project. He did not do extensive research, instead depending on guidebooks for the essential information and letting his imagination go from there. He interspersed historical detail or reference where appropriate and also drew on his background, such as a childhood interest in sailing. So, main character Larsen is named after the Norwegian national hero Olaf the Viking, and the operation that shuttled supplies and personnel aboard fishing boats to and from the western coast of Norway and the Shetland Islands is referred to as the Shetland Bus.
"There were little things that I slipped in," he says, "piecing it together."
The book was truly a work in progress, with Marshall writing, then asking colleagues and others, including Arizona State University creative writing professor Ron Carlson, for advice and criticism.
"I did it, showed it to people, then rewrote," he says.
Though ultimately pleased with his work, Marshall says that if he had to do it again, he would "do it with more feeling."
His one regret, he says, is that he did not begin writing books 20 years ago.
"I could do a better job," he says.
Currently, he is at work on an autobiography and then plans to finish a murder mystery he began years ago but never finished.
He writes by dictating chunks of text to a college student who inputs the copy into Marshall's computer. He spends hours listening as the student reads back the material to assure appropriate transitions and continuity.
Marshall, 80, says publishing a book has given him immense satisfaction. "I came from a family of writers and lawyers," he says, suggesting that may have inspired his writing aspirations. His father, James Marshall, wrote about law and psychology; his mother, Lenore G. Marshall, was a novelist and poet with seven published works to her credit.
Glancing at the copy of "Reunion," with his name imprinted on the cover, he says, "I wanted to be able to do it."
Contact the writer at vicki_cabot@jewishaz.com.
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