A son found a box of his father's wartime letters. What was inside changed how he saw his family, and history, forever.
Hyman "Hymie" Fradin wanted to be a writer. Instead, life made him a Marine, then a soldier, then a Master Plumber, but the wit never left him. Decades later, his son Duke David Fradin discovered the letters Hymie had written home to his brother Morris during and after World War II, and realized his father had gotten his wish all along.
Letters from My Hymie is built from those actual letters. They are funny, sharp, and unexpectedly tender, and they sit alongside the story of Hymie's father Louis, who fled persecution in Ukraine in 1914 to build a new life in America. Together, father and son's stories trace one Jewish family's journey from immigration, through the Marines and the Army, where Hymie served as an interpreter for German POWs after being discharged from the Marines for flat feet, all the way to Disneyland and beyond.
This is history the way most of us actually inherit it. Not from a textbook, but from a shoebox of letters, a few photographs, and the stories that get retold at the dinner table. Woven with family photographs, historical documents, and oral history, it is a rare Jewish American voice inside the World War II soldier story, a genealogist's treasure trove of real primary sources, and above all, a father and son's account of resilience and humor carried across generations.
Letters from My Hymie has found readers among memoir lovers, family historians, and anyone who has ever wondered what their own relatives' letters home might have said.
If you have ever wished you could read your grandfather's letters home from the war, start here.
Available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook, narrated by David Fradin himself.