World War II enters the narrative through Manfred M. Zakheim’s memories of British Army service and the long-distance friendship he maintained with Alexander A. Gideon. The war disperses Zakheim across several countries, but letters and packages keep the two men connected; in retrospect, that durable attachment helps explain the authority Gideon continues to exercise over him.

Enlistment and wartime service

Zakheim recalls volunteering for the British Army in 1941. Over the next five years, his service took him from Palestine to Cairo and Cyrenaica, then through Italy, Germany, Austria, The Hague, and Birmingham. The itinerary presents the war as a succession of displacements, measured not by battles described in detail but by the places through which a young soldier passed.

In 1943, while he was a second lieutenant, Zakheim was summoned in the middle of the night to Montgomery’s field headquarters in the Cyrenaica desert to translate a German document. Looking back, he compares his response to Gideon with how he felt in Montgomery’s presence: Gideon’s influence could make him feel as if he had been called to attention. The wartime episode thus becomes a measure of a personal dynamic that Zakheim says persisted long after the military setting had vanished.

Correspondence across distance

During Zakheim’s years away, Gideon sent a package every two or three weeks. The parcels came from Gideon himself, not his father, and contained candy, wool socks, Hebrew newspapers and magazines, and letters with sketches of imaginary weapons. Their regular arrival made the friendship an active presence in Zakheim’s wartime life rather than a bond preserved only in memory.

Zakheim answered with postcards from the places he visited, along with stamps and banknotes he collected and sent to Gideon. The exchange was reciprocal but not identical: Gideon’s packages carried familiar comforts and news from home, while Zakheim’s postcards and keepsakes recorded his movement through the war. The detail that each kept sending something across the distance gives their connection a tangible rhythm.

Return and the afterlife of the war

When Zakheim returned in 1946, Gideon vacated his room for him. Zakheim later recalled the gesture as part of a history in which Gideon had made room for him both literally and figuratively, beginning when they were young and continuing through later crises. The war years therefore sit within a larger account of mutual dependence, but one Zakheim describes as markedly unequal in its emotional force.

In a later letter, Zakheim revisits his 1943 encounter with Montgomery to explain why Gideon’s presence still seems to command his obedience. The comparison does not equate their roles; it shows how a wartime memory supplies Zakheim with a language for a difficult personal attachment. World War II is consequently both a period of service and separation and the setting for a correspondence that endured beyond Zakheim’s return.