Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Then suddenly everything became a frenzy of activity. On May 11, 1944, an offensive began that had him moving toward Rome with one of the convoys. For five days there was “lots of excitement,” including the death of one of his roommates. Then just as suddenly everything changed: troops were on the move to Rome, but Steinberg was sent back on the “dead road” to North Africa. He gave up on reaching Rome and also Bucharest, to whose radio broadcasts of lies and propaganda he had become addicted.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but as soon as I get used to one place I have to move,” he wrote from North Africa, as once again he was sent from one small town near Algiers to another. Hedda teased him that he always needed a list of things to worry about, and he admitted it was true, but now he had something genuine: he should have been promoted to lieutenant JG (junior grade) several months earlier, but he was so far from his original unit in China that no one there remembered to submit the required paperwork. He didn’t care about the rank, but he wanted the salary increase, so he started the process himself, as it seemed likely he would be in North Africa for the duration of the war.

  Once again he was in debilitating heat and unable to work. Algiers was a “stupid city,” and he was sharing “a dark dirty room with another fellow” without even a drawing table. Even worse, he was required to spend the equivalent of business hours sitting in an office in full uniform, to take his turn as officer of the day, to supervise all administrative activity, to sleep in his uniform at night, and to be ready to assume command on the off chance of enemy action. He also had to censor the enlisted men’s mail and supervise the collection and burning of confidential trash every day at five o’clock. He hated it.

  D-Day, June 6, 1944, initiated several days of excitement as news of the Normandy invasion filtered down the continent to Africa, but Steinberg’s morale remained low. By June 11 things had returned to the boringly normal, and he continued his daily routine, spending evenings glumly alone in his office making drawings for The New Yorker. His hands were “itching for drawings” as he was itching for any sort of action, no matter what kind. His uncle Harry wrote to say that he had received two telegrams from Moritz and Rosa sent via the Red Cross, and they were well. It was the first news Steinberg had had of his family for over a year. His birthday was June 15, but having ruined his stomach on Spam and army rations, he could only watch as his army colleagues drank the whiskey he bought for them at the navy exchange. Now his unit was working around the clock and he was “running around and busy as hell, extremely unusual for me.” By the end of the month, his unit was on the move back to Italy. Only one thing made him sad to leave Algeria: the pet baby goat they had to leave behind, in the care of “a bastard who ate him.”

  THIS TIME HE WAS JOINING THE push to Rome via Sicily and up the coastal roads of southern Italy, where he saw nothing but “destruction … an extraordinary tragic thing.” He kept a small black pocket notebook in which he drew “frightened villages.” He saw “entire cities completely forever destroyed where people still wandered looking for things and living in what little is left out of the walls, bewildered and hungry.” One of the “most pitiful” sights was burning palm trees; one of the most tragic was tailor-made for his ironic sensibility: a German tank that exploded after colliding with a monument of “the usual horseback Garibaldi or somebody you’ll always find in the piazza of an Italian town.”

  By mid-June the paperwork for his promotion was complete and he became a lieutenant JG. He bought the gold braid and had it sewn onto the summer uniforms he had finally managed to buy, only to find that the navy had changed them from khaki to blue-gray and once again he was out of uniform. By July 22 he had been moving around in such confusion that he had not had time to unpack the small amount of baggage he had carried from Algeria in early June. He compared his morale to his dirty laundry, “accumulated for days and days, and I buy new shirts instead of washing the old ones.” He was billeted in a series of elegant houses that had formerly belonged to high-ranking Fascist followers of Mussolini, all of whom were now on the run. Local people had looted the places, but he managed to sleep in “fancy beds in fancy houses” without running water or electricity, where he wrote or drew by candlelight.

  Because he could keep clean and had enough to eat, he felt guilty: his life was so comfortable compared to that of the “hungry population who don’t realize they’ve lost the war.” After so many years of identifying himself with Italy and all things Italian, he now observed the local population from an American perspective and thought he had made a big mistake by angling so hard to return there: “I’m very much disgusted about the whole business, the atmosphere of little misery and intrigue and other European tricks I forgot about in the last three years. Now I see it again with new eyes and I’m very much homesick for the big generous America.”

  If he saw nothing but the ugly side of things in Naples, Rome was far worse. Quite by accident he ran into some “so-called” friends he had known there and in Milan. After the first “enthusiastics and cheerings,” he found them like “ghosts and shadows” who were difficult to talk to: “I changed in many ways or rather I think I found myself better in the past 4–5 years.” When friends who remembered his drawings from the 1930s said they were surprised to see how much his style had changed, he was glad, “because I always suspected my old drawings of being just silly (and they indeed used to be enjoyed by silly or snobs).”

  One old friend he met by happenstance was the journalist Mikhail Kamenetzki, who had taken the name Ugo Stille after he endured many of the same tribulations as Steinberg during his quest to immigrate to the United States. Stille was working for Corriere della Sera and wanted to write an article about Steinberg for the newspaper, but nothing came of it. Steinberg was unable to reestablish contact with Aldo or get news of him and Ada until after the war ended, but he did meet several other friends from the Politecnico who were in Rome. Steinberg’s uniform made Alberto Lattuada uneasy, so their meeting was strained and uncomfortable. It was even more awkward with two of his Bertoldo friends, Mario Ortensi and Mario Brancacci. After that, he stopped seeking out Italian friends and, unless they sought him out, limited his socializing to American colleagues.

  HE BEGAN TO DROP CLUES TO Hedda about what he had done and where he wanted to go that he hoped would pass the censors. He wrote that he hoped to see his father on his father’s birthday, July 15, a hint that he was angling for a furlough to Bucharest. He said that when he looked at magazine photos of Italian women in bathing suits, his “Sicilian heart” was jealous not to be at the beach with them, a way of letting her know that he had been in Sicily and was on the move again. His next letter was more straightforward, as he said that he was sick and tired of moving constantly and was “again in a bad place, hot and flies and uncomfortable, I’m dirty and my eyes burn.” That meant Algiers. To let her know when he was back in Rome, he described himself as one of the sloppiest naval officers “in a neighborhood where regulations and etiquette dominated, as was usual with outfits far from the front lines.”

  Two things were uppermost in his mind: returning to the United States, and having a furlough in Bucharest. By mid-August 1944, because of “the exciting news about landings all over the place,” he was so sure that his orders to go home were on their way that he told Hedda he would not write as often because he would soon be with her in person. He was shocked and dismayed when his orders came and instead of going to Washington, he was assigned for “two weeks or less” to temporary duty in Toulon, France, where his assignment was to deliver “certain classified materials” to the OSS regiment somewhere in Provence. His selection as a courier was nothing out of the ordinary, for some of the most important information that guided sabotage operations and propaganda campaigns on the French Riviera originated in OSS field offices in Caserta and Algiers and was then funneled into France by whoever was available to carry it. Steinberg was probably chosen because he had previously made a number of similar trips between Italy and
North Africa. However, the Toulon assignment was dangerous, because it came just after the Allied invasion of southern France, when the country appeared poised for civil war between Resistance fighters and collaborators. For someone who had not seen actual combat, it was particularly nerve-racking, and he was glad when it was over and he was once again back in Italy.

  ON AUGUST 23, 1944, KING MICHAEL of Romania staged a royal coup, dismissing the military commander, Ion Antonescu, withdrawing his country’s allegiance to Germany, and capitulating to the Allies. In early September, Steinberg learned that an American plane was being sent to Bucharest to recover two important prisoners of war and that he could be on it. His orders were to fly from Rome to Bari and then on to “such other points in Italy as may be directed” before landing in Bucharest. By mid-September he was back in the homeland he had previously wanted to be free of forever.

  Bucharest had been hit hard by bombings once Allied planes stopped targeting the Ploesti oil fields, and Steinberg found devastation everywhere. He knew that his parents were still living on the street where the workshop was, Rahova Road, and he decided to go there first, even though Lica was the person he most wanted to see. He knew she had been married in April 1942 and was living with her husband, Ilie “Rica” Roman, in a neighborhood whose name Steinberg neither recognized nor remembered.

  Before he left Italy, he raided the PX for everything he could take to his family, from canned rations to candy bars, but once he got there, the visit was traumatic. During the war, he did not write of it to Hedda, who was the only person to whom he confided his innermost thoughts. After the war, when he resumed contact with Aldo Buzzi, he merely said that he had managed to get to Bucharest and found it unchanged. The only time he described in detail what he saw in 1944 came fifty years later, during a reunion in Israel with his old high school friend Eugene Campus.

  He told Campus that when he got out of the jeep that took him to his parents’ house, he was shocked to see how it and all the others on the street looked abandoned and were boarded up. As he stood there gazing up and down the bomb-damaged street, a curious child who had never seen a navy uniform began to wave American flags and dance around him and then around the jeep. Steinberg asked in Romanian what had become of his family and all the neighbors. The child told him everyone still lived there, but they had all gone to the synagogue because it was Yom Kippur. Steinberg surprised his parents when they returned from the services, but the visit was disturbing and he left as soon as he could get away. With the jeep outside and all the PX loot dumped on the table, he felt like a “caricature of Prince Charming returning home on his fiery steed, he’s incapable of performing any miracles. He can’t even justly punish the criminals.”

  If photos are any indication, the reunion was far from joyous. Steinberg is in uniform, his face serious to the point of being grim. He stands next to his parents, who are seated at what appears to be a kitchen table, and they appear to be uneasy, regarding him warily, as if he were a stranger who dropped down from an unknown world and whose language they can neither speak nor understand. This visit marked the only time he had returned to Romania since he spent his summer vacation there in 1937. From then on, the Romania of his youth became “a closed chapter” he never wanted to open. He was “afraid [of having] a brutally emotional response to the old childhood places” where he had “suffered … felt miserable and humiliated … Like in a prison.” In his old age, he reminisced about the “disasters of a visit to the tribe” and wondered why, ever since childhood, he had always “looked for ways to escape and avoid families.” In his last decade he often revisited the facts and events of his life in Romania, but only long enough to use his hand to transpose some of them into art.

  Steinberg on his last visit to his family in Bucharest: his parents, his sister, and her husband, Ilie Roman. (illustration credit 10.2)

  AFTER THE LIBERATION OF ROME ON June 4, 1944, Steinberg’s unit, the 2677th MO, was among the first to enter the city and set up operations. By his June 15 birthday, a printing plant had been commandeered, and the work Steinberg did from then on was probably the most sustained and valuable contribution he made toward helping to win the war. The MO unit was a team of twenty-two men and one woman who were “straight out of [journalism’s] Central Casting.” Among them were Eugene Warner, who directed the operations; Norman Newhouse, of the newspaper publishing family (and later the owners of The New Yorker); William T. Dewart, Jr., the publisher of the original New York Sun newspaper; Temple Fielding, the travel writer whose guidebooks created his financial empire; and, most important of all, a forty-five-year-old corporal from Chicago, Egidio Clemente, an Italian-American printer in civilian life who kept the presses up and running. The only woman was a Czech-born American WAC, Barbara Lauwers (later Podoski), who was fluent in German and several central European languages.

  The unit worked out of a safe house where the staff gathered daily for brainstorming sessions, during which they thought up hilariously funny projects that were seldom executed and others that were deadly serious and resulted in significant successes in ending the fighting and reaching the civilian population. The MO unit conceived a newspaper called Das Neue Deutschland, which was allegedly printed and distributed in Germany by anti-Nazi resistance groups united under the auspices of a fake peace party supposedly operating inside the country, but actually originated in Rome. The deception succeeded so well that Heinrich Himmler went to great lengths to see that the paper was exposed and denounced as an OSS ploy. To create it, the staff had to find paper and typefaces of a quality that would have been used within Germany, no small feat in war-ravaged Italy. They had to depend on agents planted in Germany to get the newsprint to Rome, so publication was sporadic. There was no problem finding native German-speakers to write the articles, because one of the main tasks of the three colleagues who had spoken the language since birth was to interrogate German prisoners of war and determine which could be persuaded to assist the Allies. In many of the MO brainstorming sessions, Steinberg’s colleagues who spoke German were struck by his replies: despite his fluency in the language, he always replied in Yiddish.

  Steinberg’s drawings filled each issue of Das Neue Deutschland, and here again, since the goal was to make people read the paper rather than avoid it for fear of Nazi reprisals if they were caught with it, his cartoons were more whimsical and laugh-provoking than frightening or off-putting. His Hitler was befuddled, his face a sort of figure eight with a long nose, drooping mustache, and downturned mouth. To poke fun at the Volkssturm, the home defense army composed of those either too old or too young to fight in battle, Steinberg resurrected the Zia Elena figures from his Bertoldo days, this time as two fat German housewives on roller skates, wearing Nazi armbands and wielding brooms and umbrellas instead of guns.

  Much of what Steinberg drew was distributed widely within Germany as well as Italy. One of his more imaginative creations was rolls of toilet paper that bore the visage of a downcast Hitler and the instruction to use it “this side up.” He created the “entwined heart” button that decorated the propaganda folder of a fictitious “League of Lonely War Women.” The folders were dropped behind German lines and urged soldiers to wear the button when home on leave, as it would attract hordes of women eager to provide sex beyond their wildest dreams. The subterfuge was so credible that it even fooled the Washington Post.

  In his work, Steinberg was able to indulge in one of his lifelong passions: postcards. He created both pictures and messages that were supposedly written by members of the German underground as well as ordinary citizens, all urging the population to rise up and overthrow the Nazi tyrants. The postcards provided some of his earliest practice at the different kinds of handwriting that filled so many of his drawings after the war, particularly the fake diplomas that he created for friends. He also created official-looking rubber stamps and certificates for the postcards, and they too prefigured many of his later ones. Some of the postcards were comic, such as the ones where
little men shot bows and arrows at Allied planes from sagging hot-air balloons that bore the inscription “Luftwaffe.” When MO created a phony German “League of War Mothers,” whose members were allegedly urging their sons to surrender to the Allies, Steinberg’s postcard showed dejected and embattled soldiers under the heading “Our Sons in Foreign Lands.”

  The MO used an ingenious distribution method to get the postcards into Germany, loading them into official mail sacks that had been stolen by operatives and smuggled into Italy. Air force planes then dropped the filled sacks of phony mail onto trains during bombing and strafing raids, and once the raids were over, railroad personnel unknowingly unloaded them along with the genuine mail. Here again, official German newspapers and radio stations had to warn citizens to beware of American fakes.

  Most of the MO staff called Steinberg their official art director because of the variety of his work. When Edward Lindner wrote a song along the lines of Kurt Weill’s “Wie lange noch?” (How Much Longer?), Steinberg created the cover illustration for the sheet music, which was printed as a lithograph and became a popular sensation when distributed behind enemy lines. And when Barbara Lauwers learned that several hundred Czech and Slovak soldiers had been conscripted into the German army, she created the text for a small white folder that Steinberg designed, inviting the soldiers to cross over to the Allied side, waving the folder as they came. More than six hundred soldiers did as the folder directed, and Lauwers won the Bronze Star for it.