There’s No Home and The Human Kind By Alexander Baron There’s a fascinating moment in his memoir, , when Alexander Baron (1917-99) describes how he changed his name when he published his first novel, . He was born Joseph Alexander Bernstein in 1917, the son of two East End Jews. His father was a fur cutter, born in a shtetl in Poland, who came to the East End in 1908.
Baron’s mother was born in Spitalfields, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His publisher, Jonathan Cape, had asked him to change his name to Baron. They clearly thought it sounded less Jewish.
The novel was a huge success. Published in 1948, it sold over half a million copies. The writer and literary critic V.
S Pritchett said it was: “The only war book that has conveyed any sense of reality to me”. Years later, the historian Sir Antony Beevor called it “undoubtedly one of the very greatest British novels of the Second World War”. It was the first of a trilogy of war books, followed by (1950) and (1953), a book of short stories based upon Baron’s own wartime experiences.
He wrote later, “I have come to be regarded as a kind of spokesman of the voiceless British soldier of World War II.” Following a new edition of in 2019, and have now been republished, with new introductions by Stephen Walter. The former is based on Baron’s period of war service in Sicily with the Eighth Army.
It begins in August 1943 when Catania was taken by the Allies after a brutal fight against the G.
