Mail Call: the Wartime Correspondence of an American Couple 1943-1945

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, a dental student and a college coed were married in Brooklyn. As the groom was also in the naval reserves, Japan's attack was to have a profound effect on the lives of these newlyweds, as it would for so many who served and for their loved ones left behind. This young couple wrote almost daily to each other for the eighteen months that the war kept them apart, and the letters that Lester and Shirley Halbreich exchanged were both beautiful and poignant. While most correspondence winds up being lost over time, this collection of about six hundred letters somehow survived-and was unexpectedly presented to their daughter decades later. The letters tell the story of one young couple, separated by war but very much in love, who had to keep the tendrils of their life together through daily correspondence. It is, in this sense, the story of all the young couples separated by World War II-one of whom was fortunate enough to have their tale survive into print almost seventy years later.