Critique from North Street Books by Jendi Reiter
Leslie A. Sussan probes questions of historical memory and propaganda in her illuminating memoir Choosing Life: My Father’s Journey in Film from Hollywood to Hiroshima. Now an appellate judge, Sussan has been a U.S. Department of Justice attorney and an advocate for migrant workers and abused children. Her intellectual clarity and balance are coupled in this memoir with a passion to right intergenerational wrongs.
This braided narrative moves back and forth between Herbert Sussan’s life-altering experience as a Defense Department cinematographer filming the aftermath of the atomic bomb and his daughter’s pilgrimage to Hiroshima in 1987-88 to complete the exposé he was never allowed to share.
In 1939, Herbert was a plucky teenager from a family of Eastern European Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. He followed his dream of film-making to the University of Southern California. Then World War II hit. Not a particularly competent soldier, he parlayed his talents into entertainment for the troops, but felt called to do something more serious for the war effort. His opportunity came when he joined the Strategic Bombing Survey crew to document the effects of nuclear weapons on the defeated Japanese.
The U.S. government thought Sussan’s crew would be making propaganda that showcased American strength. However, the photos and films of the atrocities suffered by Hiroshima’s civilians were so devastating that they were instantly covered up. Sussan no longer had security clearance to view the materials he himself had created.
According to his daughter’s recollections, he became embittered and defeated by decades of fruitless petitions to bring these films to light. He had hoped that all nations would turn away from the horror of nuclear proliferation once they saw the evidence. His cynicism led him to clash with young Leslie as she became active in the protest movements of the 1960s-70s. After Herbert’s death, Leslie, a newly divorced single mother, moved to Japan with her young daughter to continue his work. She collaborated with activists on the Japanese side who were also trying to break the silence around this massive historical trauma. The project brought her closer to understanding and empathizing with a man who had kept her at a distance in his lifetime.
Choosing Life is fact-filled but always livened with deep feeling. Leslie Sussan was fortunate to discover an oral history that Herbert Sussan gave to a student at Columbia University. Whereas many memoirists have to use their imagination to re-create ancestors’ thoughts and experiences, here we have excerpts in his own words, as well as some of the photos he took. True to her legal training, the author builds a reliable factual record to support the moving tale that she tells.
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Choosing Life is an excellent addition to our national dialogue about American accountability for historical misdeeds. . . .
