book review
V as in Victor
By Naomi Gladish Smith
Reviewed by Vera Powell Glenn
I
t took courage to write this book, but it is a book that needed to be written.
It will resonate with those people whose families lived through many of
the same experiences as Victor Gladish and his family. It should arouse the
sympathy of those who didn’t know what distress some of our ministers had to
face in the first half of the 20th century. For others this candid glimpse of New
Church history may be more dismaying than they wish to see.
At the time the General Church had been hit hard economically by the
Great Depression, and battered and bruised by the recent heartrending schism
between the General Church of the New Jerusalem and Der Hemelche Leer
position. War was a threat and soon to be a reality. George de Charms, named
Executive Bishop after the death of Bishop N. D. Pendleton in 1937, was trying
to cope with these and many other pressing church-wide problems.
An Introduction – just a paragraph or two at the beginning – would have
helped readers understand this situation better and made clear the writer’s
intention with her book. It would have introduced us to the Rev. Victor
Jeremiah Gladish, a man many of us knew
personally. A photograph would have shown us
what he looked like.
As it is, Chapter One opens without
preamble with an ominous knock on the door of
the New Church manse in Colchester, England,
in June 1940. England is at war. The American
minister and his family, as aliens, are ordered to
evacuate their home within 72 hours and quit
England as soon as they can find passage to the
United States.
Leaving the supportive parishioners of his
pastorate, the Rev. Victor Gladish, his wife,
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