Heroes All is the sequel to Jerome Ostrov’s WWII novel, Someone Waiting for You, and the third book in his WWII trilogy, When Country Calls. Heroes All begins in the weeks following the near defeat of Israel’s armed forces during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Initially, the story tracks the post-Yom Kippur War romance of Jonathan Sternbloom, the physician protagonist of Someone Waiting for You, and Bracha Wallenstein, the rediscovered love of his life.
The story then shifts to the past and becomes a retrospective, with the narrative lens focused on the persons whose lives were touched by Jonathan in Someone Waiting for You. Emphasizing the heroic roles they played in the tortuous journey leading to the creation of a Jewish homeland in Israel, the reader is introduced to a Jewish Canadian airman who is downed twice during aerial missions into the Nazi heartland and whose family lives in fear in Italian-occupied Nice; a young Jewish California lawyer who plays an instrumental role in the creation of the War Refugee Board and in the litigation of the Nuremberg War Crime Trials; a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald who, with a fellow inmate from a displaced persons camp, makes a perilous post-war journey to Poland only to find enduring anti-Semitism; a soldier grievously injured late in the war who returns to his native Alabama, marries a Jewish classmate from New Orleans, and, with her, heads for Washington DC where, in collaboration with his two-star general mentor, plays an instrumental role in President Truman’s recognition of the State of Israel; and the German engineer, whose Jewish daughter has emigrated to Israel, and who becomes instrumental in securing German war reparations for the young and desperately needy Jewish state. Along the way, the characters and the reader confront some of the most vexing questions raised by the Nazi war against the Jews.