Role as Army combat medic shaped novelist’s life

Leo Litwak, an Army combat medic on the front lines of Europe during World War II who later became a novelist and professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University, died Friday night at his home in Noe Valley. He was 94.

Litwak’s death was confirmed by his daughter, Jessica Litwak, a playwright and actress based in New York, who was at his side.

Over a publishing career that spanned 50 years, Litwak produced three novels, two memoirs and one collection of stories. His most popular book was “The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of WWII,” a 2001 memoir.

“Leo was a perfect friend for 80 years,” said novelist Herb Gold, also 94, who met Litwak when they were teenagers. “He picked up on when people were needy and tried to do what he could to help them. It was exactly what he did in ‘The Medic.’ Stuffing people’s guts back in and not caring about himself.”

Leo Ezra Litwak (pronounced Lit-walk) was born May 28, 1924, in Detroit, where he was raised, the middle of three sons of Bessie and Isaac Litwak, Russian Jews who emigrated from Ukraine. The family was poor, as Isaac Litwak worked his way up from the assembly line at Ford Motor Co. to become president of the Teamsters union in Detroit.

After graduating from Central High School, the oldest public high school in Detroit, Litwak was drafted into wartime service and became an Army medic. Proficiency in German got him sent to the front lines. There was death and dying all around him, and he was duty-bound to aid both American and German soldiers. But he never carried a gun, as he was later to recount in “The Medic.”

After the war, he returned to Wayne State University in Detroit, under the GI Bill. He also attended the University of Michigan and moved to New York to attend graduate school at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University, where he reunited with Gold to study philosophy.

“Both of us had the same idea that philosophy was going to help us discover the meaning of life,” said Gold, who came to San Francisco after graduating, while Litwak only made it as far as St. Louis, where he took a job teaching at Washington University in 1951.

Married to Katherine Fisk and with a daughter, Jessica, Litwak became restless with academia and moved the family to San Francisco in 1960.

Litwak’s novel “To the Hanging Gardens” was published in 1964, and he became part of the North Beach literary scene. He and Fisk were soon to divorce, and Litwak moved to an apartment on Greenwich Street in Cow Hollow.

After teaching at Stanford University, he was hired in the mid-1960s by the English department at San Francisco State College, as it was then called. He held that job for 30 years and received a Guggenheim Fellowship to co-write a nonfiction account of the student strikes of 1968. “College Days in Earthquake Country,” with Herbert Wilner, was published in 1971.

“He was a lovely man and a wonderful teacher. His students all speak very fondly of him.” said author Cyra McFadden, who taught at San Francisco State at the same time.

In 1969, Litwak published “Waiting for the News,” a fictionalized account of the dangerous life led by his father, the union organizer. It won the National Jewish Book Award in 1970.

“His work dealt with working class people,” Gold said. “It was very clear and matter of fact and honest and direct. He didn’t play a lot with words.”

Prolific as he was, and while teaching full time, Litwak was also in demand as a freelance writer for magazines.

He interviewed Walt Disney for the New York Times Magazine and was enlisted by the Times to review Hunter S. Thompson’s New Journalism breakthrough, “Hell’s Angels,” upon its publication in 1967. Litwak was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1970. His short story “The Eleventh Edition” won first prize in the O. Henry Award competition in 1990.

“He deserves a lot more recognition than he’s had,” McFadden said when contacted on her Sausalito houseboat. “His short story collection ‘Nobody’s Baby’ (2005) is a first-rate piece of work. The stories are unforgettable, very moving and powerful.”

Litwak first revisited his combat experience in a magazine story on group therapy at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, published in 1967. The follow-up, “The Medic,” was just 240 pages and not published until 56 years after the fact. It was critically acclaimed and is the basis of a documentary film on killing during wartime, now in production by William Farley.

Before Memorial Day 2001, The Chronicle’s Carl Nolte interviewed Litwak. He described how he was 19 as American troops pushed the Germans back. Enemy troops, mostly youthful and elderly men, were on the run but were still being shot. Speaking German, Litwak comforted them as best he could. In one instance, a German soldier’s final words to him were, “I surrender. Why do you shoot?”

“I felt terrific pity for him,” Litwak recalled. In another scene, Litwak’s sergeant and a rifleman jumped into a trench with Litwak, only to be hit and killed by German fire. The rifleman asked for morphine. The sergeant asked for his mother.

The combat stress earned Litwak a leave in Paris. He was part of the Greatest Generation, but he never bought into that hype.

“We lived through great historic times,” he said. “But other generations, the one that ended segregation, for example, were great as well.”

Jessica Litwak followed her father into academia, in theater arts, and for a time they were both on the faculty at San Francisco State. Leo Litwak retired in 1995, and Jessica moved on to New York, where she founded the H.E.A.T. Collective (for healing, education, activism, theater), which brings activist issues to the stage.

But every decade, she came home to throw her father a big birthday party, most recently his 90th, where Litwak was surrounded by his old friends.

“Up until quite recently he could quote long passages of ‘Ulysses,’ ” she said of her father. “He was a real scholar.” The Leo E. Litwak Papers, 18 boxes covering the years 1956 to 2012, are held in the library at Washington University in St. Louis.

Survivors include his daughter, Jessica Litwak, of New York City; granddaughters, Emma Weinstein, also of New York, and Sophie Olson of Charlotte, N.C.; brother, Eugene Litwak of Westchester, N.Y., and his longtime partner, Carolyn Evans of San Francisco.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Thursday at Sinai Memorial Chapel, 1501 Divisadero St., San Francisco.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SamWhitingSF Instagram: @sfchronicle_art

File photo Leo Litwak wrote three novels, two memoirs and one story collection.