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“Bleak House,’’ “David Copperfield,’’ and especially “Great Expectations’’ have been read and reread almost to pieces. Over the years, Pip and Estella and Magwitch have kept me pany. So have Lady Dedlock, Steerforth and Peggotty, the Cratchits and the Pecksniffs and the Veneerings. And so, in his silent enigmatic way, has . Generson. Did he love the books as much as I do? Who was he? On a whim, I Googled him. There wasn’t much a single mention on a veterans’ website of a World War II captain named Leonard Generson. But I did find a Dr. Richard Generson, an oral surgeon living in New Jersey. Since Generson is not a mon name, I decided to write to him. Dr. Generson was kind enough to write back. He told me that his father, Leonard Richard Generson, was born in 1909. He lived in New York City but went to medical school in Basel, Switzerland. He spoke 10 languages fluently. As an obstetrician and gynecologist, he opened a practice in the Bronx shortly before World War II. His son described him as “an extremely patriotic individual’’。 right after Pearl Harbor he closed his practice and enlisted. He served throughout the war as a general surgeon with an airborne special forces unit in Europe, where he became one of the war’s most highly decorated physicians. The list of his decorations reflects his ordeals and his courage: multiple Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star with “V’’ for valor, the Silver Star, and also the Cross of War, an extremely high honor from the government of France. After the war, he remained in the Army