The Life of the Flying Aperçu

BY Alan Mintz

took several subways and buses each day to contin- stands out. Trilling was too ambivalent and skeptical Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental ue attending the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, a yeshi- to be a brilliant teacher, but the moral intelligence Education va on the Lower East Side whose curriculum relied conveyed by the essays in The Liberal Imagination by Morris Dickstein heavily on Talmud taught in Yiddish. Dickstein re- made a strong impression on Dickstein. The book Liveright, 320 pp., $27.95 mained there throughout high school, although he became increasingly disaffected from Talmud study. . . . offered a model for criticism in a subtle, At Columbia he looked for connections beyond the personal voice that was neither ponderous nor Judaism of his parents, and found them in cours- academic but was itself a form of literature. hen I was a graduate student in es in modern Hebrew at the Seminary College of Trilling’s seductive conversational style gave me English at Columbia College in the JTS, and in summers spent as a counselor at Camp the impression—or was it a carefully crafted early 1970s, my advisor was Steven Massad, the exemplar of Hebraist Zionism. And no illusion?—of a mind in motion, a man actually Marcus, a marvelous teacher, a re- matter how fraught and exciting his studies on cam- thinking things through as he weighed the Wnowned authority on Dickens’ fiction and Victorian pus, every Friday he would take the train back to alternatives and probed the issues before him. It pornography, and an editor at Partisan Review. He his parents’ home and serve as the Torah reader for was not the irreverent voice of the coming era was a protégé of Lionel Trilling, and like Trilling, he their synagogue on Shabbat morning. but the ambivalent, ruminative voice of the more was a New York kid who had attended Columbia reflective decade that had just passed, a genuinely as an undergraduate and emerged many years later engaging voice. Despite its Anglo manner, polite with an indefinable British accent. During the sum- and reserved, it was also a Jewish voice, rarely mer following my first year in graduate school, I was assertive, honeycombed with ambivalence. It hit by a car while I was hitchhiking in the Bronx try- conveyed a sense of the tragic; it spoke not of ing to make my way to New England. I showed up revolutionary change but of “moral realism.” late for the fall semester hobbling on crutches. When Marcus asked me what happened, he said, “I spent 18 As an ex-yeshiva student, Dickstein identified years of my life trying to get out of the Bronx!” something familiar, even talmudic, in Trilling’s Columbia, where I was also an undergraduate, careful consideration of opposing positions staged oversaw the happy acculturation of young men— as an inner conversation. It’s unlikely that Trilling there were as yet no women—from all ethnic groups himself ever thought that his manner of thinking during the post-war generations. There was still derived from Jewish sources or Jewish experienc- a speech test when I was there that was aimed at es, but for Dickstein Trilling’s Jewishness, as slight smoothing out uncouth accents, but the main agent as it was, created a special place in which to stand of transformation was the famous Core Curriculum, within the Gentile culture of the English Depart- which required students during their first two years ment. In confronting the cultural turmoil of the to read the great books of the classical and Europe- sixties and seventies, Dickstein would find himself an tradition. The courses were small and taught by fortified by what he had absorbed from Trilling: non-specialists, and the texts read in translation. The using the tools of reason to adjudicate the claims approach was thematic rather than scholarly or his- of unreason. torical. The classroom crackled with ideas, and when Trilling figured in yet another way. When, as a students wrote their papers they were expected to college junior, Dickstein picked up a copy of Par- confront the text head-on without relying on second- tisan Review for the first time, he discovered that ary articles or hiding behind footnotes. The college some of Columbia’s faculty, like Trilling and Mar- encouraged a culture of confident brilliance that set Dickstein on the Cambridge River, England, June cus, “led a busy and contentious life outside the it far apart from Columbia’s graduate school, which 1964. (Courtesy of the author and Liveright Books.) classroom.” That life, as lived in Partisan Review, had been modeled on German universities and had Commentary, Dissent, and other elite intellectual the requisite desiccation and alienation to show for it. magazines of the time, was conducted under rules This heady setting is evoked in an absorbing and ickstein’s story is not a narrative of apostasy different from the pedantry and presumed objec- generous manner in Morris Dickstein’s new memoir Dand rebellion; belief and doctrine play a mi- tivity of academic articles. “For academic work of his “sentimental education” (the book ends in his nor role. Nor is it a tale of the sloughing off of fam- in those days—how times have changed!—you 30th year). Dickstein is a distinguished literary critic ily and ethnic ties; the college student remained donned the mask of impersonality; for magazine and the author of such essential works of cultural genuinely attached to his immediate family and writing you put on the trappings of personality, the criticism as Gates of Eden: American Culture in the the extended clan of his mother’s sisters and their opinionated tone of a living person actually think- Sixties and Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History summer gatherings at a working-class town on ing, speaking, braving discriminations.” Dickstein of the Great Depression. What makes his book stand the northern shore of Long Island. Rather, like his soon started a literary supplement to the Spectator, out from an increasingly cluttered field of academic week bifurcated between Morningside Heights the campus newspaper, which gave him a chance memoirs is the substance of the Jewish identity he and Queens, he sustained a compartmentalized to experiment with boldly speculative writing and brought with him to the Columbia campus. life. Yet while the claims of family remained con- “the flying aperçu.” It gave him a chance as well to Dickstein’s parents were not far removed from stant, Dickstein’s mind was being increasingly ex- look beyond the canonized texts read in class and their Orthodox European origins when they raised posed to the Western tradition, high modernism, to react to avant-garde theater and cinema taking Morris and his sister on the Lower East Side before and the avant-garde, and we wonder how long he place downtown. Only a few years later he him- moving to Queens. The move to Flushing took place could have sustained the tension. self became a contributor to Partisan Review—and for reasons of economic survival, but the family re- With regard to Dickstein’s undergraduate years then to Commentary newly under the editorship mained loyal to Jewish observance, and their son at Columbia, the looming figure of Lionel Trilling of Norman Podhoretz, another Trilling-influenced

30 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 Columbia undergrad—and thus began what would longed bouts of intestinal discomfort. The ailments stein’s career. On the academic side of the ledger, his become a career-long “double life” as a scholar and followed him abroad and then back home, and no failure to get tenure at Columbia, as painful as it was, a critical essayist. amount of medication and therapy made much of turned out to be a fortunate fall. Landing at Queens a difference. In an oddly related way, he dragged College of the City University of New York, and later raduate school at Yale in the early 1960s was a something else around with him during these years: its Graduate Center, he was able to remain part of Grude awakening to the realities of the profes- the scene of the New York intellectuals and to extri- sional study of English. There were fewer Jews and After the crackle of the cate himself from the constraints of being a scholar even less Jewish sensibility, though he was mentored of English romanticism. “I was,” he writes, “instinc- by a young Harold Bloom, whom he describes as Columbia classroom and tively drawn to what Lionel Trilling called ‘the bloody “the definition of a luftmensch, eloquently aloft in crossroads’ where art and politics meet.” a cloud of his own knowing.” With continental lit- the trafficking in big ideas, On the Jewish side of the ledger, Dickstein seems erary theory still just massing on the horizon, the to have come to the conviction that the love of his study of English literature at Yale was strung be- Dickstein felt constrained family, and his sense of himself as a Jew, was not de- tween traditional scholarship and the delicate textu- pendent on his continued observance of rituals he al procedures of the New Criticism. After the crackle and isolated in New Haven. did not believe in. Perhaps if he had come of age in of the Columbia classroom and the trafficking in big the academy a decade later when the field of Jew- ideas, Dickstein felt constrained and isolated in New his persistent observance of kashrut. Anyone who ish studies was firmly established, he might have felt Haven. He coped with his alienation by establishing spent time in England before the advent of vegetar- the tug to turn his energies in that direction. And, connections outside the inward-looking academic ian cooking knows how truly exasperating it was indeed, he has taken the American Jewish writers colony. He began a love affair with a young woman to navigate one’s way in a society that seemed to as part of his professional beat, and as a working he would eventually marry; he began writing for conspire to add lard to every foodstuff imaginable, intellectual he has continually responded to devel- Partisan Review; and, following in Podhoretz’s foot- including ice cream. Dickstein adhered to kashrut opments in Israeli literature, especially in the pages steps, he spent a year at Clare College in Cambridge even as his intellectual and social world moved fur- of The Times Literary Supplement. His main intel- University, where he studied with the great critic F. ther and further away from the religious and ethnic lectual energies, however, have been aimed at un- R. Leavis. When he returned to Yale, he managed to matrix of his parents. derstanding American culture, especially the Great get a dissertation on Keats written in time to be of- Something had to give. Repatriated to Columbia Depression that shaped his parents’ world and the fered the best job imaginable: returning to Colum- and married with a baby, Dickstein started five-days- turbulent 1960s that shaped his own. bia College to teach English. a-week psychoanalysis and began to sort things out. Yet in the midst of all this energetic good fortune, But, in a somewhat frustrating way, Why Not Say Dickstein suffered from a variety of unexplained What Happened comes to a close before the results of Alan Mintz teaches Hebrew literature at The Jewish physical symptoms. He experienced sudden panic that wisdom can be spelled out. The reader is left to Theological Seminary. He is currently working on a study attacks that laid him low, and he was subject to pro- make inferences from the subsequent shape of Dick- of the late S.Y. Agnon.

WINNERS The Association In the Category of Jewish Literature and Linguistics: Poetic Trespass: Writing between Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine and American Culture for Jewish Studies LITAL LEVY, Princeton University JOSH LAMBERT, Yiddish Book Center/UMASS-Amherst (PRINCETON UNIvERSITY PRESS) (NEW YORK UNIvERSITY PRESS) salutes the 2014 In the Category of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History: Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe Jordan Schnitzer ELISHEVA CARLEBACH, Columbia University (HARvARD UNIvERSITY PRESS) Book Award In the Category of Modern Jewish History—European Countries: The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816 PAWEL MACIEJKO, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Recipients (UNIvERSITY OF PENNSYLvANIA PRESS)

Honorable Mentions

After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk JONATHAN RAY, Georgetown University ELISSA BEMPORAD, Queens College, CUNY (NEW YORK UNIvERSITY PRESS) (INDIANA UNIvERSITY PRESS) Information and application procedures for the 2015 competition will be available The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege on the AJS website in March 2015. Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice after the Reformation YAACOB DWECK, Princeton University MAGDA TETER, Wesleyan University Support for this program has been (PRINCETON UNIvERSITY PRESS) (HARvARD UNIvERSITY PRESS) generously provided by the Yankel’s Tavern: JORDAN SCHNITZER FAMILY FOUNDATION Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland OF PORTLAND, OREGON. GLENN DYNNER, Sarah Lawrence College (OxFORD UNIvERSITY PRESS)

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