Interview An Interview with Jules Chametzky Ulfried Reichardt Jules Chametzky, who has just turned ninety-one, belongs to the group of early American Studies scholars who were students at the Uni- versity of Minnesota in the 1950s. He studied with several of the “found- ing fathers” and early practitioners of the discipline. Therefore, he is an excellent source of information concerning the ideas, aims, and motives of the emerging discipline. A Jewish scholar married to a German Jew- ish woman who had barely escaped the Holocaust, the poet Anne Hal- ley, he was also one of the first Americanists to come to Germany with his family, not long after World War II, to teach American literature. He has met many German Americanists since the 1960s, experienced the tumultuous times of 1968 and their aftermath at the Free University of Berlin, and was involved in saving the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies when it was in danger of being dismantled in the 1980s. He was acquainted with numerous American writers, in par- ticular African American and Jewish authors, took part in important de- velopments in American Literary Studies and in institutional struggles within his university (the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) as a union member, founded The Massachusetts Review, and has co-edited it for a long time (1963-74, in the 1990s, and now as Editor Emeritus). He has always seen himself as a public intellectual who participates in the debates and political struggles of his time. Among his publications are From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan; Our Decentralized Litera- ture: Cultural Mediations in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers; and Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers. He co-edited the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature and a volume celebrating ten years of The Massachusetts Review called Black and White in America, which went through three editions. Since 1958, he has been a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He also taught in Copenhagen, Tübingen, Zagreb, Freiburg, and at both the Kennedy Institute and the Humboldt University in Berlin. Thus, he is a Zeitzeuge (contemporary witness) in the true sense of the term. We need these memories, as the present state of the discipline can only be understood in continuity with, but also as a reaction to, earlier American Amerikastudien / American Studies 64.3 (2019): 435-54 435 Ulfried Reichardt Studies. As will become clear, the discipline was eminently political and critical of the status quo in U.S.-American politics from the beginning. Contrary to contemporary scholars’ recurrent critiques that American Studies before the 1970s were not political enough, America’s deficien- cies and failings were not overlooked by many scholars in the field. In fact, The Massachusetts Review was already publishing African American writers in the 1960s, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro- American Studies was founded at UMass in Amherst in 1970. I have known Jules Chametzky and his family since the 1980s and interviewed him in early April 2019 at his house in Northampton, Mas- sachusetts. Out of Brooklyn Ulfried Reichardt (UR): You grew up in Brooklyn, in a Jewish neighborhood during the De- pression. These were difficult times; Germany had been taken over by the Nazis in 1933, and the persecution of Jews in Germany had already begun. What was it like to grow up at that time? Jules Chametzky (JC): My father was a kosher butcher. We lived in Williamsburg, Green- point, in Brooklyn, which is now very chic. It was an overflow from the Lower East Side; people came over the Williamsburg Bridge. In 1932, we moved to Crown Heights, near Prospect Park, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux like Manhattan’s Cen- tral Park, near the Brooklyn Museum. It was an idyllic time; Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president, a time of great hope—except for the Lindbergh kidnapping case. An uncle owned a glove shop. My brother worked there and earned three dollars a week, a cousin five dollars. Philip Roth’s great book American Pastoral (1997) thematizes a glove factory in New Jersey, and my cousin Sidney might have been a model for the protagonist, the Swede who worked at the Century Glove Company. But this is just a speculation. UR: Where did your parents come from? JC: My mother grew up in Poland, near Lublin, until she was thirteen years old. Her father had been a handler of cattle—as a Jew he was not al- lowed to own land. After the Dreyfus Affair, an important influence 436 Amst 64.3 (2019): 435-54 An Interview with Jules Chametzky was Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who organized three settlements in Pal- estine, Argentina, and Woodbine, New Jersey. The family emigrated, and my grandfather became a cattle farmer in Woodbine in 1908. Later he went to New York and worked in a garment factory, and was presi- dent of his small shul in Williamsburg for the rest of his life. My father was brought to the United States in 1913 by his older brother Meyer, who had served in the Tsarist army before coming to America some years earlier. Meyer had served outside Moscow in the cavalry but was not al- lowed in the city because he was Jewish. My father worked in a garment factory for seven years and couldn’t stand it. So he apprenticed himself to a butcher and remained a kosher butcher until his retirement. He owned his own shop in Brownsville for twenty-five years. My parents mostly spoke Yiddish to each other, but my mother increasingly got bet- ter at English. UR: Was your Jewish origin an issue for you at this time? JC: I went to junior high school with Jewish, Italian, a few Polish kids. Go- ing home from school meant fighting every day, boxing with the Black kids. When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor happened in December 1941, a Black boy said to me he hoped the Japanese would win, which was unthinkable for me. It was an expression of his situation as a Black person in America at the time. And it was the beginning of my learning about race. UR: Did you know what was going on in Germany? JC: Absolutely! Yes, we felt it, my father knew about it. When we lived in Williamsburg, I was close to my grandparents. I was a Cub Scout, for 1 According to histo- rian Timothy Snyder, “[i]n boys up to 12 or 13. One time, my grandmother saw me in my dress, the middle of Europe in dark blue shirt and a yellow kerchief, and she said: “Why are you wear- the middle of the twenti- eth century, the Nazi and ing that fascist shirt?” There were indeed fascists on the street, Italian Soviet regimes murdered fascist kids, for example. In the shul, the synagogue, they talked about some fourteen million people. The place where the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. And we knew about the Holocaust al- all of the victims died, the ready, before America entered the war. In 1942 and 1943 people came to bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western the shul and talked about the persecutions. My father’s older brother, Russia, through Ukraine, who had lived before World War I in what later became known as the Belarus, and the Baltic 1 “bloodlands,” brought my father over in 1913, but his sisters and younger States” (vii-viii). Amst 64.3 (2019): 435-54 437 Ulfried Reichardt brothers and parents stayed behind in Russia. The younger brothers went to Brazil in the early 1920s. They could not come to the United States then because of racially discriminating immigration policies. But the rest of the family, father, mother, two sisters, and their children, who were still in Eastern Europe, were exterminated. We thought by the SS, but research later showed that, actually, Ukrainian fascists murdered all the Jews in the village Poritzk Volyn in August 1941. UR: Did you also know about the Stalinist purges? JC: Yes, I knew about the purges, but was still a fellow traveler. I read George Orwell’s 1984 when it came out, given to me by a friend who was a Trotskyist. She joined the French Communist Party while she was a student at the Sorbonne, yet she never joined the American Communist Party. Later she became the private secretary of Vladimir Horowitz for 25 years. I was a pacifist and read the anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun [by Dalton Trumbo, 1939]. UR: How did you feel about the war? JC: During the war I was very patriotic. My older brother was a staff ser- geant and led an infantry platoon, helped capture Algeria, took part in the battle of Tunis, and was the first American to put his foot on land in Sicily. He was captured by an SS paratroop division. They put him and other prisoners of war on an Italian ship. But it was bombed by the British, and thus he was lucky and freed. He was happy to be alive, yet no longer trusted the officers’ class. In 1944, when I was sixteen, I enlisted in the New York State Guard and was trained in crowd control. Only later, when I read James Baldwin’s writing about a riot in Harlem (“Notes of a Native Son” [1955]), did I realize what we were trained for. It was interesting to learn to shoot a rifle, but I hated the army. 438 Amst 64.3 (2019): 435-54 An Interview with Jules Chametzky The University of Minnesota and American Studies UR: How did you get into American Studies? JC: After the end of the war, I first went to Brooklyn Tech and then to Brooklyn College.