A very real person

Judaism, Fall-Winter, 2006 by Merle Rubin

Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination, by MARK KRUPNICK. Edited by JEAN K. CARNEY and MARK SHECHNER. University of Wisconsin.

What does it mean to consider yourself a Jew if you have no interest, let alone belief, in the religion, no connection to Jewish organizations or Zionism, minimal knowledge of Jewish history and culture, but only a strongly ingrained sense that you are somehow, indubitably, Jewish? One response to this question comes from Philip Roth's character Nathan Zuckerman, who claims he is a Jew on account of anti-Semitism. In this case, considering oneself a Jew is at least a kind of ethical stand: to deny being Jewish, to try to "pass" for Gentile, would seem not only a betrayal of one's identity but a tacit endorsement of anti-Jewish prejudice.

For literary critic Mark Krupnick, who grew up in the 1950s in a New Jersey neighborhood not far from Philip Roth's, the same motive seems to have been at least one factor in his sense of Jewish identity. But, unlike Roth, for whom Jewishness is a given, an accident of birth, like having hazel eyes, Krupnick was engaged in a life long quest for direction and self-understanding that involved seeking out specifically Jewish role models.

Born in Irvington, N.J., in 1939, Krupnick died of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease) in 2003 at age 63. He began working on Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination shortly after being diagnosed with this debilitating, fatal disease in the spring of 2001.

A professor who had written many articles in a lively journalistic mode (as distinct from a more academic one), Krupnick was probably best known for his 1986 book, Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism, a thoughtful study of the career and influence of the renowned literary critic and New York intellectual who had the distinction of being the first Jew to gain tenure in the English department of Columbia University.

Now, in this posthumously published collection of 17 essays, Krupnick (and the editors--his wife, Jean Carney, and his friend, literary critic Mark Shechner) have given us a powerfully affecting book not only to remember him by, but also to set us thinking. These candid, intensely personal essays, many written under conditions of increasing disability and in shadow of what he knew to be his own impending death, cover a range of provocative subjects, from Jewish novelists and critics such as Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe and Yale professor Geoffrey Hartman, to matters of cultural criticism in general, along with more specific questions like "Why Are English Departments Still Fighting the Culture Wars?" There's even an amusing essay on newspaper obituaries, as well as an outspoken diatribe against what Krupnick felt to be the banal, misleadingly rosy view of illness and mortality presented in Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom's best-selling book of conversations with another victim of ALS, Brandeis sociology Prof. Morris Schwartz.

Krupnick taught at Boston University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and ended his days as a professor at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Although he made a brief foray into the arcane realms of French literary theory by editing a book on critic Jacques Derrida in the early 1980s, Krupnick much preferred a less academic, more journalistic, plain-spoken style. This is why Lionel Trilling and the rest of that set of politically and culturally engaged writers and critics known as the New York intellectuals played such an important role in his life.

Although his Ukrainian-immigrant father ran a successful furniture business and his mother worried enough about her son's college prospects to send him to a private school, Krupnick recalls the limitations of his upbringing: "I had been raised in a household without religion, politics, worldly sophistication or learning. Neither did we have more than a few phonograph records or more than a dozen books.... My parents did not have much formal education ... or religious orientation. Their strongest sense was of being Jewish." Young Mark's sense of his Jewishness was equally strong. As a bright young Harvard undergraduate, he felt the need to look elsewhere for intellectual and political guidance. The people he turned to were the New York intellectuals: liberal, anti-Stalinist champions of high culture, including Lionel and Diana Trilling, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, William Philips, Mary McCarthy, Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Abel, Dwight Macdonald and Alfred Kazin, to name some of this set (also known as the Partisan Review crowd), which may not have consisted entirely of Jews, but which certainly might be characterized as predominantly Jewish.

Many of them the children of immigrants (or, in the case of Rahv, who came to this country in 1922 at age 14, as an immigrant himself), the New York intellectuals, like others of their generation, started off as communists (or, at least, in sympathy with communism) in the early 1930s, when capitalism seemed to have plummeted the world into the Great Depression. But as the hopes promised by the Russian Revolution gave way to the grim realities of Soviet life under Stalin, Rahv, Philips and others in their circle broke with fellow leftists like Lillian Hellman and Malcolm Cowley who continued to defend Stalin and the Party line. And, at a time when Socialist Realism was the artistic credo of many a leftist, Rahv, Philips and others whose work appeared in the pages of the journal they co-founded in 1934, the Partisan Review, enthusiastically embraced the kind of "elitist" art--both classic and Modernist experimental--that orthodox communists eschewed or denounced.