Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
Susanne Klingenstein's Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990 is a frustratingly uneven work on a fascinating, largely unexplored subject. Of course, much has been written about Jewish-American fiction, and much, too, about the post-war New York Jewish intellectuals associated primarily with the cultural and political journal, Partisan Review. But less attention has been paid to the important story of how 20th century Jewish scholars overcame the anti-Semitic barriers erected by the WASP academic establishment in order to play a major role in English Studies in the American university. An MIT humanities professor, Klingenstein traced the same subject through the preceding era in an earlier book, Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940.
Although extensively researched, the book suffers from Klingenstein's organizational format, which skimps the forest for the sake of the trees. In her introduction, she admits that "an unpleasant consequence of opting for in-depth portraits rather than for a comprehensive series of snapshots was the necessity of being extremely selective" (xix-xx). The author's selectivity leads to a dubious decision to consider only Jewish literary scholars who were teachers or students (or, in some cases, both) at either Harvard or Columbia University, and, even within this select group, to narrow her study to a relatively small number of academics, who personal and professional lives are described in exhaustive and sometimes exhausting detail. Despite the implicit claims of the book's subtitle, then, Enlarging America is not a thorough analysis of the field. Such an approach might be defensible if the only Jewish literary scholars of note came from either Harvard or Columbia. But Klingenstein herself acknowledges that at Yale "one could [begin] with the educations of Charles Fiedelson, Richard Ellmann and Charles Muscatine, [move] on to [Geoffrey] Hartman, [Harold] Bloom and John Hollander, and [end] with the rebellious roster of Morris Dickstein, Marjorie Garber, and Stephen Greenblatt" (xx). This is an impressive group of scholars, indeed, whose work often deals--especially Hartman, Bloom and Dickstein's--with Jewish subject matter. The author's narrow focus also means she gives little space to the many, mostly current Jewish scholars studying Holocaust literature, glancing only at the doyen of the field, Lawrence Langer. And, as a fellow transplanted New Yorker in Montana, I was especially disappointed that more mention wasn't made of Leslie Fiedler (still a Big Sky legend, though he left UM years ago), who has often explored Jewish themes--writings collected in the wryly titled, Fiedler on the Roof.
While excluding so many major Jewish-American scholars, Klingenstein opts for "in-depth portraits" of several rather minor figures, such as Allan Guttmann and Jules Chametzky. Moreover, since the first generation of Jewish scholars considered rarely even mentioned Judaism in either their writing or teaching (for reasons I'll explore) the opening third of Enlarging America--with chapters on Harry Levin, M.H. Abrams, Daniel Aaron and Leo Marx--includes lengthy summaries of critical works containing no Jewish content whatsoever. This recurs at the end of the book, when Klingenstein extensively rehashes Sacvan Bercovitch's radical analysis of the Puritans. Even though these summaries are often intrinsically engaging, one might reasonably expect that a book billing itself as a study of Jewish literary scholars will focus largely, if not exclusively, on the scholarship of critics who weren't merely of Jewish ancestry, but for whom Judaism had at least some relevance to their work. Otherwise, why bother singling out Jewish scholars in the first place?
Still, it's worth exploring why Judaism is virtually absent from the criticism of Jewish academics writing primarily in the 1930s and '40s. Such exploration reveals the problematic status of this generation of professors, given the anti-Semitism prevalent at the time in our nation's most elite universities. The nature of Ivy League anti-Jewish prejudice is revealed in a passage Kingenstein quotes from the autobiography of the philosopher George Santayana (himself a Spanish immigrant) describing a Jewish classmate of Santayana's at turn-of-the-century Harvard, Charles Loeser:
At Harvard, Loeser was rather friendless. The fact that he was a Jew and that his father kept a "dry goods store" cut him off, in democratic America, from the ruling society. To me, who was also an outsider, this at first seemed very strange, for Loeser was much more cultivated.... Yet in the end, taking imaginatively the point of view of the native leading Americans, I came to see why Loeser could never gain their confidence. His heart was not with them, and his associations and standards were not theirs. He didn't join in their sports...he hadn't their religion, he had no roots in their native places or their family circles. In America he floated on the surface, and really lived only in the international world of art, literature and theory. (11-12)
Klingenstein astutely notes that Santayana's portrait of Loeser is "seemingly indulgent toward a fellow student's quirkiness while actually toying with popular anti-Jewish stereotypes" (12). No matter how assimilated, cultured or patriotic Loeser may appear, Santayana implies, the mere fact of his Jewishness makes him inherently alien, not "one of us". Klingenstein finds Santayana's portrayal recycling "a classic argument of the...Church, namely, that the Jews were impervious to spiritual salvation, the root cause of their materialism"--deriving from Christianity's ancient demonization of Jews as "Christ killers," who ever since have stubbornly continued to refuse to recognize Jesus as the Messiah (12).
Such highbrow anti-Semitism inspired Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Harvard's blue-blooded president in the 1920s, to institute quotas limiting the number of Jews admitted to the college to no more than 15% (regardless of the number of qualified Jewish applicants)--a policy which severely depleted the previously growing number of Jewish students. In a letter Klingenstein quotes, which Lowell wrote to Franklin Roosevelt's law partner, Langdon Marvin, Lowell defended his policy by insisting that "the main problem caused by the number of Jews comes...from the fact that they form a very distinct body, and cling...together, apart from the great mass of undergraduates.... We take as many as we can benefit [read: assimilate], but if we take more, we shall not benefit them and we shall ruin the college" (43). Because Lowell conceived of Harvard's mission as training the sons of the WASP ruling class to preserve the dominant Christian culture, he saw large numbers of Jewish students (as well as professors) as threatening the college's very raison d'être. The tone of repressed hysteria pervading Lowell's letter derived from his belief that the barbarians were already at the gates and only desperate measures cold stop them from storming the citadel.
This was the climate at Harvard when Harry Levin entered as a freshmen in 1929, and anti-Semitism had ebbed but certainly not vanished when he was made a junior faculty member a decade later. Under the circumstances, it's no surprise that when Levin got hired he sought to "out-WASP the WASPS" by devoting himself to explicating, as a critic and teacher, the Western literary canon. Indeed, Levin's prolific scholarly activity throughout his long career can be seen, Klingenstein suggests, as the classic strategy of a member of any marginalized minority to prove he belongs by outworking everyone else. Levin's less assimilated Harvard colleague, Delmore Schwartz, made the same point more pithily in a satiric couplet: "Anti-Semitism ever/Sharpens Jews to be more clever" (67).
Nonetheless, Klingenstein argues that Levin's career (as well as that of Abrams, Aaron, and Marx) may have been less cravenly assimilationist and more subtly subversive than they at first appear. After all, by the very act of writing and teaching authoritatively about the Western literary tradition at an elite university, these Jewish professors sent the implicit message that this essentially Christian tradition wasn't "owned" by Christians, that the qualifications needed to interpret its canon for future generations were based on intellectual merit, not accidents of birth. Still, Klingenstein suggests the price Levin's generation of Jewish scholars paid by hiding their Judaism when she quotes from Levin's acknowledgments to his study of nineteenth-century American literature, The Power of Blackness, where he thanked the Guggenheim Foundation, which "during the year 1943-44 provided me with the leisure to accumulate a backlog of reading" (68). "Anyone familiar with the cataclysm in Europe," Klingenstein comments, "even to the extent that it was known in the forties, must find the juxtaposition of 'the year 1943-44' and 'leisure to accumulate a backlog of reading' painfully jarring," particularly since one of Levin's own aunt's was murdered by the Nazis"(68). Indulging her occasional fondness for rather free-wheeling psychological speculation, Klingenstein wonders if the "power of blackness" Levin found omnipresent in the writers he focused on (Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville) hints at a displacement of the grief and horror Levin privately felt as a Jew confronting the Holocaust. But she admits, with excruciating tact, that "such speculation obviously grants Levin a great deal" (68). One imagines that, if pressed, Jewish academics such as Levin would defend their scholarly indifference to Judaism by claiming that they were transcending tribalism and embracing a more universal Western tradition. But examples like the one cited above sharply question the persuasiveness of such justifications.
After hundreds of pages spent describing the nuances of Jewish professorial assimilation, Klingenstein turns, in a section called "The Rediscovery of Origins," to two Jewish literary scholars who not only unapologetically acknowledge their own Jewishness, but have made Judaism's religious, cultural, linguistic, and historical dimensions central to their work: Robert Alter and Ruth Wisse. While Alter is the one of the first American critics to have written extensively on Israeli writers, Wisse (who narrowly escaped the Holocaust with her family) is an expert on Yiddish literature. Moreover, both Alter and Wisse have pioneered the field of Jewish studies--founding graduate programs in the subject at Berkeley and Harvard, respectively. Not surprisingly, the pair are also the first literary scholars Klingenstein discusses to be ardent Zionists.
After finishing the chapter on Alter and Wisse, I expected Embracing America to end on a triumphant note. After all, scores of Jewish professors are now securely ensconced in elite universities, while academic anti-Semitism and the defensive assimilationism it engendered have largely vanished. However, Klingenstein's conclusion is actually surprisingly pessimistic. Considering the latest generation of Jewish scholars, including Gallop, Sedgwick, Graff, Greenblatt, Garber, Perloff, and Shelley Fishkin, she finds that while "unselfconscious about their Jewishness," these literary critics have "little to say about it, because beyond childhood memories--some sweet, some sour--Jewishness or Judaism plays no role in their social and intellectual lives" (411-412). Now that over half of American Jews intermarry, while Jewish religious observance is in decline, these contemporary Jewish scholars, Klingenstein suggests, reflect in their attenuated relationship to their own Jewishness the state of American Jewry at large. Such critics, it seems, have abandoned Judaism in favor of more enticingly "transgressive" topics: feminism, New Historicism, homosexuality, cross-dressing, postcolonialism. In one sense, then, a lot has changed since the days of Harry Levin. But in another sense, alas, nothing has changed at all.