Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990 (review)

Abstract

Enlarging America: Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990, by Suzanne Klingenstein. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998. 492 pp. $34.95. This is an important book, not only for what it says but for what it implies. Klingenstein has traced intellectual history of those Jews who taught or were students in rarified atmosphere of Harvard and more egalitarian Columbia. book begins with first Jewish academic who was given die opportunity of becoming a tenured member of Harvard English department, Harry Levin, and continues through Lionel Trilling and his immense influence on some important writers, to present-day and Not-So- Young Turks, Stanley Fish and Susan Garber. But this is not just a survey of academic Jews who have been, in Norman Podhoretz's elegant phrase, Making It, but of its implications for American Jews in a wider cultural context. IfI had had an opportunity to retitle this book, I would have called it The Crisis of Jewish Intellectual, with a nod to Harold Cruse. Klingenstein is not writing such a polemical work as did Cruse, but this book implies that, indeed, Jewish high culture, as expressed in academic world, is in crisis. beginnings of a Jewish presence at Harvard was with Harry Levin, who managed to recognize that there was something terribly wrong about T. S. Eliot's antisemitism. As Klingenstein observes, 'In last analysis,' Levin wrote, 'Eliot's critical technique is impressionistic, his dogma based on nothing less ephemeral than good taste, and his authority a personal authority.' idol had fallen; Levin was free . (p. 64). It was bold for Levin to dare criticize one of most influential critics of period, especially at Harvard, but Levin had been an less as a Jew than as a Midwesterner. This outsider status can be considered typical of a number of figures Klingenstein presents, but three that comprise first section of book Levin, M. H. Abrams, and Daniel Aaron - are clearly assimilated Jews. It is obvious, according to Klingenstein, that the first Jewish literary scholars were integrated into East Coast literary academe as facsimile WASP's; had they been visible as Jews or written on Jewish topics, they would not have had academic careers (pp. 153-154). Perhaps most significant of these scholars was Lionel Trilling, who had a profound influence over a younger generation of such literary figures as Cynthia Ozick, Norman Podhoretz, and Carolyn Heilbrun. Trilling's goal, spelled out in preface to Liberal Imagination, was immensely appealing to his impoverished, culture-starved Jewish students, who thought of themselves as breaking out of worlds that did not seem to allow for 'variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty' (p. xv) mat Trilling ascribed to (p. 215). But most of those of second generation including Allen Guttmann, Leo Marx, and Jules Chametzky wrote, as had their mentors, about English and American literature of mainstream culture. …