To drive home this commitment they assembled an impressive cast of older and younger writers for their first issue. It included poems by Wallace Stevens and James Agee, essays by Edmund Wilson and Lionel Abel, reviews by Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling. But at the head of the issue, surprisingly, was a story by a young, largely unpublished poet, Delmore Schwartz. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” would become perhaps the most beloved piece of fiction ever to appear in the magazine.

Schwartz was born in 1913 to parents, Harry and Rose Schwartz, who were mismatched immigrant Jews. After innumerable quarrels, they would separate when he was 7 and his younger brother was 4. Their unfortunate marriage and its impact on his life would obsess Schwartz for many years. Harry’s real-estate dealings made him wealthy, but he was a chronically unfaithful husband. Full of recrimination, Rose was nonetheless proud of her husband’s success, driving him away yet unwilling to concede the end of their marriage. Delmore attributed his later unhappiness to his parents’ bitter alienation, punctuated by melodramatic demands that he choose between them.

After their divorce, Harry moved to Chicago, where his business prospered and he quietly remarried. Delmore spent summers with his father but grew up with his mother and brother in the lower-middle-class world of New York’s Washington Heights. There they were enmeshed in her extended family, whose lives he chronicled in a long story, “The Child Is the Meaning of This Life,” that provides rich background for “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” When Harry died in 1930, it was found that his fortune had evaporated, thanks in part to the onset of the Depression. As a result, Delmore, like so many writers who came of age in the 1930s, would always be hungry for work and short of money.

Though Schwartz studied philosophy with Sidney Hook at New York University and did graduate work with Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard from 1935 to 1937, his inner bent was toward poetry. He was also a brilliant talker and a restless, omnivorous reader. According to William Phillips, who met him in the 1930s, “one felt immediately one was in the presence of a strange and possessed being, endowed with some extraordinary nervous and intellectual energy.” Schwartz developed a prodigious mastery of poetic forms and a remarkable fluency at deploying them, but the influence of modern masters, especially Yeats and Eliot, kept him from becoming a genuinely original poet. His real breakthrough as a writer came one hot July weekend in 1935 when, at the age of 21, he wrote “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” its title borrowed from Yeats. The story was rooted in his own life, but its nightmarish quality, its brevity and ingenuity, its manipulation of time and place, linked it to the modernist writing of the 1920s. For the editors of the new Partisan Review, the story was a gauntlet laid down to the social muse, an implicit challenge to the naturalism and political engagement imposed on many writers during the Depression. It was at once personal and quietly experimental. The following year, it would serve as the title piece of a collection of poetry and prose that would make Delmore Schwartz the most celebrated young writer of the moment, acclaimed by poets as different as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, by New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, and Allen Tate, and by the most promising of his contemporaries, including Robert Lowell and John Berryman, who became his close friends.

Schwartz also became a central figure in the emerging group of New York intellectuals who would come into their own in the 1940s, but his writing was palpably different from theirs. Most of them were Jewish, but they showed little interest in their Jewishness, except for their urge to leave it behind. Marxist theory and the appeal of Western culture helped make them universalists, quickening their flight from their immigrant beginnings. Their facility with ideas typically made them critics rather than poets or novelists. Personal writing held little appeal for them, at least until they began to look back years later. During the Depression it seemed an indulgence, even an embarrassment. It could only drag them back to the poverty and, as they saw it, the cultural poverty of their family backgrounds.

For Delmore Schwartz, what lay behind him was everything. His family history, and especially his Jewishness, was the medium that would help him fathom the enigma of who he was. His most ambitious work was a failed book-length autobiographical poem called Genesis. No writer believed less in the Emersonian vision of personal freedom, with its faith in the individual’s power of self-making. In one of his short plays, titled Shenandoah, Schwartz derided the notion that “a man/ Creates his life ex nihilo.” Instead, he took up Freud’s exploration of the family romance, which fed his own bleak sense that family was destiny. He never tired of musing on the cultural contradictions of his own name and the burden it placed on him. In Shenandoah, the mock-tragic verse play, his 25-year-old alter ego, Shenandoah Fish, is transported back to the scene of his own bris, the moment when he, at eight days old, received his impossible name. He blames his parents for their eagerness to gain a foothold in the gentile world while at the same time being tone deaf to its language and culture. The incongruous name came to stand for his divided being, at once comically native and ethnic. He would use it again to join the stories collected in The World Is a Wedding (1948), his most telling book.

This sense of an overwhelming fate, rooted as much in Greek tragedy and Jewish history as in Freud, is what Schwartz means by the enigmatic title of the story “The Child Is the Meaning of This Life.” There, he compares a young man’s insight into his family’s history to a series of lights turned on in dark rooms, beams that illuminate the shadowy places in himself. Disheartened, Schwartz revises Wordsworth’s reassuring faith that “the Child is father of the Man.” His conclusion is more desolating: “What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child? This freedom seemed to [him] like the freedom, dangerous, dark, and far-off, to become the father of new children without knowing at all what would become of them, what kind of human beings they would be.” He is haunted not only by the unalterable past but by the unknowable future, the blind responsibility of one generation for another. This is the psychological drama behind “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” Delmore Schwartz’s most poignant evocation of the power of the past over the mind of the present.

If Shenandoah sends Schwartz’s surrogate back to the moment in infancy when he was given his name, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” takes him back even further—to his parents’ courtship, the very day his father, with little deliberation, asked his mother to marry him. The story is cast as a dream, though we don’t learn that until the last line. These scenes from the past unfold on the screen of an old movie theater, a dream within a dream, since movies have always been seen as dreamlike. The year in the story is 1909; the medium is new and modern, its technique still primitive. The scratchy, fragmentary print, its tintype settings, reflect the unbridgeable distance in time, the awkwardness of the characters, whose unhappiness is foreshadowed at every turn. We learn all we need to know about his parents’ marriage but obliquely, by way of metaphor. Each anecdotal twist of the narrative augurs a failure to which the clueless couple remains oblivious.

The most striking of these turns comes when they stroll along the boardwalk at Coney Island, looking out at the glaring sun and the pounding sea. At first this seems harmless, yet the language resonates. “Overhead the sun’s lightning strikes and strikes, but neither of them are at all aware of it.” Gradually the sea grows more menacing, crashing ominously with irresistible force. “The ocean is becoming rough; the waves come in slowly, tugging strength from far back. The moment before they somersault, the moment when they arch their backs so beautifully, showing green and white veins amid the black, that moment is intolerable.” The waves are beautiful yet shattering, intolerable not in themselves but in the agitated thoughts of the young observer, for whom they signal something painful and inexorable. “They finally crack, dashing fiercely upon the sand, actually driving, full force downward, against the sand, bouncing upward and forward, and at last petering out into a small stream which races up the beach and then is recalled.” But the couple feels nothing of their son’s preternatural sense of dread. “My parents gaze absentmindedly at the ocean, scarcely interested in its harshness. The sun overhead does not disturb them. But I stare at the terrible sun which breaks up sight, and the fatal, merciless, passionate ocean.” Vladimir Nabokov cited this last phrase in a 1972 essay on inspiration to illustrate why this was one of his half a dozen favorite stories. But he was no doubt inspired just as much by the author’s way of visualizing the past, playing with time, which anticipated his own scenic technique for conjuring up his early life in Speak, Memory.

What disturbs the young man is that the past is irreversible, its actors unconscious of the upshot of their choices, the long reach of their mistakes. Looking out at the blinding sun and pounding sea, he continues, “I forget my parents. I stare fascinated and finally, shocked by the indifference of my mother and father, I burst out weeping once more.” As the movie unreels, like his own run-on sentences, he turns into the troubled voyeur of his parents’ union, feeling helpless to alter the action as it unfolds. The people on the screen remain deaf to his dire warnings. “Don’t do it,” he says, in the story’s best-known lines. “It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

The story does little to flesh out this prophecy, except to show us the anguish in which he blurts it out. Each incident that follows subtly accentuates the dissonance between his parents. They step up to have their picture taken, as if to inaugurate their coming life together, but the photographer tries and tries again, somehow unable to get it right. They argue adamantly before entering a fortune-teller’s booth, a bad omen for what their future might hold, until the father angrily stalks out, as he would later walk out of the marriage. Watching the scene, the son feels more and more imperiled, “as if I were walking a tight-rope a hundred feet over a circus-audience and suddenly the rope is showing signs of breaking.” As he grows more vulnerable, more desperate, he shifts from being part of the audience to becoming the featured act.

When the story’s narrator talks back to what he sees on the screen, the other people in the theater object to his unruly behavior. He feels utterly apart from the people in the theater for they are mere spectators, engrossed in a story, annoyed at his disruptions. An usher threatens to put him out, while others plead with him or stare him down in dismay. His outbursts continue, and the usher, as in a scene from Kafka, drags him out with a stern warning: “You can’t act like this even if other people aren’t around.” Perhaps the usher’s meaning is that our lives may not be as starkly determined as he thinks. “Why should a young man like you, with your whole life before you, get hysterical like this?” The ending that follows is ambiguous. Expelled from the theater “into the cold light,” he wakes up “into the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.” A man is coming of age, a new day is dawning, but it’s a harsh, wintry beginning. The morning’s “lip of snow” seems at once chilling and inviting, a cold initiation into maturity.

The story resists explaining why the young man is in such distress, but Schwartz’s other writing fills us in. Like the work of many second-generation American Jewish authors, including Bernard Malamud and Arthur Miller, Schwartz’s stories offer a tale of two generations. In his version, the older generation is emotionally confused, poorly acculturated to American life, and set mainly on material survival—making a living, creating a family, carving a place for themselves and their children in a new world. But some of their children turn out to be artists and intellectuals, doleful creatures, acutely self-conscious, alienated from both work and family, living too much in their own heads, their inactivity heightened by the harsh economics of the Depression. Schwartz’s best stories are either poker-faced satirical takes on the bohemians and outright failures of his generation, as in “The World Is a Wedding” and “New Year’s Eve,” or chronicles of the distressed lives of his parents’ generation, for whom the promise of American life has not panned out.

The later story most closely linked with “In Dreams” is “America! America!,” in which Shenandoah’s mother takes him through the history of their neighbors, the Baumanns, a gregarious, seemingly happy family whose early successes gradually peter out, like the faltering hopes of the Loman family in Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Their children go nowhere while they themselves drift downward. “The expectations of these human beings who had come in their youth to the new world had not been fulfilled in the least.” But the key to the story is not so much the fate of the Baumanns as his mother’s absorbing way of telling their story, her peculiar understanding and empathy. He interrupts her account not with protests but with pained reflections, for he realizes how far he is from ordinary people and their lives, the very people who formed him and made him who he was. Compared to what he learns from these stories, his own cast of mind feels self-conscious, abstract, even solipsistic. His mother “was never deceived about any actual things by words or ideas, as he often was.” The flat, awkward solemnity and almost biblical simplicity of his style, perhaps the most striking feature of his fiction, can be seen as his way of imitating this intuitive wisdom. He often uses a tone of mock-solemnity to take down the pretensions of his contemporaries, but also to point to ultimate things.

His mother’s stories crystallize his disaffection with his life, his way of thinking as a modernist intellectual. Yet channeling those stories makes him, for the time being, a different kind of author.

He reflected upon his separation from these people, and he felt that in every sense he was removed from them by thousands of miles, or by a generation, or by the Atlantic Ocean. … Whatever he wrote as an author did not enter into the lives of these people, who should have been his genuine relatives and friends, for he had been surrounded by their lives since the day of his birth, and in an important sense, even before then. … The lower middle-class of the generation of Shenandoah’s parents had engendered perversions of its own nature, children full of contempt for every thing important to their parents.

As Shenandoah tries to imagine the experience of the older generation—their arrival in America, their early hopes and struggles, their growing disappointments—an unexpected surge of empathy overcomes his usual limitations. “And now he felt for the first time how closely bound he was to these people. … As the air was full of the radio’s unseen voices, so the life he breathed in was full of these lives and the age in which they had acted and suffered.” In resonant lines like these, his language seems etched in granite.

Delmore Schwartz came to consider himself a historian of the great Jewish immigration, not with multi-generational family sagas but through modernist fragments and glimpses, seeing those lives through the eyes of the next generation. The movie scenes of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” like the mother’s recollections in “America! America!,” are spots of time salvaged from oblivion. Reading “In Dreams” soon after he wrote it, Delmore’s mother testified to its uncanny accuracy. On the back of the typescript she wrote, “If there is another word besides wonderful I don’t know[.] I don’t remember telling you all these so accurate.” Achieving this uncanny insight did not make the writer happy. “What will become of me?,” Shenandoah thinks at the end of “America! America!” as he gazes at himself in a mirror. “What will I seem to my children?,” he wonders. “What is it that I do not see now in myself?”

As people in the past could not imagine our present, we can scarcely envision the future. This leap of time, the projection forward that so exhilarated Whitman in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” weighed heavily on Delmore Schwartz. In (hopeful) dreams begin (awesome) responsibilities, not thanks to some iron law of fate but because our actions, our character, our choices are fraught with incalculable consequences. We can never know their ultimate impact. This would be a heavy realization at any age, but especially for a young man just turning 21. Amid his short-lived early triumphs and subsequent trials, including mental illness, addiction, and the loss of fluency as a writer, this comfortless knowledge would press on Delmore Schwartz’s mind for many years to come, turning his meteoric rise and fall into a cautionary legend, dimming our sense of his bright beginnings.

Morris Dickstein, professor of English and theater at the Graduate Center of the City University in New York, is the author, most recently, of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. This essay will be published later this year as the afterword to a new edition of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” from Shackman Press.

The day after graduating from Columbia University, 56 years ago this month, a 21-year-old writer headed straight to the artists’ colony Yaddo, where Lionel Trilling had secured a room for him. The young man, Sam Astrachan, had caught Trilling’s attention by publishing excerpts from his novel in The Columbia Review. According to contributing editor Josh Lambert, “Trilling, the genteel idol of all of Columbia’s aspiring writers,” requested a room at Yaddo “where the kid could finish his novel about the genesis of a Jewish family in Russia and their transformation into Americans.”

Lambert points out that while Trilling encouraged other Jewish writers like Irving Feldman and Allen Ginsberg, “Astrachan’s embrace of an earthy Russian Jewish past rather than the materialistic American present goes a long way towards explaining Trilling’s zealous support of him.” That summer, Astrachan wrote to Trilling:

“Certainly, if the Jew is to accept the heritage not simply of the ghetto and the concentration camps, but of the Old Testament, he must search out the primitive and appreciate that purity of action. In the first part of my book, Kagan must be seen as a man of natural force and abilities, to be contrasted in the second part with the new-type ghetto mediocrity of the family after arrival in New York City.”

Astrachan’s debut novel, An End to Dying, signed by publishing house Farrar, Straus and Cudahy that September, “traces the degeneration of a hardy family of nature-loving Russian lumbermen, the Kagans, into a tribe of slick American shysters, the Cohens.” The largely-autobiographical main character, Sam Star, resents his family’s transformation, lamenting that children of immigrants are “sucked into the watered-down version of their parents’ watered-down new world existence.” Astrachan himself was born in 1934 into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants in the East Bronx, though his real-life parents died when he was a teen.

So what happened to Sam Astrachan—“who had been nicknamed “Dostoyevsky” when his mother found him reading Crime and Punishment, with tears in his eyes, at age 12, and who, a few years later, read his first short story aloud to his English class at Stuyvesant High School”? Mixed reviews and poor sales of the hurriedly published novel and its follow-up, The Game of Dostoyevsky, made Astrachan too expensive for Farrar, Straus and Cudahy to publish. Today he lives in the south of France with his wife, Claude Jeanneau, a French sculptor.

“Astrachan says, now, that he has no regrets about publishing so early,” Lambert reports. “We’ll never know whether a longer road to publication—a year or two sweating through a rewrite, maybe—would have been the apprenticeship he needed to achieve something even greater.”

Read Big Bang, by Josh Lambert

Kazin set out to be an intellectual-at-large, the Jewish Wilson, and while he could never approach Wilson’s global reach or genius for languages—it was Wilson, ironically, who could read Hebrew—his voice had its own distinctive soulfulness and vibrato. Like Wilson, Kazin mastered critical prose in both long and short forms—the broad panorama and the slashing review—and both men exercised authority from positions at the New Republic, where Wilson was an editor from 1926-1931 and Kazin from 1942-1943. But like Wilson, Kazin could turn up anywhere: He was one of the go-to guys of literary thought. Both kept daily journals, and Kazin’s, just now published by Yale University Press, may well turn out to be his greatest work. And Wilson never wrote a memoir with anything like the thrilling emotional peaks and isolated beauties (Kazin’s phrases) of Kazin’s A Walker in the City or character portraits with the zest and bite of those in New York Jew. Wilson’s Upstate (1971) came late in his life and lacked both the youthful self-exaltation and the social drama, the up-from-the-ghetto adventure, of Kazin’s book. And both were four times married, as though divorce above all were the intellectual’s Purple Heart. In matters of domestic disorder and sorrow, the Jewish apprentice kept pace with the Yankee master, wife for wife.

Kazin’s memoirs have enjoyed a longer shelf life than his literary criticism. For one thing, they tell a classic novelist’s story: arrival. The young man from the provinces, in this case the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, comes to the big city to seek his fortune. Along the way, he rubs shoulders with the literary beau monde until the arriviste becomes the A-list invitee. In his memoirs, Kazin gave full rein to his talent for portraiture and low-down gossip. New York Jew in particular established him as the gossip-laureate of the New York intellectuals. With his endless parade of portraits and cameos—Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Isaac Rosenfeld, Arthur Schlesinger—Kazin had become the Ed Sullivan of the literati. But he was an Ed Sullivan with a barracuda’s nose for blood in the water.

We now know, thanks to Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook and published by Yale University Press, that Kazin had been rehearsing this role privately for years, in a journal he had been tending since he was 18, and that at a certain point the journal had become his chief care. He intended to publish it and did manage to release selections from it in 1996, two years before his death, as A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment. But to edit and publish the whole was beyond him, and even Cook, who has edited this 632-page volume, concedes that the entries here represent just one-sixth of what’s housed in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. In putting the volume together, Cook writes in his introduction, his goal was “to faithfully represent the range of Kazin’s interests and the tenor and depth of his thought. As [Kazin] readily acknowledged, he was not a systematic thinker; he was, however, capable of sustained and passionate reflection, moving from image to insight, from feeling to idea, from association to discovery, surprising himself, Emerson-like, by what he never knew he knew.” Given the dense foliage of Kazin’s reflections and the brio and velocity of his style, even one-sixth of the whole will make for a month’s reading, and then some. Cook’s own labor over this material has been all-consuming; his 2007 Kazin biography took him some 25 years to complete.

Ever the walker in the city, Kazin employed a peripatetic style of crisscrossing a section of the map and recording his encounters, like an anthropologist describing an alien culture. The journals are rambles: anecdotal, impressionistic, breathless, sharp, gossipy, diffusely spiritual, and saturated in verbal music. Lionel Trilling, the other Jew, shows up as regularly as the postman. “Trilling, the pompously respectable professor is a character in my imagination of society, not a person to argue with—the Jew’s dream of literary England, of surpassing his servile state by culture. No one was ever so much the prisoner of culture as Trilling. No one was ever so much the victim of the genteel fantasy.” T.S. Eliot makes a courtly appearance as “the high priest of this movement in criticism, [who] reviews the ‘contemporary situation’ as something frozen in its own despair, shut-in from the past, and destroyed in the supernatural disgust with [all] that is expressed in Thunder.”

Presiding over this assembly is Wilson, the master, the icon, the elder, the polymath, the stylist, the goy as rabbi, and the fellow journal keeper against whom Kazin measured himself: “I notice in all excerpts from Wilson’s famous journal that they are set pieces of literary-historical description, formal portraits, essays in miniature. How nice it would be to keep a journal like that, to leave a treasure like that. But so often I turn to this notebook as if it were my private lie detector, my confession, my way of ascertaining authenticity—and of recovering it—of making myself whole again. Talking to myself as I do here, I nevertheless find in the expression of private uncertainties a form of release, a clarity, from which I can start up again.”

Kazin’s journal was the more intimate. He scrutinized his world at close range, as if nearsighted. He had nothing of Wilson’s world-historical latitude, or Trilling’s oracular profondeur, or Hannah Arendt’s reprocessed Hegel, or Irving Howe’s doctrinal intransigence. He recorded meetings, conversations, encounters at his house, at her house, at a restaurant, at a party. He said, I said, we said, they said. Does Edmund Wilson have ideas? Kazin doesn’t tell us. But he does have a house: “Edmund W[ilson] in his wonderful ‘old’ house on Route 6 in Wellfleet. Everything in this house passed down or acquired by someone who could recognize immediately its historical application to himself.” Why should we know this? Because “By contrast virtually everything I own I have bought for myself or have had to decide its merits in relation to an entirely new situation. The crucial factor in the life of the ‘new man’ who is the Jewish writer in this country is this lack of tradition.” Brownsville might just as well have been halfway around the world from Wilson’s primary residence in Talcottville, N.Y. Everything was personal for Kazin, and the self-conscious Jew in him was at the center of it all. “I wonder if Edmund Wilson ever gets into his journals of the literary life anything as personal, harrowing, mixed as this?” he wrote after reading entries from Wilson’s journal in The New Yorker. Kazin knew the answer. He was the counter-Wilson, a Jewish spokesman for angst and confusion.

The highlights of this volume are Kazin’s portraits: tableaux vivants of actors frozen in mid-gesture and placed on public display. In Kazin’s hard-edged prose, people become more vivid. He practiced the one-liner, the punch line, a style that had more in common with the stand-up comedians of his day than with literary critics. “Dinner party at Louis and Adele Auchincloss, Louis so bright and cheery, always primed for cordial interchange and Adele with the mysteriously bad teeth for a Vanderbilt, with that extraordinary sweetness and presentability of the very, very rich.” Elsewhere, “George Kennan, noble, solemn, aggrieved; the composer Milton Babbitt writhing like a cornered boxer; Karl Shapiro very wistful and out of it.” And again, “Bellow came on with his eyes confronting you. The sense of some overall, private confidence was enormous. But his private radar never stopped studying you—and warding off anyone who might obstruct his assured progress.” This compulsive spying dismayed some of Kazin’s targets, but it also affirmed the acuity of his impressions and the penetration of his social radar. He’d gladly sacrifice a friendship to an epiphany.

Kazin himself was the common target of his own caustic pen. The journals are an odyssey of self-discovery by a man who was never entirely certain of who he was or what social mask he should wear. He called them his private lie detectors. Yes, he was a great success, but he never grew to trust it. The man who wrote was always struggling to feel identical to the man who experienced: the feeling man. The journals are filled with the pathos of the feeling man, and Kazin acknowledged more than once that he felt anguished over “the labyrinth of my own soliloquy.” He was obsessed with his own blunders and refused to make peace with his achievements. He never became the smiling public man. “When I look back at these notes from time to time, it seems to me that their main burden is passive suffering, complaint, and yearning. I feel ashamed—not because I have suffered or revealed my suffering, but because I have not sufficiently defined my suffering, or been sufficiently generous, loving, and therefore challenging toward it. The task is to use our suffering and to use it so well that we can use it up.”

Kazin fit a familiar social profile, the non-Jewish Jew, a term coined by Leon Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher. Though Kazin had written in New York Jew that he “had come to believe that Jew and my family were identical” and “the Jews are my unconscious,” his Jewishness was more a register, a mood, a poetics of being rather than a belief or practice. Yet he possessed, as many Jews do, a tuning fork inside him that vibrated powerfully to Jews around him. Kazin’s early plan for this journal was to call it just Jews, but he possessed neither Irving Howe’s grasp of Yiddishkeit nor any Hebrew, and one of the uses of the journal was to align his profound feeling of Jewishness with some durable evidence of it. Declaring himself to be an “isolato” in the manner of Melville or Hawthorne, he saw how that put him ever at the margins of Judaism. “There are public Jews and private Jews,” he wrote. “But can one really worship the Jewish God privately? There is no ‘private Jew.’ That is just genteel affectation—a social mannerism—a way of living in a society you do not trust.” And yet, was there ever a more gregarious isolato than Kazin? This was no peg-legged Ahab beating out a Morse code of rage on the deck of the Pequod. He was the most sociable loner of his generation.

The durable Jewish goods he sought turned out to be his family, his own bruised ego, and the Shoah. If he was self-exiled from the observant life of the Jews and had tenuous relations with Jewishness as community, he felt profoundly about the Shoah, and the journal is filled with horrified reflections on it. They are everywhere. “In Alexander Donat’s memories of the last days of the Warsaw ghetto, the Polish Catholics on their way from Church on Easter Sundays watched the helpless Jews flinging themselves out of the windows, and they applauded.” Or this particularly horrifying entry: “Read in Podhoretz’s selection of 20 years of Commentary and broke down in reading Sol Bloom’s old piece on the Jewish dictator of Łodz and the children being taken out of the orphanages en route to the gas chambers, crying Mir viln nisht shtarbn [I don’t want to die.], 1943, the year of agony!” One of the clichés of our time is that the postwar generation of Jewish American writers did not respond to the Shoah as profoundly as they should have. Kazin was an exception; his horror was unceasing.

Time and Kazin’s own habits of work have done much to blur his reputation as a scholar and critic of literature. After completing On Native Grounds, Kazin dove headlong into a career of reviewing, journalism, and lecturing; he did little research and did not keep up with the work of fellow scholars. Writing itself was his métier, and after the success of A Walker in the City, the career of the memoirist opened its arms to him. Indeed, in 1951, Bernard Malamud had yet to publish his first novel, The Assistant, and Saul Bellow had only two novels to his credit, Dangling Man (1942) and The Victim (1947). A Walker in the City was a pioneering instance of Jewish-American writing—a harbinger of what would soon become a flood—and in the originality of its material, the freshness of the writing, and its candor it has stood the test of time better than Kazin’s critical writing.

Kazin remains relevant as a writer, a voice, a social portraitist, and an artist who composed in words. Kazin was to my mind a hero of the English language. He was a master of the vernacular as an instrument of literary expression. He brought the cadences and resources of American colloquial speech with him miraculously from Brooklyn and a household in which ideas were nonexistent and Yiddish was spoken. Perhaps because he had a terrible stammer as a youth, the written word became his primary voice and the essay his form of conversation. The English vernacular, its rhythms, its registers, its juxtapositions, and its layers, became the key to his escape from the confines of Brooklyn, and he applied himself to it with a rare ferocity until he became one of the great phrase-makers in English critical prose. How much of this phrase-making started out in his almost-daily notes to himself we now understand. Of the major critical voices, maybe only Wilson had anything like Kazin’s facility and ease. Lionel Trilling, who wrote a generic and fussy English, never did. Some Jewish novelists also took possession of American English with similar tenacity and insistence, Saul Bellow for one and Philip Roth for another, and it is telling that Roth wound up as one of Kazin’s younger friends and was at his bedside toward the end.

Alfred Kazin comes across in these journal entries as both the Brownsville Jew and the Emersonian thinker-at-large. He saw himself as the Jewish version of the mythic American individual forging his own destiny, and doing it in the only way he knew how: by words alone. This look behind the scenes at Kazin’s act of self-creation makes for remarkable and exciting reading, and Richard Cook deserves our gratitude for the labor of bringing it to us.

Mark Shechner is a professor of English at the University at Buffalo.

Joanna Neborsky

We scoured Tablet Magazine’s and Nextbook.org’s archives to find books (and their writers) long forgotten. Each week we will feature one lost book and the story behind it. So blow the dust off the cover, and begin!

Hurst and Hurston: Seventy years after their road trip, the best-selling sentimental novelist has run out of gas, while Zora is still in the driver’s seat. By Kate Bolick

No Exit: Raised in the last golden days of the Hapsburgs, the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig found his world shattered by war. By Jennifer Weisberg

Restoration Project: Where have all Bernard Malamud’s readers gone? By Rachel Donadio

Back from the Shadows: Dovid Bergelson’s skepticism served him poorly in life but sublimely in art. By Boris Fishman

Third Look: On rereading Leonard Michaels’s I Would Have Saved Them If I Could. By Shalom Auslander

The Odd-Bod: In literary London, Elias Canetti was everybody’s favorite refugee. By Jonathan Wilson

School Ties: Jacques de Lacretelle won praise when he wrote in Dreyfus’ shadow, but today his portrait of a prep-school peer looks grotesque. By Paul LaFarge

Glamour and Peril: Tempestuous, cold, and intensely private, Elsa Morante considered herself a genius. Are others finally starting to agree? By Andrea Crawford

Melting Point: British playwright Israel Zangwill coined America’s most enduring metaphor as his reputation dissolved in controversy. By Chloe Veltman

Give ‘Em Hecht: A young Chicago newspaperman thought he was perfect for the part of his hero. By Neal Pollack

The Spy Who Loved Me: An Israeli thriller that captivated Graham Greene. By Paul LaFarge

King of the Forest: The Viennese pornographer turned critic who dreamed up Bambi. By David Rakoff

Funny Guys Finish Last: Philip Roth and Bruce Jay Friedman were rising stars in the 1960s. Roth became part of the canon. Friedman became “that guy who wrote Splash.” By Meg Wolitzer

Westward Expansion: Prostitutes, Christian Scientists, cross-dressing teachers. By Margy Rochlin

A Fine Mess: How a filmmaker turned his movie flop into a groundbreaking book. By Lawrence Levi

Asch’s Passion: A popular Yiddish novelist strove for immortality by taking on Jesus, but it cost him his core audience and made him a marked man. By Ellen Umansky

So Big: Human awkwardness was at the heart of Edna Ferber’s popular novels, but she shied away from writing about the outsiders she knew best. By Mollie Wilson

Fall From Grace: In 1843, British novelist Grace Aguilar was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. So how come we’ve never heard of her? By Justin Taylor

A Woman Out of Time: In 1938, at the height of U.S. isolationism, Americans devoured Phyllis Bottome’s chronicle of a German-Jewish family’s struggle to survive under the Nazi regime. By Andrea Crawford

Regatta Land: Amid Harvard’s ivy-covered bricks, the hero of Myron Kaufmann’s Remember Me to God struggles to become part of the in crowd. By Josh Lambert

Great Pretenders: In Romain Gary’s family, invention was the necessity of mother and son. By Emma Garman

Wartime Truths: In 1945, Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel of the Warsaw ghetto enraged Poles and Jews alike. How will it read to audiences today? By Andrea Crawford

Dizzy with Life: Clarice Lispector’s gorgeous, vibrant writings made one writer’s head—and heart—spin. By Anderson Tepper

Storm Warning: The surprising alliance at the heart of John Oliver Killens. By Josh Lambert

In Bloom: Pearl Buck breathes life into a disappearing Chinese community. By Jennifer Cody Epstein

Toward the Abyss: The final work of a doomed Yiddish novelist. By Elizabeth Mitchell

The Student Who Wouldn’t Go Away: How a bumbling immigrant from Kiev became a literary sensation. By Jennifer Weisberg

What Happened to Mary Berg? A young girl’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto was a big success. Then the diary—and its author—disappeared. By Amy Rosenberg

The Good of ‘A Bad Man:’ How Stanley Elkin hit his stride. By Sarah Almond

The Hermit of Oliphant: After the literary pioneer Dvora Baron immigrated to Palestine, she never again ventured out. By Haim Watzman

The Road Not Taken: Decades before Herzl, Benjamin Disraeli wrote a novel that grappled with Zionism. By Adam Kirsch

Third Life: For Jakov Lind, reinvention was the heart of fiction. By Sasha Weiss

The Paragraph That Changed My Life: On Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous. By Todd Hask-Lowy

Baruch Obama: How a black president was imagined as a Jewish one, more or less. By Ben Greenman

Comeback Kid: Having failed to assimilate, Ludwig Lewisohn went on to write the great American Jewish novel. By Josh Lambert

Beginning of the End: Decadence and anti-Semitism in Arthur Schnitzler’s Vienna. By Wesley Yang

Touchy Subject: Frederick Busch feared his novel Invisible Mending would upset readers. He didn’t anticipate his own discomfort. By Andrea Crawford

Child’s Play: Seventy years ago, a contentious novel scrutinized Judaism through the eyes of a young boy. By Sasha Weiss

Where the Heart Is: A 1951 novel parses the meaning of home. By Elizabeth Gumport

Swallowed Whole: Réjean Ducharme’s mysterious 1966 novel. By Benjamin Nugent

Big Bang: With Lionel Trilling and Robert Giroux cheerleading, Sam Astrachan had a stellar future. Then the glimmer faded. By Josh Lambert

A Wanderer in the Desert: How a tubercular shoemaker became a great Yiddish poet. By Jacqueline Osherow

Of a Feather: Communing with Bernard Malamud’s Jewbird. By Joe Hill

Rosenberg’s aphorism was a way of asserting that this difference was purely formal—that the vocation of the intellectual, as a professional analyst of texts, was essentially the same as that of the Talmudic commentator. As Irving Howe noted in his memoir A Margin of Hope, it seemed fitting that when the immigrant Ivan Greenberg renamed himself Philip Rahv, he chose the Hebrew word for rabbi: as editor of Partisan Review, Rahv became “the chief rabbi,” as Howe put it, “of our disbelieving world.” They may not have believed in Judaism, but the New York Intellectuals were carrying on a Jewish tradition—the tradition of commentary.

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem agreed in seeing Franz Kafka as a kind of Talmudist manqué, and in parables like “Before the Law” Kafka deliberately imitates the Talmud, offering various interpretations of his own text. In a sense even Freud is a commentator, taking the recitations of the patient as his scripture and probing its hidden meanings. And when Jews entered American culture, they produced Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, two of the most important critics of American literature; and Harry Levin, the major interpreter of Joyce; and Harold Bloom, who models his literary criticism on kabbalistic concepts. No wonder that when the American Jewish Committee founded a journal of Jewish American culture in 1945, they named it Commentary.

There is something appealing about the continuity this idea proposes: immigration and the Holocaust might have destroyed our ancestors’ way of life, but when the American Jewish critic sits at the table and examines a text, he is somehow following their example. Yet how can a commentator be said to belong to a tradition that, in fact, he does not possess? Certainly, when you look at the testimony of the great American Jewish critics, none of them link their own activity with any knowledge of the Talmud or rabbinic literature. Irving Howe wrote that his role models were not Rashi and Maimonides but “the fluent wit of Elizabeth Hardwick or the rhetorical plenitude of Alfred Kazin.” Lionel Trilling insisted, “I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing.”

To suggest that, despite their personal ignorance of Jewish tradition, Trilling and Howe—or Benjamin or Brandes—were performing a Jewish role, seems to require us to believe that there is something about the Jewish mind that is instinctively, necessarily drawn to commentary and criticism. But no sooner is this idea stated than it becomes clear how similar it is to the old anti-Semitic belief that Jews are essentially uncreative, only able to manipulate the work that other peoples produce. The most influential proponent of this idea was Richard Wagner, who wrote in “Judaism in Music” that “the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.”

This idea is obviously absurd—it would be degrading even to list the Jewish writers, composers, and artists who falsify it. But as Paul Reitter has shown in his excellent book The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, it had a powerful impact on German Jewry, instilling a self-doubt that affected even its greatest minds. Ludwig Wittgenstein once worried in his diary, “Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) I think there is some truth in the idea that I really only think reproductively.” How, then, can Jews take pride in their “mass production of intellectuals,” and see an affinity between rabbinic commentary and modern literary criticism, yet rightly reject the notion that the Jewish mind is restricted to “secondary” activities like commentary and criticism?

For help with this quandary, I turned to the new book Rashi by Elie Wiesel, which will be published in Nextbook Press’s Jewish Encounters series next month. Rashi, of course, is the prince of the commentators: on every page of the Talmud, his commentary appears in the center of the book, on the side closer to the binding. Wiesel’s brief book shows how Rashi—Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak—emerged from the violently anti-Semitic milieu of 11th-century France to become one of the greatest minds in Jewish history. A polymath, a linguist, a mystic, and a rationalist, he applied his genius to producing a vast commentary on the Bible and almost the entire Babylonian Talmud.

Speaking to Wiesel by phone, I asked him whether he believed there was a lineage of the kind Rosenberg saw, from Rashi to secular literary critics and commentators. He was skeptical: “I hope so, anyway. But if the commentator doesn’t know who Rashi was, it’s impossible. What they are doing may be in the same line, but I wouldn’t say it’s a continuation or a result or a consequence.” Nor did he agree that, in some cultural sense, Jews are predisposed to commentary as a literary form: “I as a Jew would like to say that, I would be proud. But let’s be honest—other cultures also have their commentators. What was Pascal, what was Descartes? They are also commentators.”

Wiesel, of course, is a memoirist and a novelist, and so I was particularly interested to see the points of contact between his imagination and Rashi’s intellect. He told me that, while he still reads Rashi today, he does not turn to him for literary inspiration: “I’ve read it and studied it hundreds of times. But does it help my literary endeavor? I don’t think so.”

But perhaps the main thing I learned from Wiesel’s Rashi is that this kind of opposition—between intellect and imagination, commentary and creation—simply does not apply to Rashi. For one thing, the kind of love Wiesel clearly feels for Rashi is deeply personal, as he writes: “And why not say it? I discover I am sentimental. Ever since childhood, he has accompanied me with his insights and charm. Ever since my first Bible lessons in the heder, I have turned to Rashi in order to grasp the meaning of a verse or word that seems obscure…. A veiled reference from him, like a smile, and everything lights up and becomes clearer.”

In the middle section of his book, Wiesel shows how it is that a commentator can leave such a powerful impression of his own mind and sensibility, even when dealing with a canonical text. He does this by offering samples of Rashi’s commentary on the Book of Genesis, from the creation of Adam to the burial of Jacob. What Wiesel shows is that, while we might think of commentary as meaning explication and analysis, for Rashi it is something much more supple and original. Take, for instance, his gloss on the story of Jacob’s deception by Laban, the father of Leah and Rachel:

When he meets Jacob, his future son-in-law, he embraces him. What could be more natural? No, says Rashi: ‘He embraces him so he could go through his pockets which he thought were full of gold coins.’ Laban embraces him also ‘to see if he has precious pearls in his mouth,’ says Rashi.

Clearly, this is not just clarification of the biblical story; it is a creative retelling, adding vivid new details that both heighten the story’s immediacy—we can see Laban peering into Jacob’s mouth—and deepen its characterizations: Laban’s tricking of Jacob, by substituting Leah for Rachel, is foreshadowed in this sneaky embrace. Even when Rashi is focused narrowly on the text, he reads it in an expansive way:

‘And Jacob loved Rachel; and said (to Laban), I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter.’ Rashi’s commentary: Why so many details? Because Jacob felt that Laban was an inveterate liar. He said to him: I will serve for Rachel, but if you think you can tell me that we’re referring to another Rachel, off the street, let me be specific: ‘thy daughter.’ And in case you say you’ll change her name to Leah and Leah’s to Rachel, let me say to you right away: ‘your younger daughter, the youngest.’ But, adds Rashi, in spite of all these precautions Laban betrayed him.

Here Rashi demonstrates the basic principle of his commentary: the belief that, because the text is divine, its words are perfectly chosen and their meaning inexhaustible. It is impossible to say of Rashi, as we might of a secular critic writing about a poem or novel, that he is overingenious, interpreting things that need no interpretation. Today, reading the Bible as the flawed work of human authors, we might not wonder why it refers at one point to “all [Jacob’s] sons and all his daughters,” when in fact he only has one daughter, Dinah; we would simply chalk it up to scribal error. Rashi, however, must see the slip as meaningful, so he advances theories: each of Jacob’s sons had a twin sister, or else they were married and the Bible really means Jacob’s daughters-in-law. Instead of foreclosing possibilities of meaning, Rashi wants to hold them open. To borrow a phrase from Keats, he loads every rift with ore.

The lesson of Wiesel’s Rashi, then, is that while the tradition of rabbinic commentary may lie behind the Jewish intellectuals, it also lies behind Jewish novelists and dramatists and philosophers—perhaps even composers and painters, too. All of them can draw on it, because the kinds of imagination now put to work in all those genres were condensed, in the world of rabbinic Judaism, into a single activity, that of commentary. This was not because of any innate tendency of the Jewish mind, but because of the absolute coherence of the rabbinic worldview. If the Bible is God’s word, then all our human powers are needed to understand it—and, in fact, our powers need no wider field of activity. If the Bible is not God’s word, however, then it is possible to turn those powers to other purposes; what was once coherence begins to look like mere constriction. But even if he is no longer necessarily an authority, Rashi, and the tradition of commentary at whose head he stands, remains a resource for the Jewish—and, as Wiesel notes, the non-Jewish—imagination.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

When Bush administration figures like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle urged America to fight Islamic fundamentalism and build democracy in Iraq, and when Jewish liberals, in turn, denounced those figures as neoconservatives, they were reenacting some of the same battles the New York intellectuals fought seventy years ago, when the combatants were called anti-Communists and anti-anti-Communists. Indeed, as Kimmage notes, the label neoconservative—which in the last decade has become almost a kind of anti-Semitic code word—was coined in 1943 by Dwight Macdonald, a charter member of the New York intellectuals, to describe former leftists who had abandoned their radical aspirations.

There is no shortage of books about the New York intellectuals—the mostly Jewish circle of writers clustered around Partisan Review—and their ideological schisms. But Kimmage offers a new perspective on this familiar story by focusing on an unlikely pair of protagonists. Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers could not have been more different in terms of personality and background. Trilling, the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, was a quintessential New Yorker, who spent his whole career at Columbia University; Chambers, a WASP from Long Island, came to see New York as a symbol of America’s decadence, preferring to live on a remote farm in Maryland. Trilling wrote magisterial literary essays for Partisan Review; Chambers wrote blunt polemical articles for Time Magazine. Most important, Trilling was a reserved, professorial figure, while Chambers was a man of action, a Communist spy turned anti-Communist prophet who figured in one of the most scandalous trials of the century.

Yet The Conservative Turn shows that, from the time they met as classmates at Columbia in the 1920s, Trilling and Chambers followed similar intellectual courses. In the early 1930s, with America sunk in the Depression and fascism on the march in Europe, they were among the many American leftists who turned to the Soviet Union for inspiration. The appeal of Communism was especially strong to American Jews, who saw in Russia’s great experiment” the promise of a world without poverty, injustice, or prejudice, including anti-Semitism. Hadn’t Lincoln Steffens, the crusading liberal journalist, visited the Soviet Union and proclaimed, I have the seen the future and it works”?

For Trilling, becoming a fellow traveler was primarily an intellectual commitment, not a practical one. He did nothing more to advance the revolution than joining a Communist front organization, the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, and writing some pro-Soviet book reviews. Chambers was much more deeply involved in the Communist cause. After joining the Party, he became a secret agent for the Kremlin, helping to organize a spy ring among mid-level New Deal bureaucrats in Washington D.C. He even tried to recruit Lionel and Diana Trilling, asking if they would help him by acting as a drop” for secret messages. They declined, not wanting to follow Chambers so far into the realm of espionage.

But in the mid-1930s, both Trilling and Chambers underwent a crisis of conscience about Communism. Like many radicals, they were troubled by the show trials in which Stalin eliminated many of his fellow Bolsheviks. It was becoming increasingly hard for anyone paying attention to deny that Stalin, like Hitler, was a totalitarian dictator. Yet in the late 1930s, the so-called Popular Front, which united liberals and Communists in a common crusade against fascism, had blinded many American leftists to the true nature of the Stalin regime. For Trilling and Chambers, it now became imperative to repent of their former error, and to convince those who still believed in the USSR to do the same. Even more than the Soviet Union itself, their target was the Popular Front mentality so common among literary and intellectual people—the belief that Communism was just an advanced form of liberalism, rather than liberalism’s greatest enemy.

Kimmage documents the month-by-month evolution of Trilling’s and Chambers’s political views, studying their correspondence in tandem with their published work. Trilling’s literary criticism seldom addressed contemporary politics directly, yet by quoting extensively from his (still unpublished) letters, Kimmage shows that political motivations were never far from his mind. Writing to the drama critic Eric Bentley in 1946, Trilling declared, I am willing to say that I think of my intellectual life as a struggle, not energetic enough, against all the blindness and malign obfuscations of the Stalinoid mind of our time.”

In his sensitive readings of Trilling’s criticism, Kimmage shows how this struggle” shaped his interpretation of writers like Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster. What Trilling admired in them was a habit of mind that shunned false certainties and embraced difficult realities—what he named, in his influential 1949 book, the liberal imagination.” An art that was morally complex and free from self-righteousness,” Kimmage summarizes, would express the spirit of political anti-communism.”

It is no surprise, then, that when Trilling produced his only novel, The Middle of the Journey, in 1947, he would choose the dilemmas of communism and anti-communism as his subject. What is more surprising is that he chose to base one of the novel’s main characters directly on Whittaker Chambers. Chambers’s clandestine work for the Communists, followed by his dramatic apostasy from the Party, made him unpalatable to both the pro- and anti-Stalinist factions of the left. Kimmage describes a Halloween party Chambers attended in 1938 where New York intellectuals, including the Trillings, shunned him; Diana refused to shake his hand, since it was figuratively covered in blood.

In The Middle of the Journey, Lionel Trilling used Chambers’s dramatic story and enigmatic character as the basis for Gifford Maxim, one of the novel’s protagonists. The few people who read the book when it first appeared would have had no problem identifying Maxim’s original, since Chambers’s history was well known among the New York intellectuals. Just a year after Trilling’s novel appeared, however, Chambers was to become notorious across America and around the world, thanks to his starring role in the Alger Hiss affair.

Kimmage recounts the well known story of how Hiss—a member of Chambers’s old spy network, who had risen to become a leading member of the New Deal establishment—was denounced by Chambers as a Communist and a traitor. The ensuing trials, in which the disreputable, unattractive Chambers testified against the well-connected, personable Hiss, polarized the country. To the anti-Communists, Hiss was a perfect example of the way liberalism, fellow travelling, and active support of the USSR all bled into one another. To most liberals, by contrast, Hiss was the innocent victim of Chambers’s ideologically motivated denunciations. Even after Hiss was convicted, the left remained convinced of his innocence. Not until the end of the Cold War and the opening of the Soviet archives was it established beyond a doubt that Hiss was indeed a spy.

In the aftermath of the trial, Chambers became a hate-figure to the left and a hero to the right. The spectacle of the liberal elite rallying around Hiss helped to galvanize the nascent conservative movement; to this day, Kimmage shows, when a gutter polemicist like Ann Coulter writes that liberals are traitors, she is drawing on tropes from the Hiss case. Kimmage follows Chambers’s subsequent career and offers a close reading of his memoir, Witness, which became one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite books. Between Witness and The Middle of the Journey, Chambers and Trilling helped at once to create and to document the “conservative turn” in mid-century American politics. Kimmage’s book offers a thorough guide to this still powerfully resonant chapter in our history.

On June 1, 1955, Sam Astrachan graduated from Columbia. On June 2, he moved into a room at Yaddo, the famed artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs. He was 21, one of the youngest writers ever to be so honored, and he had been invited thanks to his professor, Lionel Trilling, at that time the country’s foremost literary scholar.

Astrachan, now living in the south of France, was born in 1934 in the East Bronx, into a large and complex family of Russian Jewish immigrants. His maternal uncles arrived in the U.S. first, and earned fortunes selling furs and working in the shipping industry. His father, Isaac, trained as a doctor in Russia and, once in the Bronx, dedicated himself to treating immigrants and the poor for “fifty cents here, a dollar there,” as the author recalls in an autobiographical novel, Katz-Cohen (1978). When Astrachan was still a teenager, his parents died just a few years apart. An uncle suggested he go to work full-time and enroll in night classes, but Astrachan—who had been nicknamed “Dostoyevsky” when his mother found him reading Crime and Punishment, with tears in his eyes, at age 12, and who, a few years later, read his first short story aloud to his English class at Stuyvesant High School—had set his sights on Columbia, where he could become a writer.

The editors of The Columbia Review in 1955. From left to right: Sam Astrachan, Mickey Hollander, Donald Lehmkuhl, and Henry Nathan.

On campus, he made a name for himself in the literary crowd, becoming editor-in-chief of The Columbia Review in his senior year. A friend, Dan Wakefield, describes him in a memoir of the period, New York in the 50s (1999), as the “fledgling novelist who paced Broadway late at night with his hands clasped behind his back.” Trilling, the genteel idol of all of Columbia’s aspiring writers, was so impressed with excerpts of the novel-in-progress that Astrachan published in the Review, and sufficiently sympathetic to Astrachan’s plight as an orphan, that he asked Elizabeth Ames, Yaddo’s director, to set aside a room where the kid could finish his novel about the genesis of a Jewish family in Russia and their transformation into Americans.

After a couple of months at Yaddo, Astrachan returned to Manhattan with a complete manuscript. Trilling then brokered an introduction to another former student, Robert Giroux, the recently named editor-in-chief at Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. “I almost never get myself involved with students who are devoted to creative writing, as it is called nowadays,” Trilling wrote, going on to suggest that Giroux read Astrachan’s manuscript and mentioning that one Columbia colleague had compared the young writer to Thomas Wolfe. “I have it in mind,” he went on, “to bring Astrachan to your attention not as the author of a particular novel but as a writer with a long career before him which you might want to advance and help shape.”

Yaddo, summer of 1955. Top Row: Isadore Freed, George P. Elliott, Michael Seide, Katherine Shattuck, Virginia Dehn, Geoffrey Wagner, Milton Avery, Sally Avery, Sam Astrachan, Edgar Johnson, Earl Zindars (in rear), Eleanor Johnson, Neil Weiss, Jarvis Thurston, Clifford Wright, David Fremack. Bottom Row: Hortense Calisher, Patience Haley, Maude Morgan, Adolph Dehn, Colleen Browning, Anita Lerner, Elizabeth Olds.

By September of 1955, Giroux had signed Astrachan’s An End to Dying, calling it “one of the most talented first novels to come across my desk in years,” and comparing it to works by Saul Bellow. “We ought to take a lot of time and do a proper build-up,” Giroux suggested in an internal memo, “with advance quotes from people like Bellow and Trilling and Kazin.” The London publisher Victor Gollancz bought British rights to the book for an astonishing $1500, based on Giroux’s and Trilling’s enthusiasm and without even a glance at the prose itself. The young writer, flush with cash, took a celebratory jaunt to Europe. Every indicator augured a colossal debut.

As the months passed, though, problems surfaced. No magazines wanted to print prepublication excerpts, and nobody responded to requests for blurbs. (Trilling remained steadfast in support, but told Giroux that giving “pre-publication statements for promotion purposes” was not his style: “To say yes to some and not to others is an impossible situation for a man who has a great many book-writing friends and acquaintances. . . . I’ll be grateful if your ingenuity can find some way of indicating my strong support of the book without an ad hoc statement.”) In January 1956, Astrachan complained about the book jacket—he felt the photograph made him look too serious, and, contrary to the claim on the inside-front flap that “this is not another autobiographical novel,” insisted on An End to Dying as a fundamentally autobiographical work—but Roger Straus gently informed him it was too late for changes. Then, in April, just as the novel was about to appear in bookstores, Gollancz rescinded his offer to publish in England and asked for his $1500 back. Having only recently read the manuscript, he now predicted it would be one of his “biggest flops,” citing its “positively repellent” subject matter: “Russian background, immigration into America.”

Gollancz was the decidedly universalist, Christian-sympathizing heir of a rabbinical dynasty, but his resistance to An End to Dying can’t be ascribed entirely to distaste for his Jewish roots. As he pointed out, defensively, in a letter to Giroux, he had just purchased Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice (1957), which treats material similar to Astrachan’s, because he felt its “superb” quality helped it to transcend what he called the “immense handicap” of its Jewish subject matter.

While Gollancz and Giroux fired angry letters across the Atlantic, An End to Dying appeared in the U.S. to mixed reviews that justified both Giroux’s support and Gollancz’s skepticism. Trade publications raved, and the New Yorker called it “a splendidly affirmative first novel,” but the New York Times was ambivalent: Anzia Yezierska praised Astrachan as “a new talent, one with perhaps a touch of genius,” yet noted that “he does not stop long enough to flesh out his vision and make vital to the reader what is vital to himself,” while an unsigned review observed that the book is “a consummate story-study of a culture and a religion” that “fails . . . to climax.” In Commentary, Suzanne Silberstein agreed, highlighting the book’s “curious unevenness.” When the novel finally appeared in England, in 1958, the Times Literary Supplement echoed these inconclusive assessments: “Astrachan has somehow managed to give us a solid novel though his style is both careless and pretentious.”

Narrated by an autobiographical stand-in for the author—whose name, Sam Star, suggests Astrachan’s vision of himself as a celebrity waiting to be discovered—An End to Dying aspires to relate not just a young man’s maturation, but his complete family history, a project emphasized by the genealogical chart preceding the first chapter. The novel’s first half focuses on Sam’s uncle Jacob Kagan, the grandson of a nearly illiterate fur trader and son of a lumberyard foreman in Russia. Jacob vigorously contradicts the stereotype of the pale Eastern European scholar: a giant—6’4″ and 230 pounds—he “could lift a man over his head and throw him twenty feet.” Refusing to dodge the Tsar’s draft in 1904, he is shot in the leg by his own anti-Semitic officer at the Japanese front. Upon his return to the village of Nishkovitz, he decides to seek wealth: “Not even the czar will spit at a millionaire,” he reasons. Ubermensch that he is (“the truth of life is power,” he remarks at one point), he’s soon the richest Jew in Russia.

Sam Astrachan, 1960

The novel’s second half traces the degeneration of a hardy family of nature-loving Russian lumbermen, the Kagans, into a tribe of slick American shysters, the Cohens. Like the Kagans, the Cohens rake in the dough; one of Sam’s uncles is featured in Fortune, lauded as “a poor boy who now controlled millions of dollars.” Sam perceives this not as a happy example of American success, but as a tremendous loss of vitality: “I hate West End Avenue Jews,” he remarks. “They’re all fakes.” As Silberstein pointed out in her Commentary review, Sam personifies Hansen’s Law, an immigration historian’s prediction that third-generation Americans will dismiss their assimilating parents as spiritually bankrupt and idolize their old country ancestors for their perceived authenticity. “I cry,” Sam proclaims, “for all the sons and daughters sucked into the watered-down version of their parents’ watered-down new world existence.” Sam recognizes this emptiness seeping into literature, too: he admires a Yiddish storyteller, Shmyola Bernstein, who hangs around with his family in Russia and France (Astrachan reproduces a couple of his I. L. Peretz-like tales as digressions in the novel), while he disdains Jess Kraut, an American Jewish writer who doesn’t understand Yiddish and hasn’t heard of Bernstein. For ambitious Jess, “In business and art . . . it’s the same thing,” while for Bernstein, “A Jew must always work with the knowledge that he is a Jew.”

Trilling encouraged many young Jewish writers—Irving Feldman, Ivan Gold, and Allen Ginsberg, for example—but Astrachan’s embrace of an earthy Russian Jewish past rather than the materialistic American present goes a long way towards explaining Trilling’s zealous support of him. In an introduction to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, first published in 1955, Trilling infamously argued that Babel’s fascination with two qualities “made his art”: the brutal violence of the Cossacks and the soulfulness of poor Polish Jews. Trilling contrasted these with the effeteness and spiritual bankruptcy of Babel’s assimilated Odessa Jewish community. It doesn’t take a psychologist to recognize that Trilling was projecting onto Babel his own failings and his disdain for American Jewish life, as he had remarked in a 1944 symposium that “as the Jewish community now exists it can give no sustenance to the American artist or intellectual who is born a Jew.”

Astrachan’s Jacob Kagan personifies both of the qualities Trilling projected onto and admired in Babel. After reading Trilling’s essay during that summer at Yaddo, Astrachan wrote him an enthusiastic letter, pointing out the continuities:

Certainly, if the Jew is to accept the heritage not simply of the ghetto and the concentration camps, but of the Old Testament, he must search out the primitive and appreciate that purity of action. In the first part of my book, Kagan must be seen as a man of natural force and abilities, to be contrasted in the second part with the new-type ghetto mediocrity of the family after arrival in New York City.

Since the recent publication of an unfinished novel unearthed in Trilling’s papers, Cynthia Ozick, Louis Menand, and other critics have observed that Trilling should be understood not just as the major critic of his time, but as a frustrated novelist bitterly disappointed that his fame derived from essays and not fiction. No wonder, then, that he championed a precociously talented student who could flesh out his own theory of Jewishness in a novel; Trilling had managed to express it only in his literary criticism. Trilling’s “support was that of a father,” Astrachan remarked in a recent phone interview, “who let himself think that he himself might want to be living the life that I was living. Because he always wanted to be a writer, a fiction writer.”

As much as it may have gratified Trilling, though, the rush to publish An End to Dying may not have served Astrachan well in the long run. The book sold poorly, and his follow-up, The Game of Dostoyevsky, appeared in 1965 to little fanfare. After a second commercial failure, Giroux couldn’t afford to publish more of Astrachan’s work. A short novel, Rejoice, was published by Dial Press in 1970, and Katz-Cohen, a massive autobiographical saga, appeared from Macmillan in 1978.

Sam Astrachan in August, 2008, at home in Gordes, France

Having married Claude Jeanneau, a French sculptor, in 1959, Astrachan split his time, beginning in the 1960s, between Provence and Detroit, where he taught creative writing off and on at Wayne State University. He retired in the late 1990s to Gordes, in the South of France, writing to his old Columbia classmates that if they are “passing through this part of France, Sam will keep a light on for you.” In 1994, his wife translated a brief, and atypically non-autobiographical, novel Malaparte in Jassy (1989), and since then his books have appeared solely in French. Published by a respectable small press, they mostly mine Astrachan’s life and memories, as his debut novel did, and receive favorable notices in Paris; in 1996, Le Nouvel Observateur preferred Astrachan’s Hôtel Seville: Rockaway Beach 1947 to John Irving’s The Imaginary Girlfriend, while Le Monde praised Treife (2004). Few people in America recognize Astrachan’s name anymore—when the New Haven Review published a brief sketch of his in 2007, the editors referred to him as “an American master . . . now unknown in his native country”—and An End to Dying is never mentioned by scholars of American Jewish literature.

Astrachan’s story should serve as a reminder that it is nothing new when publishers push fledgling writers into print, accompanied by press releases celebrating the precocity of young genius—and that, best intentions notwithstanding, such headlong rushes in literary activity may be not only commercial missteps, but unfair exploitations of the ambitions of youth. In December of 1955, Astrachan mentioned to Straus that when he’d looked over his proofs, “It was actually the first time that I’ve read the book through. It is very uneven but if I had to rewrite it, I really don’t know how I would change it.”

Astrachan says, now, that he has no regrets about publishing so early. That he was able at that age to compose a novel as rich and complex as An End to Dying, a forceful tribute to his family history and to Trilling’s thought, is impressive enough. We’ll never know whether a longer road to publication—a year or two sweating through a rewrite, maybe—would have been the apprenticeship he needed to achieve something even greater.

Babel fell into silence, wandered the Soviet Union; in the few photographs we have of him, he looks like a man wearing the mask of a grocery clerk. The rebellious writer had to be hidden at all cost. And so Babel became the jovial pal of the proletariat, who’d rather talk with jockeys and whores than with a fellow writer. Whereas he’d talked about literature day and night with his first wife, Zhenya, while he was with her in Batum, would read his stories to her until they were burnt into her heart and she could recite them twenty years later, he wouldn’t even show his manuscripts to his second wife, Antonina. He was practicing to become a man of the people who hung out at a stud farm, but he’d used up his own interior space. He was one of the voiceless men—”Ten steps away no one hears our speeches”—in Osip Mandelstam’s poem about Stalin, a poem that got Mandelstam arrested, exiled, and killed. Babel never attacked the Kremlin’s “mountaineer” with “cockroach whiskers.” Stalin was one of his readers, but that couldn’t save him.

He was given a dacha in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino, and he disappeared from that dacha in May 1939. The secret police had moved him and his manuscripts to their own “dacha” in the middle of Moscow, otherwise known as the Lubyanka. And when Lionel Trilling wrote about him sixteen years later, his death had become only one more enigma in a land of enigmas. He’d been declared an enemy of the people, a spy for Austria, England, and France, and was finished off in 1940, shot twice in the head—the bullet holes were stuffed with rags—and cremated, his ashes emptied into a communal pit. Neither Stalin nor his Cheka bothered to tell anyone, and the myth of Babel languishing in some Siberian camp lingered for years. There were constant sightings of Babel, campmates who swore he was still alive. The Cheka itself manufactured these tales. It was imitating the artistry of Isaac Babel….

By 1954, a year before Trilling’s introduction, Babel was “resurrected” in the Soviet Union, pronounced a person again, though the Cheka persisted in giving him a phony death date, March 17, 1941, and wouldn’t reveal how or where he had died. It was the United States that had to reinvent Babel in the person of Lionel Trilling, a godlike figure on Columbia’s campus. Trilling abhorred violence. And here he was writing about Isaac Babel, the poet of violence, who touched upon a primitive, amoral madness and seemed deeply ambivalent about it.

Babel himself had been a war correspondent attached to General Budenny’s First Cavalry, which consisted almost completely of Cossacks, and in a fictional rendering of his ride across Poland and the Ukraine with Budenny’s troops, one can almost feel Babel imagine himself as a little Cossack, with more than a bit of self-mockery as he begins to imitate their own cruel creed. Readers loved the stories, which belonged to that tiny “window” during the twenties when Russia was like a Wild, Wild West with its own avant-garde in the middle of NEP (Lenin’s New Economic Policy), as “beautiful women in mink coats” suddenly appeared in Moscow, some of them clutching copies of Isaac Babel. It troubled Trilling when he first read the stories in 1929. He’d been hoping that the Revolution might offer him an art with “as little ambiguity as a proposition in logic.” And here was Babel, full of ambiguities.

In a 1948 essay about Huckleberry Finn, Trilling describes Huck’s moral dilemma regarding Jim, the runaway slave whom he condescends to but can never seem to denounce. Huck’s own heart, like Babel’s, is a “battleground” of competing ideas and obligations. In a land of liars, he learns to lie. Yet whatever Huck’s chicanery, we never doubt his essential goodness and his reverence for the godlike Mississippi, a river that equips him with language and a sense of wonder. But there are no river gods on the ride to Poland, only Cossacks and their rituals of slaughter.

Trilling notes Babel’s “lyric joy in the midst of violence,” a rhapsody that almost numbs the reader and allows Babel to detach himself from the suffering he describes. Trilling finds in this the key to Babel’s art: “the apparent denial of immediate pathos is a condition of the ultimate pathos the writer conceives.”
And this masked pathos is but one more enigma of Isaac Babel, the man of many masks. Babel had crept under the wing of Maxim Gorky, Russia’s most revered writer, whose popularity rivaled Stalin’s. Gorky had been living in Sorrento, under Mount Vesuvius, and it was Stalin who lured him back to the Soviet Union in 1932, naming streets and parks and entire cities after this writer-saint who’d risen out of the lower depths, and “crowned” him the first president of the Soviet Writers Union. Babel couldn’t be harmed while Gorky was alive. In one apocryphal tale that Babel himself loved to tell, Gorky pops into the Kremlin with his protege, has an audience with Stalin, who asks Babel why he hasn’t written a novel about Gorky’s “Boss” (it was Gorky who began calling Stalin the country’s “senior comrade” and “Boss”). Babel doesn’t answer. He smiles. At the first Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934, attended mostly by half-men and hacks who’d sold themselves to the Soviet dogma of socialist realism, Babel stood outside this dogma, said he was the master of a new genre, the genre of silence. He praised the Boss’s laconic style—sentences that had the sensation of steel. Yet there was something perverse about Babel’s speech, as if he were “addressing his fellow-writers in a dead language,” the dead talking to the dead in a country that sought to destroy all the idiosyncrasy of art.

Gorky died in 1936, probably poisoned by Stalin, who could no longer afford the whimsies of this old man. Stalin was bent on killing as many intellectuals as he could, and the starik might have used his prestige to get in the way. With Gorky gone, Babel no longer had a protector. How could the Soviets have reconciled themselves to Babel’s wayward art? “Intensity, irony, and ambiguousness…constitute a clear threat to the impassivity of the State. They constitute a secret.”

And so Babel was shoved into oblivion. And I couldn’t help but marvel at Trilling’s devotion to Babel, who wrote about Cossacks and the Moldavanka, the Jewish slums of Odessa, which had given birth to the King, Benya Krik, Babel’s most celebrated character, a gangster in orange pants—”the Jewish gangs of Odessa were famous,” Trilling tells us, without realizing that it was Babel who made them famous, that the Moldavanka was a poor, pathetic slum that Babel had mythologized, that there was nothing but the remotest counterpart to Benya Krik, the Crier, who could outwit Odessa police chiefs, fall in love with a merchant’s daughter during one of his night raids, and immediately return all of the merchant’s goods.

Trilling was a classicist who did not believe in creativity’s lower depths. He was too much of a measured man. I remember him on campus, with his silver hair and tweed vests and British diction that every English instructor adopted in the hope of cannibalizing Lionel Trilling. He was the lord of enlightenment and reason in the late 1950s, when literature still ruled the earth, and we poor undergraduates had a talmudic devotion to the writer’s craft. He was much more vivid than a movie star.

He was also a novelist, a teller of tales, but his fiction was curiously cloistered and flat, as if he didn’t dare to enter any wildness. “For all my life, the fear of insanity has blocked the free play of my imagination and made me too intent upon reasonableness,” declares Diana Trilling, Lionel’s wife, but she could have been writing about Lionel himself. It was in his essays that he paid homage to the river gods and found his own lilt—freed of creativity, he could afford to become creative. His essays were as musical as his name. He could have been writing a kind of dream-novel when he wrote about Huckleberry Finn and Isaac Babel.

And there were wicked stories about him. That he was the son of a Bronx tailor, that he himself was a child of the ghetto, that Lionel Trilling couldn’t have been his real name, that he was some kind of Monte Cristo who took revenge on his own impoverished past, the Jewish Gatsby who’d become a literary critic rather than a bootlegger, and reinvented himself as an Oxford don with his own kingdom on Morningside Heights.

The don died in 1975, and pretty soon his own belief in a measured imagination seemed expendable in a world that was moving closer and closer to chaos.

And then a couple of years ago I happened upon Diana Trilling’s memoir about her marriage to Lionel. And suddenly I had a different Trilling. He was indeed the son of a tailor, but a men’s custom tailor who might have dressed the king of England … or an Oxford don, a tailor who turned to manufacturing coats for the chauffeurs of millionaires and hadn’t brought up Lionel in any rough equivalent of the Moldavanka.

A bookish child who never had a bicycle or roller skates, he would become the first Jewish professor of English in the Ivy League. Even with a name that could have been invented by the master of all novelists, Henry James, Trilling had to twist himself into some kind of Anglo-Saxon golem (it was the 1930s, and the very best English departments still believed that Jews weren’t refined enough to teach Shakespeare or Keats or Matthew Arnold). He suffered from long bouts of depression, saw himself as a failed writer of fiction, and must have sensed his own unlived imaginative life, the mask he had to wear as Lionel Trilling.

And perhaps this explains his attraction to Babel, and his ability to intuit the pathos beneath Babel’s savage lines. Trilling must have felt an affinity with Benya Krik, that gangster in orange pants, as lyrical as language itself, a warrior with all the grace and willfulness of poetry. Trilling could have been dreaming about himself when he says of Babel: “[T]he unexpectedness which he takes to be the essence of art is that of a surprise attack.” He was Babel’s secret sharer, a writer who would have liked to shuck off his academic clothes and veer toward the unexpected, with its quota of surprise attacks.