Scholar and Exegete: A Tribute to Sacvan Bercovitch, MLA Honored Scholar of Early American Literature, 2002

Although Sacvan Bercovitch is best known for his powerful and influential studies of Puritan and classic American literature, and is most properly honored on that account by the Modern Language Association Division on American Literature to 1800, the extravagant scholarly reach of his work—and the unusually profound intellectual leverage he brought to bear in his practice of interpretation—can only begin to be measured if we take some account of the improbabilities and idiosyncrasies of his academic career. Bercovitch's first published article, in 1964, was "Dramatic Irony in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground"; his second and his third, in 1965, "Romance and Anti-Romance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Three Perspectives on Reality in Paradise Lost." Only thereafter does his publication record begin to reflect his interest in the vagaries of early American culture, when he published in 1966 his essay "New England Epic: Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana." But throughout his long and distinguished career, amid the many justly admired and often reprinted essays and books on Puritans, Hawthorne, Emerson, Bancroft, Twain, Melville, Cooper, James, Faulkner, Franklin, Thoreau and others, there appeared occasional essays on Milton and Blake, Thomas Mann,Wordsworth, "Empedocles in the English Renaissance," "Literature and the Repetition Compulsion," Shakespeare, and Kyd; and a series of translations from Yiddish, beginning in 1966 and continuing to 1994, introducing writings by Itzik Manger, Yaacov Zipper, Sholom Aleichem, and Solomon Ary to readers of English. It seems right, in view of the extra American breadth of these writers and topics, that in retrospectively characterizing the development and nature of his own fascination with the meaning of America, Bercovitch should look to Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog" for a governing motif.¹ Bercovitch is the opposite of a provincial Americanist: the literary culture of the world—ancient to modern—is the rich background against which he sets the discovered singularities of his adoptive country.

But this is not to say that his approach is that of a mandarin humanist whose wide range of literary reference buttresses his confident overview of his subject. Bercovitch writes from deep within the puzzlement and amazement that America has elicited in him, the mixture of admiration and astonishment that is still connected, in him, to what he has called "the peculiar insularity of [his] upbringing" in the immigrant slums of Montreal. The "Yiddishist left-wing world" of his parents, characterized by "Romantic-Marxist utopianism"—an amalgam (as he has described it) of reverence for the spiritual treasure of high art and delusively cherished hope for world revolution—locates him very specifically in relation to the American topics of his scholarship and criticism.² From one angle, he might seem an utter outsider, with the utter outsider's useful intellectual estrangement; but from another angle, he might seem uniquely positioned to understand sympathetically a different but comparably insular culture, the culture of belief in what Bercovitch characteristically has termed "the myth of America." There is no question that Bercovitch has been the foremost interpreter of early American literature and culture of his generation, and probably of several generations; it is difficult to imagine the combination of incisive native intelligence, scholarly determination, personal identity, and searching curiosity that could produce another equally charismatic interpreter of America.

Bercovitch is the son of Alexander Bercovitch and Bryna Avrutik, Jews born in the Ukraine in the 1890s who grew up during a time of deep poverty, social upheaval, and periodic pogroms. Bryna idealistically joined the Red Army in 1917, and was wounded at the front in Poland in 1919. Her faith in a Communist future remained undimmed, according to her son, for the rest of her life. Alexander Bercovitch was an artist: he learned to paint from some monks in Kherson (his hometown) who rewarded his fascination with their endeavors by providing him with paint and some elementary instruction; his talent took him at 15 to Palestine to study in 1907, and later to St. Petersburg and Munich. World War I forced him to return to Russia, however, where he was...